Agile methodologies have become a popular approach to building and running digital services for most organisations looking to undergo a digital transformation.

Even for the UK government this is now a mandatory process for improving digital services. In 2007 it was compelled to change from DirectGov to Government Digital Services (GDS) after a damning report from UK Digital Champion Martha Lane Fox.

Her report called for a “revolution” in the way Directgov dealt with the public online, adding that the government “should take advantage of the more open, agile and cheaper digital technologies to deliver simpler and more effective digital services to users.”

Since the report was published, the government has embraced agile methodologies by creating a digital service team who have since set about modernising online services throughout central and local government.

Essex County Council was one of those authorities keen to revamp its online services, having found their old website ill-suited to the demands of a increasingly connected public. Through the use of agile methodologies, the council set about creating a new blogging platform in just two weeks, a tool the council could use to communicate information more effectively.

The council turned to public sector digital specialists Dwx for help on the project – a company that has previously worked alongside the Cabinet Office on its new assurance tool for approving government spending, and the Small Business Commissioner service, a online advice platform provided by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.

Agile working

The first post on the new blogging platform, written by ECC’s service delivery team manager Nicholas Ward, paid tribute to the new method of service delivery.

“It was exhilarating making something so tangible in just two weeks. That said, trying to keep pace with a truly digital organisation like Dxw really highlighted how slow some of our internal processes and systems are and how we tend to accept this as the norm,” he wrote.

An agile project is where research, planning, design, development and testing all happen in parallel. Feedback from users comes regularly, so a thick skin and an adaptable mindset are required. It allows for continuous improvements to be made throughout the process with the new system only going live when it has demonstrated the service works and meets the user’s needs.

“This kind of sprint-based approach uses less documentation and provides more value, which are the principles of what we are doing,” Ward tells Cloud Pro. “We understand the problem that we are trying to solve and we do our user research to make sure what we are doing is right.”

“It involves early prototyping and testing and continuing testing as we go through the process of building. It’s very focused on you as the user of the website achieving your goal.”

Borrow, don’t build

The guiding principle for Ward was “not to reinvent the wheel” and use a system that already exists and has proven to be successful. The team decided to use the incredibly popular platform WordPress due to its ease of use, although the design and coding was based on a publicly available template already deployed on GOV.UK blogs, sites that use the same style and functionality needed by ECC.

It was this process of recycling tools that have already been tried and tested elsewhere in government that helped cut down on any extra programming that would have otherwise been needed.

“As well as the obvious speed advantages, using a codebase borrowed from central
government illustrates a broader principle: borrow, don’t build,” says Ward. “Our problems are not unique, there are people all across central and local government facing very similar challenges.”

User stories

Dxw and Ward worked with the Essex team to develop a series of user stories, used to explain the functionality of a feature from an end-user perspective.

These stories describe the type of user, including what they need from a specific application feature, to help create a simplified, easy to implement solution to the problem. For example: “As a user, I need to be able to navigate between different blog posts so that I can read other posts that I’m interested in”.

Dxw deployed a copy of blog.gov.uk and the two teams began to work on the user stories, all
of which went onto a Trello board. Each story worked on by the Dxw team had specifically defined acceptance criteria, so the whole team knew at what stage each task was to be completed by.

As the stories moved from the product backlog through each of the columns on the board, it was the responsibility of both the deadicated Dxw delivery manager and the ECC product owner to provide oversight and approve stories as they were developed.

Working in the open

The delivery service team looked at central government’s recent technology led work and tried to implement similar collaborative practices into Essex’s digital services.

“We learned lessons from central government and its ways of working that we have found tremendously useful and we wanted to do the same,” says Ward. “It’s a tool to help us to reach out and build relationships with other local authorities who are doing similar work. And, potentially, we could form partnerships that help us and help them.”

Local and central governments now share tools, templates and patterns as part of this new agile method and ECC has lots to gain from making this part of its own culture. The service design team is now piloting the blog and will roll it out to other teams while also documenting the process as part of its commitment to working in the open.

