Applying the U.S. Digital Services Playbook for Strategic and Sustainable Success

Digital services are now the main interface between governments agencies and their constituents. Since 2022, 90% of U.S. citizens primarily interact with government agencies via their web presence. It’s therefore crucial that digital services are easy to use, well-maintained, and built on modern, well-maintained technology stacks. Enter the U.S. Digital Services Playbook. 

What is the U.S. Digital Services Playbook?

The Playbook is a set of 13 strategies — or “plays” — that provide instruction and recommendation on how to build and maintain optimal digital services. The plays were devised using successful practices from both public and private sectors, and cover everything from researching to testing, hardware to design, and project management to maintenance. 

The U.S. Digital Services Playbook is a rich resource for government and public sector entities. 

But when you first look through it, the long strings of checklists and questionnaires can be intimidating, and you may feel daunted seeing a long list of standards your department isn’t currently meeting. But don’t be discouraged: when you start from the “why” of each play, understand the principles behind the recommendations, and focus on the benefits each play can bring to your department, the utility of the Playbook comes into sharp focus. Our guide will help illuminate the key principles underlying the plays, and the benefits of implementing them in your organization.

Adopting new project management methodologies, switching out your tech stack, and implementing the principles of user-centered design and openness within your organization are all radical shifts. At Palantir, we offer tailored expertise in profound digital transformations for the public sector — learn more about our approach to digital government solutions.

Agile and iterative practices for digital services

Many of the plays in the Playbook focus on the design, development and delivery of digital services — but some focus specifically on how such work should be carried out. Using the most relevant project management and leadership tactics for your projects will set you up for success right from the start. 

For example, Play 4, which focuses on agile states “We should use an incremental, fast-paced style of software development to reduce the risk of failure”. This sounds great in principle — but in practice, teams who are used to more traditional project management styles can be confused by what agile methods actually entail, and how they vary from their current style of work. Such teams can benefit greatly from understanding what agile looks like in practice, and the opportunities it opens up. 

Defining agile & iterative practices

Agile was developed as an alternative to traditional “waterfall” project management approaches, and they differ in several key ways: 

• Waterfall methodology involves laying out every step of a project right at the beginning, defining a clear end goal, and then incrementally working through the steps towards completion. This level of pre-planning allows you to estimate the total timeline of the project, and works well for projects where each phase is dependent on the earlier phases being thoroughly completed. However, since all of the work is set so early, it’s difficult to adapt to changes along the way. Without check-ins built into the process, it’s easy to veer off course or make mistakes and not catch them for a long time. Additionally, the value-add for customers and citizens is only tangible right at the very end of the process, once the completed service, website, or piece of software is deployed. 
• Agile methodology focuses on a more value-based approach to delivering the project. The roadmap is defined by delivering minimally viable products and deploying new features at regular intervals, so products are delivered to customers incrementally throughout the project lifecycle. Teams may work on several different phases of the project at once: i.e., implementing user feedback and debugging a feature that was released early in the project, while researching and scoping out the next development phase. Work is done in short, defined periods, called sprints. Teams check in regularly during and after sprints to assess progress, collect feedback, and make changes to the project timeline and priorities. 

The benefits of agile

For teams who are accustomed to waterfall-style working practices, not having a clearly defined plan from the start of the project can seem confusing, and even counterintuitive. But agile principles offer a lot of advantages to digital services teams:

• Faster functionality: Frequent delivery of new and improved digital services means your site visitors aren’t waiting until the end of a mammoth project to see the results of your work 
• Iterative improvements: Regular feedback, testing, and reviews throughout a project mean that you aren’t just shipping new features and then allowing the debugging tickets to pile up — you’re regularly improving existing services
• Efficient response times:; Change is part of the process. If mistakes are discovered, or new information needs to be responded to, teams can do so quickly and efficiently
• Continuous development: Agile’s principles emphasize setting a sustainable pace of delivery — meaning no stressful rushes and long hours the week before a deadline, and better estimates on how long work actually takes

If your team seems hesitant about switching to agile methodologies, focusing on the benefits it adds and the pain points it alleviates will help with motivation. 

