Week notes

August 2023

25 August – Customer interviews and user testing

This week I’ve been experimenting with my regular customer interviews. I’ve been doing weekly phone interviews with businesses who have used the Business Connect platform for around a year now. They have been an incredible source of insight and a great reality check.

With the most recent interviews I’ve been asking if we can do the session as a video call. So far I have done 3 in this way and have asked some questions about incorporating a user testing element.

I want to explore whether this could be a weekly opportunity to do a short, targeted remote user testing exercise. I’m trying to figure out how to make it easy to do user testing as part of our continuous discovery approach.

It has been helpful asking what people think, before launching into it. My 3 video interviewees have been open to the idea, but asked for bit of forewarning which sounds sensible!

Shelley, Product Manager

18 August – How we work

I’ve been having one-to-one meetings with each member of the delivery teams over the last week. Business Connect has multiple delivery squads running, with the squad compositions changing based on the nature of the work. 

One of the key insights for me has been the benefit of giving the team the responsibility for setting up how we work. 

I think previous ‘ways of working’ can create a bias within a leader for how a team needs to be set up. I’ve certainly been guilty of trying to push other structures that have worked for me in previous organisations.  Instead, we have hit a sweet spot. I see the team suggesting ways of working, to best suit the work being delivered.

One of the key factors in enabling a high-quality delivery has been lining the squads up to deliver against the product outcomes.  Arguably the most important part of this is trusting the teams to prioritise and organise themselves. Here’s how we have things set up right now.

Key outcomes and squads:

• Reduce the time it takes for a business to complete what they came to do (Time squad)
• More businesses are using Business Connect (More squad)
• Maintain a strong and stable platform (Trust squad)
• The fastest way to deliver great government digital services (Fast squad)

I’ve enjoyed the one-to-one sessions I’ve had, they let me check in with the people who are building and testing the platform and features.  This quarter it looks like we have done what we came here to do, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. These sessions also work if things aren’t going so well. I can find out directly when we aren’t hitting the mark. 

The feedback has changed how I deliver and communicate across the team.  

Daryl, Director for Business Connect

11 August – Reducing government API integration friction with FormBuilder

This week, one of our focus areas has been on streamlining the integration process with our FormBuilder tool to provide a smoother experience for agencies and councils. We understand the importance of seamless connections between platforms, and we've been actively investigating ways to enhance this aspect of our service.

One exciting avenue we explored was the creation of connectors into various platforms and the idea of publishing FormBuilder connectors. Our team embarked on an experiment where we utilised our webhook notification to trigger a Power Apps cloud flow. This Cloud Flow then called the Business Connect GET Case Details API, within a few steps we were able to easily extract the case submission details and store a copy within our test Power Apps Dataverse.

The end-to-end process was very swift, with data flowing into Power Apps in under 30 minutes.

We have an assumption that over the next few years agencies will be looking to adopt more drag/drop type workflow automation tools to manage their integrations between systems and back office workflows. We think this will mean more government agencies may be searching for pre-built connectors that they can drag/drop instead of manually setting up API integrations with code.

As we continue to innovate and optimise our services, we invite collaboration and input from our community. If any of you are intrigued by the possibilities of Business Connect integrations, integration connectors or have unique use cases in mind, we encourage you to reach out. Your insights and ideas could play a pivotal role in shaping the future of this GOVT.NZ platform.

Aaron, Solution Architect

4 August – Accessibility is crucial

This week I’ve been asked on a few occasions about how our product stacks up from an accessibility standpoint. Accessibility is crucial, as it ensures that digital content, like forms, is usable by individuals with disabilities.

During the past few months we have been working to improve accessibility on the Business Connect platform by tackling issues identified through independent accessibility testing. Things that were found were common problems in form accessibility include unclear labels, poor keyboard navigation, and missing alternative text.

Using these learnings, we’re working to integrate these accessible design principles into the FormBuilder tool, so forms built using our tool have clear labelling, keyboard-friendly navigation, and proper image descriptions. Our mission continues with accessibility improvements and using findings from testing to fine-tune our accessibility features. Our commitment is to ensure all forms created using Formbuilder are truly inclusive and user-friendly.

Tian, Senior Service Designer

July 2023

28 July – Demonstrating our speed

This week I’ve been reflecting on how far we’ve come in terms of our ability to respond quickly.

We got wind of a new service about to be launched to support businesses with funding and approached the service team responsible to let them know how we could help.

The team were planning on a pdf form for this service to meet tight timeframes and deliver within budget.

We got enough information to start prototyping the form on Tuesday and had finished it by Thursday. We ran the team through a demo on Friday and showed them our plan for making it available for customers on the Business Connect platform within a week.

It felt incredible to be able to confidently take this offer to a team and know that we could follow through if that is what they wanted to do.

The other encouraging side of this was that 2 of our squads were almost unaware of this new service and kept focus on their planned work rather than having to jump in to help make it happen.

Shelley, Product Manager

21 July – Putting the usability of FormBuilder to the test

This week the thinking has been going into initial user testing for FormBuilder.govt. We want to see how easy or hard it is for form builders outside our team to pick it up and produce a great form.

We’ll begin by testing ourselves! Some of the uninitiated team members will be tasked with building a form. We’ll see what the challenges are and there might be some work for the developers as well as improvements to our guidance and guardrails as a result.

This is going to help us have better sessions with first users from other agencies. We hope to be lining those up sometime in August.