The idea is that sharing the work as you go and taking on the feedback you can quickly get a sense of whether the project is going in the right direction. It’s the opposite of building something in isolation, where there is no feedback until its final reveal as a fully formed product.

“Everyone is at a different stage, but I think it is a growing community,” says Ward. “We share and talk with a number of different partners in other local authorities, some of them come out of comms teams, some from IT teams and some from digital teams.

“It’s a methodology that crosses over quite a few different departments in traditional local authorities. Everyone has a part to play.”

Setting the standard

ECC’s blog platform project demonstrated what can be achieved in a short space of time with a well organised effort and a culture of openness and collaboration.

“We are at the start of the journey,” Ward says. “Things like the blog are a good example of something we can do that is achievable and shows the principles of how we want to work and this is something that we can just get out and deliver very quickly.”

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Slack is down, forcing workers everywhere to resort to sending mass emails as the collaboration app tackles a major outage.

The communication tool, which passed six million daily users in 2017, warned that “all workspaces are experiencing difficulties”.

Downdetector, which tracks outages with popular applications, showed the US, UK and mainland Europe were having the most difficulty.

Naturally, people responded to the issue with a sense of calm equanimity online.

The issue began at 2.33pm BST, with Slack posting the following update to its status page an hour later: “We are continuing to work on fixing the connection problems that have been impacting folks. We hope to have the issue fully resolved as soon as possible.”

On Twitter, Slack posted: “We’re working hard to isolate the issue. Thanks for your patience!”

However, with the investigation ongoing, it’s not clear yet what’s caused the issue, though Cloud Pro has approached Slack for more information.

The firm runs its platform on top of Amazon Web Services (AWS) – EC2 instances for basic compute, S3 for user uploads and static assets, Elastic Load Balancing to distribute workloads across EC2, and EBS for overnight backups.

“As a company, our business is integral to our customers’ daily lives,” Richard Crowley, Slack’s director of operations, is quoted as saying on AWS’s website.

“So in our customers’ eyes, our security controls and ability to deliver a reliable service become incredibly important, and it’s a responsibility we take incredibly seriously.”

Slack debuted new developer tools last month designed to allow them to code and test their own Slack apps within the Slack platform, as well as coming with built-in integrations for third-party apps popular with coders; Asana, Bitbucket, HubSpot, Zendesk and Jira.

The collaboration tool isn’t the only service to experience issues recently, with Office 365 dropping offline for UK users earlier this month, as well as back in April.

Document management isn’t a sexy new idea. It’s at least as old as computing itself: as a child, I remember asking my parents why they needed so many little keys on their office keyrings, and getting the answer that these were for their individual, lockable output trays on the various printers and copiers they used.

The documents they handled were so sensitive that even a casual bit of misfiling could spell disaster – and individual secretaries were, even then, becoming anachronistic. So their employer had invested in a complicated, state-of-the-art copier that could keep track of who was making each copy, and deposit each user’s prints securely into their own personal out tray.

Some years later, I happened to meet a programmer who had worked on the Post Office’s OCR project – a project which transformed the business of letter sorting by electronically reading handwritten postcodes and turning them into those little blue dots you used to see printed on the outside of the envelope. It was a necessary evolution, he explained, as the number of letters being processed was outstripping the availability of workers to route the mail by hand.

Like the locking trays, those blue dots were reflections of the supreme importance of pieces of paper – and the growing difficulty of managing them. From one perspective, you might say that the Rise of the Machines began in the 1970s as a direct expression of the need for document management.

That’s not to say that it’s ancient history. Document management remains crucial in the 21st century. For sure, it’s become something much broader than simply keeping track of sheets of paper: the QR code on your smartphone that lets you board a plane is a document, just as much as a letter from your landlord that lets you move into a new office. But the old issues – too many eyes on one type of document, not enough on another – remain as prevalent as they ever were.

All that’s changed is that the modern equivalent of the lockable-tray copier has to deal with those who carry their sensitive data around on an iPad rather than in a cardboard folder (and who don’t necessarily understand the limits of security when it comes to Wi-Fi printing). Indeed, there’s still much to be said for the lockable paper tray, as a metaphor if not a reality. It may go against the optimistic precepts of certain computing gurus, but it’s a practical solution to an everyday problem – and that’s what document management is all about.

