Week notes

29 March – Reflections on FormBuilder trial

This week we presented progress and learning to our Advisory Board. Every quarter this group meets to offer us ideas and guidance as we’ve worked to be the fastest way to deliver great government digital services. 

The Advisory Board includes representatives from the international trade, farming, hospitality and tech sectors along with senior people from central and local government.

The sessions come right before quarterly planning and always offer a different perspective to consider. Given how close we all are to this work, it’s vital to have people outside the team challenge us and contribute.

Over the last quarter we’ve run an experiment to see what happens when we leave government people to try FormBuilder without much help from our team. As we outlined for the Advisory Board, we’ve had to concede that there are some real barriers to builders independently producing a form that could be published onto the Business Connect platform.

There are 3 main reasons and they give us some clear direction on what we need to do:

1. The tool is too technical and advanced for an average user. When people log in for the first time they feel overwhelmed. The page is quite cluttered and presents a huge range of functionality, much of which we don’t really want people to use.
2. It’s hard for people to translate their service into the pattern we use on the Business Connect platform. The pattern consists of commons screens that bookend a service and we know from research that those using the platform find the pattern easy to use and familiar. However, those building forms often try to replicate their PDF and get stuck.
3. The experience using our products is fragmented and it doesn’t support builders to flow through a process and publish a form. The builder, form preview and support material are in 3 totally different places with different logins. Not ideal! 

Most of this is because we want to get something into peoples’ hands as early as possible. It’s better to learn and iterate the product over time than try and build the perfect experience out of the gate. 

As we shared what we’ve learned with the Advisory Board it felt good to be able to honestly reflect as a group and get input to help chart our next steps. Our full team quarterly planning session is next week and I’m always eager to see what the team comes up with.

Shelley, Product Manager

22 March – Support from DIA Web Standards

This week, collaborating with the DIA Web Standards team was incredibly beneficial. They offered not only support and guidance but also technical advice based on best practices. They're committed to sharing success stories, inspiring us to excel in accessibility with FormBuilder.

The Web Standards team will complete a thorough assessment of accessibility barriers for government people using FormBuilder, aiming to help us pinpoint areas for improvement and implement solutions.

We have a goal that FormBuilder is a fully accessible government tool and as we see uptake across government we will continue to prioritise accessibility. It’s great to get help on how we make the builder more inclusive and show progress based on need.

The team is also considering who they might connect us with in government to learn from others’ experiences and strengthen our efforts. They mentioned agencies like Waka Kotahi and Stats NZ, who are doing great work around accessibility.

With the DIA's support, we're confident in overcoming obstacles, embracing innovation, and creating a more inclusive digital future for New Zealand.

Tian Liu, Product Owner

15 March Week – Council user group

This month we had our first quarterly council user group of 2024! There was a fantastic turn out with 18 representatives from 13 councils across Aotearoa.

We use this forum to share important news about what’s happened over the quarter and to discuss what’s coming up next. It’s also chance for our local government stakeholders to come together to and hear how others are using the product. We are a small team and these sessions are an effective way of communicating one-to-many.

This time around we had 2 guest speakers. Mike Manson, Chief Executive for the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) spoke about the work they are doing to standardise council services and processes for councils to adopt. Mike sits on our Advisory Board and has been an advocate for Business Connect and FormBuilder since the early days.

We also had Malcolm Johnston, board member with the NZ Institute of Liquor Licensing Inspectors (NZILLI) talk about their commitment to maintaining our alcohol licensing forms to ensure they stay up-to-date and adhere to relevant legislation.

The buy in we are getting from local government industry bodies like ALGIM and NZILLI shows that other groups across government can see the benefits FormBuilder and Business Connect can deliver. It’s also such a boost to the teams’ morale.

It was great to see lots of familiar and new faces at the session and I was really pleased to see everyone so engaged. I’m looking forward to meeting again at the next session in June.