User-centric design

Agile covers the “how” of digital services — now it’s time to focus on “what” designing digital services using the Playbook actually entails.

User-centric design is a design process which prioritizes users’ needs and experiences throughout every phase of a project — from research, through development, and into testing and feedback. Although the phrase “user-centric design” isn’t directly used in the Playbook, many of the recommendations and questions in the plays adhere to the key tenets of this process. 

For good user-centered design practices, follow these principles from the Playbook: 

• Use qualitative research methods and speaking directly with people who use your services as part of the research phase
• Use prototypes to gauge visitors’ responses to your project early in the process 
• Create “user stories” (narratives about how and why people use your services), and allowing them to inform the design process
• Develop metrics and testing regularly to assess if your services are effectively meeting citizens’ needs 
• Follow accessibility guidelines, such as plain language, to open services to as many visitors as possible 

The Playbook continually emphasizes the importance of considering why visitors will use your service, and how to best help make use of your services effectively — following user-centered design processes is invaluable for this. If you’re looking for more detail on user-centered design, take a look at our guide to best practices for government website design. 

Defaulting to open

The Playbook emphasizes incorporating openness into your services wherever possible. The case for building open services is simple: it builds trust. A 2020 study by the Journal of Public Administration found a “positive direct relationship between open government data and institutional trust”. 

Playbook principles that encourage openness include:

• Provide open and easily discoverable routes for visitors to give feedback and report bugs
• Use open source software
• Provide open datasets to the public, where appropriate
• Publish source code for your projects, where appropriate
• Maintain the rights for third-party data, and releasing it publicly

The more interactive and open your web services are, the more likely your visitors are to trust and engage with them — so openness is a principle that should be considered in each step of your digital service workflows. 

Integrating playbook strategies with modern technology

Several of the plays detail key considerations for selecting and maintaining hardware and infrastructure. Selecting the appropriate tools for each layer of your stack has profound benefits for usability, maintenance, and security.

Choosing the right technology

Play 8 highlights the importance of choosing a modern technology stack. Following the recommendations of this play allows you to take advantage of the most modern software features available, and also ensures the longevity of your services. Specifically, this play recommends using software that is commonly used by other government agencies, to leverage support and interoperability. Additionally, the play emphasizes the importance of open source software. Open source offers the key advantage that the software is maintained and updated by a wider community, increasing its resilience and longevity, and lessening the burden of maintenance on each individual organization who uses it. 

At Palantir, we build in Drupal: an open source CMS. Drupal is used by governments in over 150 countries, and as of 2021, 56% of the world’s government websites are built on Drupal. One of the reasons so many government agencies use Drupal is that it offers a high level of compliance. Drupal has modules for compliance with GDPR and COPPA, and the core software is WCAG 2.0 compliant out of the box. 

Security and privacy management

When considering which technologies to use for your services, it’s important to consider your agency’s specific compliance requirements. Your services may need to adhere to local regulations, such as the U.S.’ COPPA or HIPAA laws for children’s data and health data respectively, or GDPR in Europe. Choose software which is built to handle such compliance requirements. 

Play 11 emphasizes the importance of working with a privacy specialist early on in the design process, to ensure thorough and sustainable data management. If this is an area where you’re currently looking for expertise, we can help. 

Takeaways: principles for building modern digital services

Although its checklists and questions are extensive, the underlying principles of the U.S. Digital Services Playbook form a robust framework for building and maintaining high-quality digital services in the public sector. Adopting these approaches will serve you well in your digital transformation — but for many agencies, they involve a radical (and sometimes daunting) shift in how you work. Educating yourself and your team on the fundamentals of these topics and their key benefits will help prepare you for the changes. 

You also don’t have to go it alone. Whether you’re looking for compliance and privacy specialists, assistance modernizing your tech stack, or experts who understand how to implement modern project management practices in a public sector environment, we have over 20 years’ experience helping government agencies with their digital transformation journeys — get in touch.

Image by opensource.com, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.