Paper trail

Document management can save you a lot of money – and space

Small companies tend to assume that their workflow is too simple to justify investing in anything more than a filing cabinet or two. But even if you don’t need to do much in the way of actual managing, technology can help. One of my old clients, in the course of a deal, ended up holding some sensitive documents that were (even by the standards of these things) very long. It rarely needed to refer to them, but had to retain them securely – which meant dedicating two full-height office cupboards, in a room with a locked door.

As you can imagine, the mere process of scanning in all this paperwork yielded huge rewards. The data was downsized into a single locked drawer, allowing the company to situate two additional staff in the room that had been freed up. In consequence, it ended up increasing its turnover by about a quarter of a million pounds a year.

That might sound like a special case, but that’s the nature of the beast. Talking about document management in general terms has always been a challenge, because it’s in the narrowest, most specialised roles that the technology most visibly pays for itself. Those who really need a lightning-fast write-once storage subsystem already know it; with the more generic stuff, like a simple scan and store process, it can be harder to point to exactly where the benefits are going to justify the investment.

Indeed, I come across plenty of businesses that are suspicious that costly document-management projects are scams or rip-offs. (Then again, that’s not unique to document management – such accusations come up with IT projects of all kinds.)

Factor in a general perception of document management as simple and old-fashioned, and it’s easy to understand why companies baulk at spending money on something that “ought to be easy”. But even if we accept that some aspects of the technology are simple and old-fashioned, that’s no bad thing. It’s a classic geek mistake to think that every modern problem needs a rarefied, compute-intense solution.

Get the hardware right

You might assume that document management starts with a scanner, but it’s nigh-on impossible to do rational document management if your printers aren’t up to the job. If something starts out as paper, there’s a good chance it’s going to get printed out again at some point; we may want to save the environment, but people are more comfortable clutching a nice physical piece of A4 than referring to a digital representation of it.

Modern, superfast scanners such as these by Xerox and Fujitsu are a valuable addition to a digitising office

Indeed, you should probably proceed on the assumption that people are going to print more than you bargain for – and the same applies to scanning. I’ve had arguments with companies who simply refuse to believe the figures for numbers of pages ingested per day into their document management systems.

In short, the best advice is not to skimp on the hardware, even if the initial cost seems higher than you’d hoped. Depending on your needs, you may be able to save money by investing in a big multifunction office printer with its own ADF, so it can tear through big scan jobs in minutes or seconds. By all means, test your procedures with a slow, clunky £29 inkjet MFP before you roll them out, but realise that thousands if not millions of sheets of paper are likely to pass through them before you next come to review your document management needs.

A few more practical points: if you expect to scan lots of big documents, scanners that move the paper past the head, rather than the other way about, are normally much faster.

(Read the PC Pro buyer’s guide to desktop scanners in issue 278, p92, where you’ll see reviews of Brother, Fujitsu, Plustek and Xerox machines. Or jump to the A-List on p18.) If you need to digitise lots of bound documents, camera mounts can grab high-quality snapshots while you turn the pages by hand.

Keep the goal in sight

The ambitions of document-management have expanded a long way beyond those early lock-boxes. One currently fashionable idea is seeking to connect together the many different apparitions of a customer across your diverse products and systems. The benefits are obvious, but if your CRM is in the cloud, your email server is 8,000 miles away, and your document scans are right beside you, it becomes quite a major project. Ask yourself whether it’s worth the investment: you may well find that you’re dealing with Pareto’s 80/20 rule, as 80% of the data you’re storing could well end up sitting dormant for the entirety of its retention cycle.

Indeed, while the benefits of document management may not all be obvious, there’s much to be said for keeping things simple. As I’ve mentioned, it’s an easy mistake to try to push the technology out of its comfort zone, and beyond what’s really advantageous to your company. Keep focused on the practicalities and you won’t go far wrong.

Image: Shutterstock