Chloe, Senior Advisor

8 March – Welcome to FormBuilder today

It’s been another flat tack week. I counted up and I’ve been involved with meetings and workshops with 60 central and local government people in just the last fortnight. It’s great to have so much interest in FormBuilder and Business Connect.

In February we had a session to imagine the ideal future onboarding for government people to FormBuilder. It was inspiring, but also feels pretty aspirational! This week I asked the team to review and improve how we’re doing it right now.

We want to give those trying the tool the best chance of creating a form and making it available to their customers.

Since October last year we have given 44 people from a range of agencies and councils access to FormBuilder. There has been a mixture of results as some people log in just once and others create multiple forms.

As we drew a flow diagram on the whiteboard we thought about how to support builders, but also how to manage this growing number of people using the tool. For now, instead of immediately giving people access to FormBuilder we’re going to invite anyone interested to join us for a monthly webinar to learn more and then decide if they want to try the tool.

We’re keen for people to bring a form with them. Having something tangible in mind makes it easier to engage with FormBuilder and get going. Once you’re ready you can share the form with colleagues and get them to fill it in.

We also recognise that waiting for the next webinar won’t always make sense. For anyone with a more pressing need to deliver a service, we’re happy to get you up and running more quickly.

The next webinar is taking place on 27 March so please join us to find out more, ask questions and meet the team behind FormBuilder and the Business Connect platform.

FormBuilder Webinar(external link)

Shelley, Product Manager

1 March – FormBuilder Workshop series

This week we collaborated with the Digital Public Service team in DIA to hold the first of our monthly sessions introducing people to FormBuilder.

We’ve again taken inspiration from colleagues in Canada and the UK who use a regular session like this to manage interest. We’re a small team and being able to group together those from across government who want to know more just makes sense.

We had 14 participants from DIA, MSD and Te Whatu Ora join us for an interactive demo. We invited them to log in to FormBuilder and build along with our expert to get a feel for the tool. We had a few access problems, but I think there are some simple things we can do to reduce that.

It’s a work in progress and we’ll make improvements for the next one, but it did help people get a sense of what FormBuilder can do.

I felt proud of the team during the session. We had technical, service design, product and customer experts in the room to educate and answer questions. It’s fun to show people what you have worked on and get real-time feedback. My favourite comment was, “We needed this 20 years ago”. This really helps give the team a lift!

I’m looking forward to more feedback from participants and of course the next workshop! If you want to join us please email hello@businessconnect.govt.nz to jump on the invite list.

Shelley, Product Manager

23 February – A great partnership

This week I presented to a group of government stakeholder engagement professionals alongside Heather Finn from NZ Customs.

I did my bit explaining what FormBuilder is and how it could help then handed over to Heather to talk from a Customs point of view about the tool and about Business Connect.

Having partners who are willing to share their time and story means a lot to me. It helps those considering using FormBuilder and Business Connect get a better sense of what it might mean for their customers and their organisation.

We’ve worked with Customs since the beginning and they launched the first service on the platform in 2019. Over that time our teams have learned and grown together.

Heather described how being able to use an existing platform meant they could move forward on improving subsequent services, like the Secure Export Scheme (SES), without making a business case for funding.

I was happy to hear that the whole scheme is now much easier to join and be part of and the time it takes a business to complete the application has reduced dramatically from months to a matter of hours.

“Making the application simpler and clearer has also meant a more efficient process as any available officer can log in and progress an application rather than needing a dedicated officer for each application. Less time is needed to train our officers and it gives us a single source of truth for data. By using Business Connect to make changes and updates, much less manual effort is required updating at our end.”

— Heather Finn, Manager Business Improvement and Innovation, NZ Customs

Big thanks to Heather and I’m looking forward to sharing a stage (and a laptop) with her again sometime soon.

Shelley, Product Manager

16 February – Support from the experts

This week I sat down with 3 representatives from the New Zealand Institute of Liquor Licensing Inspectors (NZILLI) to review our alcohol licensing forms.

NZILLI has agreed to support our team to ensure the forms remain current and fit for purpose.

