Leading design in government— VISIT BLOG

Building a high performing team

In my role at GDS I built and maintained a high performing team of 50 design practitioners. These roles where spread across disciplines such as Service Design, Interaction Design, Graphic Design and Accessibility Specialists.

When hiring at pace it’s important to maintain standards around important areas such as DEI and cultural fit. To enable us to have the best possible change of getting high quality candidates we first needed to interrogate and improve our recruitment process. This involved working with the people team on mapping out our end-to-end recruitment journeys and honing in on areas for improvement.

We also conducted research with recent hires to better understand their feelings and needs throughout the process. This gave us the qualitative understanding we needed to prioritise areas to fix.

Building consistent role profiles and progression frameworks

When building out the design profession within government it was important to have a sense of consistency regarding role expectations across different departments. Alongside Tim Paul and other design leaders across government we developed clear role profiles and career progression frameworks to enable departments to thrive in their capability building initiatives. These could then be used to hire, manage and develop the hundreds of interaction, service and graphic designers across government.

Maintaining a thriving design community

The cross-government design community contains hundreds of talented user-centred design specialists working in government organisations throughout the UK. This active community is in constant dialogue on platforms such as slack and email discussing design patterns and service delivery.

It's important to celebrate successes and keep the community active by digging into important topics in more detail. Every few months we ran community events focused on specific themes in venues throughout the country (remote during the pandemic). We have held events in venues such as the Design Museum, Mary Ward House and Conway Hall.

During these events we had a mixture of government based speakers and special guests who’s work specifically related to the event theme. Over the years we have had great guest speakers such as Michael Beirut, Reginé Gilbert, Dan Hill, Anthony Burrill, George Aye and Ken Garland. We have covered important topics, such as, ‘Equity in the design process’ and 'Design, Health and Ethics'.

Using design to build a strong org culture

We created many cultural assets that enabled people to work in better ways. Important principles were outlined on posters and stickers and permeated across different government departments. We created a GovDesign assets tumblr to enable teams across government to use these assets as they wished.

— VISIT BLOG