Sport Wales has a new Team! Phil Stevens shares the journey as to why the new Digital and Service Design Team came about.
Sport Wales has a long history of developing digital ways of working. If you think about our core service such as grant platform, website, the institute and so on, it's clear that Sport Wales has always leveraged digital across its business. However, the sweeping changes brought about by COVID highlighted the need to transform our services ever further both internally and externally.
Our constant drive to improve is a big factor for our new digital approach. One of the things we understand in relation to digital is just how hard it is to get right. Our previous experiences of bringing in digital ways of working pretty much began and ended with procurement; the ‘buying’ services in. The emphasis then was in exploring what products were out there on the market rather than spending the most time understanding what the problem was that we were trying to fix.
In partnership with the Welsh Government, Sport Wales worked with the Centre for Digital Public Services (CDPS), which gave us a new and exciting exposure to contemporary ways of digital service design. For the first time Sport Wales was able to get the support to develop an agile approach to solving problems.
This was a real game changer for us as the CDPS highlighted the benefits of doing digital better. We learnt how understanding the needs of users has to be at the heart of the issue.
After trialling the new principles on a significant project looking at investment platforms, we began to aspire to have our own digital and service design team.
Initially digital development was undertaken by borrowing people from across the business; the project might involve people from tech solutions, various directorate's and perhaps an executive sponsor. We would borrow and beg managers to release staff to help with digital projects. As you can imagine this created its own problems; we never had enough capacity to work at the pace we wanted, and we also lacked the understanding around modern digital practise.
If we wanted to travel faster and further in the digital space we would need to put together its own team of specialists.
The launch of the new team ensures we have end to end capability and capacity on all the projects. Of course the team will never be big enough to work on everything simultaneously, but as we grow our digital roadmap we’re confident that we can support the key digital demands of our business going forward. It also ensures that our digital work has a higher quality baseline. As Tara puts it, ‘having a team introduces more checks and balances to ensure that projects deliver on business and user needs’.