It’s reassuring to know that we have experts behind us, and we hope councils will feel even more confident about these 5 alcohol licensing forms.

The updates suggested by the advisory group were valuable and I have already implemented them. This really reminds me how much easier it is to make changes to existing forms using FormBuilder. Previously I would have been writing a lot of user stories for developers!

Now the master templates for On licence, Off licence, Club licence, Special licence and Temporary Authority are ready for councils to adopt starting with Ōtorohanga District Council.

We’ll meet with the NZILLI advisory group on a quarterly basis to check if there’s anything to update.

I feel grateful to Malcolm, Anneke and Antoinette for dedicating their time to help create standardised templates that work for councils.

Susan, Service Designer

9 February – Connecting with Singapore

This week I was given access to the Singaporean government’s form building tool. Over the past 6 months I’ve been blown away by the willingness to share from other government teams abroad.

SG is officially my new favourite builder! It’s so simple and clean and sits at about the right level in terms of what it allows users to do. Not too advanced but includes important features many forms would need.

It was a nice touch to see our logo had been pre-populated when I logged in!

I’ll continue to trial it and I’m looking forward to a meeting with the team behind the tool later in March. I think we can learn a lot from them and these kinds of exchanges with international teams are helping to leap our thinking forward.

Tian, Product Owner – FormBuilder.govt

2 February – Making it easy to get started

This week the team sat down to do a workshop on how best to onboard government people to FormBuilder.

It’s still early days and so far we’ve tried:

1. Mini workshops with a hands-on activity
2. Sending people instructions and resources and letting them just play around with the tool themselves

Neither option has been more successful than the other and I would go as far as to say neither option has been a winner. I suppose it depends on learning styles and motivation. 

We’re working on our welcome instructions and video. I’m looking forward to testing those with some prospective builders from within the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment.

The workshop today was a chance to think way out into the future and imagine our ideal onboarding. One thing that clearly emerged was the desire to see people able to try FormBuilder without the need to create an account.

Our model for this is GCForms from the Canadian Government. It lets people see what the builder can do before they go through the sign-up process.

GCForms(external link) — Government of Canada

This approach, of deferring account creation, quickly gives the customer value and removes frustration caused by putting hurdles between them and what they’re trying to do.

This is what we’d like to work towards. In the meantime, we’ll look at what else we can do to make it easier to get started.

Shelley, Product Manager

26 January 2024 – Templates are the ticket

This week we completed another of our local government template forms for use by councils. This brings us to a total of 7 templates.

Using a template and then tweaking it for a different council’s requirements has helped better meet the needs of those delivering council services. It gives them a solid starting point and encourages standardisation across councils while still allowing flexibility to cope with local differences.

I’m looking forward to partnering more closely with the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) to enable the creation of more templates covering a wider range of council services.

So far we have the following:

• Registration of a food business
• Alcohol licences
• Registration of a premises
• Notice of management change
• Trade waste permit
• Application for waiver or exemption
• Licence to trade in a public place

The Business Connect platform, FormBuilder tool and templates created by and for local government are all centrally funded. I’d like to see more councils using them to save time and money.

Shelley, Product Manager

19 January 2024 – A milestone moment

eInvoicing delivers first service using FormBuilder.govt

The Business Connect team hit an exciting milestone this week.

The first service built by someone outside of the Business Connect team went live using FormBuilder.govt... the whole process taking just 4 working weeks from requirements gathering, to gaining approvals and to going live!

Eddy Horwood, an advisor with the eInvoicing team at MBIE used FormBuilder.govt to create the form and with some help from the Business Connect team, he could progress the form to a state where it was ready to be published on the platform. The eInvoicing Ready Software form allows businesses to apply to be added to the list of eInvoicing ready software providers on the MBIE website.

For me, it feels momentous, we’ve been working towards this goal since the concept of our own drag ’n’ drop form building tool came about in late 2022. In time, it will be a game changer in how services are delivered as more and more service teams across government build and publish their forms quickly and seamlessly using the tool providing major cost savings for agencies looking to digitise.  

