The Lasting Power of Attorney (LPA) digital service went live in May 2014, the first government exemplar to pass the Digital by Default service standard to do so. Product Owner Kaz Hufton tells us what life is like after live.
It was a great day - but, for me as the product owner, the service going live was only the first chapter, getting to understand the users and refining our development approach. The assessment gave me confidence that we were on the right track, rather than being at the end of the journey.
The team’s been really busy since then, improving stability, monitoring and analytics. We’re constantly receiving and reviewing user feedback and looking at ways to increase use of the service.
Since going live we've done 26 major releases to the service, including:
- myriad content changes
- a search feature to enable users with multiple LPAs to find the right one quickly
- design updates
- improvements to PDF generation
- improvements to password reset process
- changes to timeout function
We've done this by keeping the same team post-live as before - this might go without saying, but not long ago government would have immediately gone to a ‘fix on fail’ support model, which is the last thing we want for our digital services in Office of the Public Guardian (OPG). We kept momentum going through scrum ceremonies, focusing on the user and vision by sharing positive feedback with the whole team. As the product owner the OPG trusts me to make the decisions around the service and its functionality without going through lengthy sign offs, which speaks volumes for the agile governance models we've got in place. By iterating regularly and successfully we’re showing that we can continuously improve a service and bring real benefits to the user.
Our customer satisfaction is 88% and digital uptake has risen to 21.5%, which is slow but steady progress. I’m really pleased with the way the service is developing and seeing these figures increase is a real motivator to continue doing what we are doing.
At the same time, OPG’s content team have been working on the redesign of the LPA forms which are used not only by the digital service but by the paper channel too; the teams have worked closely to make sure they work for the users of both digital and paper channels, and we’ll release the forms in the summer.
One of our most exciting changes has been improving the analytics in our performance dashboard, helped hugely by Matt Harrington and the GDS performance team. Being open about our performance is something we’re really passionate about, so it’s great to see our analytics get better. You can read about what we’ve done here.
Looking ahead, we have wrapped support costs into our OPG digital 2015-2016 investment plan so we can continue to support and improve the service, keeping it up to date with user needs. We’re also looking at new features, like letting users track the progress of their LPAs through the application process.
We can’t wait for the next step on our journey!
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