Shelley, Product Manager

14 July - Publishing forms without a big release

This week we released a service for the Insolvency and Trustee Service without the need for a hotfix or a full release. We could independently push the service through to our staging environment without all the extra overhead that comes with a release.

This saves time and means someone non-technical can build and then release the service without needing to pull in the technical team. We’ve proved we can do it, and this is the toe in the water for services being published more quickly and easily. Here’s one to consider - if we had to, how could we release a service every day?

Shelley, Product Manager

7 July – Saying no is hard, but it’s important

This week we had an approach from a service team that needed to implement a new register and ask businesses to submit information twice a year.

The budget is low for the project and there are few options. Business Connect represents a great way to deliver this new service. The question arose of our ability to add features that would give more ‘register’ type back-office functionality.

While this kind of register functionality is on our roadmap it is not what is strategically most important right now in terms of value back to NZ businesses and scaling the platform.

I’m proud to say that we bravely said not right now and prioritised our existing roadmap over the immediate needs of that team. We are likely still going to deliver the customer-facing aspects of this service and can provide the data to the service team via API or our case management portal.

Shelley, Product Manager

June 2023

30 June - Organising the work                 

I just love that our team has a spirit of experimentation. We are fairly Agile, but we just go with what works.

One of the squads has taken a more intentional approach to the order of things in their sprints. Several big user stories landed on the test team at the end of the last sprint and caused a bit of test team chaos. Like 3 big rocks landing in a peaceful pond.

This sprint the fast squad will ensure all large stories are developed in the first week or so giving the test team time to work and the second half of the sprint will be spent on investigations and proofs of concept.

These pieces are work are just as important but won’t land on the test team. In fact, they will likely set the squad up nicely with development work for the following sprint. The work has been arriving at the right time and made it easy for the test team to manage.

This also means we have flexibility to drop stories today and focus on things that are higher priority if something comes out of leftfield. This is because the work the squads are doing in the final week of sprint is not for the current release, so there is less pressure on our people.

Shelley, Product Manager

23 June - Smaller squads, stronger outcomes

We were being slowed down by the need for our big team of developers to be across every aspect of our roadmap. The planning and refinement sessions were mammoth and tied everyone up for long periods with not all content relevant for everyone.

In April we made the decision to break down into 4 small squads. Each squad was given a product outcome to focus on and one or 2 key results for the quarter.

What we saw was an immediate shift in productivity, speed and culture. The smaller squads had fewer and shorter meetings, deepened their knowledge on their own key areas and were context switching far less.

In just 3 or 4 sprints we have seen more ownership, more autonomous working, better problem solving, more understanding of prioritisation and more high-value features being shipped.

This structure might not be what we stick with, but it has been a game changer for team culture and productivity.

Shelley, Product Manager

16 June - Accessibility baked in

Something incredible is happening. Over the last few weeks the team has brought in a new step in our development process to help ensure we factor in accessibility as early as possible. The developers working on Business Connect now use Axe to test their code along the way and address any issues that it picks up.

The whole team is embracing the kaupapa and kind of relishing the chance to upskill in this area.

It means when our testers step up to do their thing, many of the bugs they normally have to catch are already resolved and greatly improves the quality of the code we’re shipping. We want Business Connect to be as accessible and inclusive as possible so we’re always looking for ways to make this part of how we work.

Shelley, Product Manager

9 June - FormBuilder.govt dashboard

Our vision for the FormBuilder tool is that it’s available across government and easy to start using. We know that it must be intuitive to succeed. Our product owner for the tool challenged his squad to start thinking about how a user would manage and configure forms. There was no directive on what the solution should be.

The team went away and worked on the technical solution while bringing in our design lead to make sure whatever they produced was usable and met user needs.

What they have developed will now need to be tested with users but is a great example of empowering our creative people to problem solve and run with the best ideas.

Shelley, Product Manager

2 June - New FormBuilder.govt tool

We’ve gone live with a service created using FormBuilder.govt! Our partnership with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise has resulted in a new service for New Zealand businesses who want to qualify as an active investment for high-value investor migrants.

More than a year ago we recognised that with our current toolset and ways of working we were going to struggle to scale to achieve our vision of being the easiest way to transact with government.

The cost and time to build was still too high, even with reusable components and the time saving from having a base platform certified for hosting with no need for procurement.

Looking abroad we noted what Canada, Singapore and the UK were doing with a form builder offering and we began exploring how to create our own.

The result is FormBuilder.govt which we hope will one day be the NZ government’s form builder. It is a tool for non-technical users to drag and drop government forms and publish them for users to experience great digital government services.

Our time to onboard a new service to the platform has dropped from 8 weeks, with all hands to the pump, to just days.

Shelley, Product Manager

May 2023

26 May – Power of partnership

The work that we’ve been doing alongside New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) has catapulted us forward. Our new FormBuilder tool has benefited from their involvement because we’ve been able to prioritise features that we know are actually needed and will definitely be used.

Partnering with an agency that is digitally mature and has incredibly talented UX and developer professionals ready to go has been a real pleasure and has meant we can keep pace with each other to get everything in place.

Now we have a service live on the platform for NZTE that delivers applications directly to their CRM and allows them to post results and communications back to the customer. Our new Get and Put APIs are both in use by NZTE and we’re delighted to be able to use their adoption of Business Connect as an example for other agencies and councils to follow.

Shelley, Product Manager