We’re ready for more service teams to create their forms using the tool. If you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you – just email Hello@businessconnect.govt.nz.

Chloe, Senior Advisor

12 January 2024 – Empower others

This week we had quarterly planning and refreshed our objectives and key results. I was struck by how much the squads were able to achieve in just 1 short breakout session. We’re rallying around a strategy for the quarter that puts more focus on our new customer group - government builders.

The goal is to make digital government simple, fast and cost effective to deliver. The tools we’ve created have the potential to transform hundreds of inaccessible document-based services into truly digital ones.

The team is trying to prioritise development that maximises the usability of our FormBuilder tool to increase adoption and the range of services remade digital for New Zealanders.

This means we need a better understanding of the needs of those in government who deliver digital services. We'll get this through interviewing different kinds of users from a wider range of agencies.

We’ll continue to raise awareness of the opportunity to sign up more builders and we’ll aim to make it easy for them to know whether FormBuilder is the right tool for their service.

This quarter I’m excited to see experiments to try and simplify things for builders by using AI to convert their existing forms. We’re looking at ideas to increase the proportion of users who create and finish a form.

One challenge this quarter will be ensuring the team is allowed to remain focused on the objectives and big rocks we've agreed. There are likely to be requests for services that are beyond our core patterns and feature set. I’m clear that we’re creating products that meet the needs of the many, not the few.

Shelley, Product Manager

15 December – Reflections on 2023

I orea te tuatara ka patu ki waho
A problem is solved by continuing to find solutions

It is always hard to sum up an entire year’s worth of work in a few paragraphs, but if there was just one word for this year, it would be ‘remarkable’.
 
Normally the Christmas push has me feeling tired, but this year I’m feeling energised and hugely satisfied at the progress made. My role is to build an environment where teams can deliver great things and enjoy themselves while doing it. We have gone from me thinking that ‘something isn’t working here, my approach isn’t hitting’ to ‘something really clicking, and the team absolutely firing on all cylinders’. 
 
A year ago, we were still trying to work out how to move Business Connect forward and were focused on services to build. We changed that to a product led approach, built, and launched our fantastic new form building tool ‘FormBuilder.govt’, and now we are seeing genuine, organic interest in the product.
 
We had our final advisory board meeting this week. The board checks on our progress and gives feedback on our intended direction. It is always a good measure of where we are at and where we should be. We received some great questions around what we intend to do with form builders, and how we can onboard agencies faster. There is work to be done but we are comfortable with the product direction, and approach.
 
When I look ahead to 2024, I can see that we are very well placed to continue the execution. The team is lined up to deliver a raft of additional services that small businesses are crying out for. I go into the festive break immensely proud of the work the team have put in this year.
 
Kua hua te marama, here’s to celebrating a successful year.
 
Daryl Pettitt
Director, Business Connect

8 December – Bringing builders together

This week we had our first drop-in session for builders using FormBuilder.govt.

We’re in the early stages of getting people from across government to try the tool. We already have 8 builders from local and central government learning to use the tool and creating their own forms.

I was happy to see 4 builders join the drop-in session with Josh and I. We wanted to bring people together to run through a ‘how to’ and then open up for questions and feedback.

For me it’s so important to get that time to talk to people face to face. We learned a lot in just half an hour!

One of our builders emphasised the importance of having a shared space to learn from other people’s forms, “don’t put us in silos.” Another was using FormBuilder.govt to show others internally what it could do, “we’re migrating all our pdf forms, so this is timely.”

The third was interested in discussing how to create a best practice form that would work for other councils and commented, “the pre-built template with the pages already there along with the NZBN and NZ Post look ups was great.”

The last builder wasn’t sure how to share what he’d built with his colleagues or what the next steps were if they wanted to publish the form, “what’s the next step to get things going?”. We were glad to clarify and are hoping this service will go live before Christmas.

Big thanks to everyone that attended – so nice to have an informal session like that.

We’re planning to run these sessions monthly and I’m excited to see the numbers increase. They’ll be a great source of ideas for improvements to make it even easier to create digital government services.

Email hello@businessconnect.govt.nz if you’d like to join in!

Shelley, Product Manager

1 December – FormBuilder turns 1

We've been working on FormBuilder.govt for a year, and the progress we've made has surpassed expectations! The demo this week left me in awe of our form tool's advancements. I’ve been involved since the design phase and seeing it in action was incredible.

Creating forms with a drag-and-drop tool- check. Publishing without the need for a developer – check. The transformation in the last few months has totally changed the way we deliver.

Manual data entry and complex configurations are a thing of the past. Our team has carved out a niche in which publishing a form to Business Connect is now simple, automated, and lightning-fast. Seeing a form effortlessly glide into the test environment demonstrated how far we’ve come.

Here’s to breaking down barriers and pushing efficiency to new heights! I'm proud of the team and everything we've accomplished.

We are constantly innovating and optimising our form building capability. Come and give the tool a whirl, create a form and tell us what you think.

Tian, Product Design and Experience

24 November – Otorohanga services launch

Conversations with Ōtorohanga District Council started back in August 2023. The Council was looking to revamp their website and digitise forms. @Webshed was the delivery partner for this project. Webshed was aware of FormBuilder’s capabilities and decided to work with Business Connect on digitising the forms. (We can tag Rebecca on LinkedIn)

Using FormBuilder, we built and launched 5 services in less than 2 weeks:

• Trade Waste permit
• Application for waiver or exemption for hospitality businesses
• Notice of management change - for hospitality businesses
• Registration of premises
• Licence to trade in a public place

This allowed us to build master templates which give other councils the opportunity to adopt these existing services faster and more efficiently. We also set a record for the most services Business Connect has gone live with, in a single day. How exciting is that!

Ōtorohanga District Council has other services that they would now like to see on Business Connect. We will continue to work with Ōtorohanga to save their businesses time and improve customer experience. If you are a local council looking to build online forms, we want to hear from you. Please contact us on hello@businessconnect.govt.nz.

Let’s get building.

17 November – ALGIM Conference

This week, I attended the ALGIM (Association of Local Government Information Management) Conference in Wellington, along with my colleagues, May Chin and Chloe Carroll. The theme of the conference was ‘Navigating Uncharted Territory’.

Being relatively new to Business Connect, it was a wonderful opportunity to connect with our stakeholders and understand how we can better support their digital transformation journey. Business Connect works with several councils already and looking to onboard more.

What I gathered from interacting from people across local government was that the issues they face are broadly similar. It reinforced some of my understanding of how Business Connect can improve the experience of small businesses when dealing with government. We are on the right track but there’s plenty more to be done.

I found the opening keynote delivered by Thomas Frey, one of the world’s foremost futurists, very interesting. It got me thinking about the future of Business Connect and FormBuilder, the impact of generative AI on what we do, and how businesses might access government services in the future. Thinking about AI and its impact on the way we work, here are some potential questions that we would need to work through - how can AI improve efficiency and effectiveness of government services? What is the impact of AI on data and privacy? How can we build trust around how AI is being used? How can we eliminate bias in decision making?

I look forward to having these conversations and more with our stakeholders as we continue to find ways of making government services more accessible and reliable.

Sushrutha, Business Development Lead

10 November - FormFest

This week I participated in FormFest, a virtual event showcasing governments working to make services accessible to everyone through online forms.

We were introduced to the organisers Code for America and the Digital Services Network by our friends in the GOV.UK Forms team.

I felt proud that we were presenting alongside public service people from UK, Canada, US and France at national, state and city levels.

The presentation I gave charted my experience of our path from launch in 2019 through COVID to the present day highlighting how much we’ve learned and changed along the way.

I tried to make it an honest account and share how I was feeling at various points. We got some great questions during the Q&A that, for me, showed just what experts were taking part. The questions were pretty detailed and were obviously from people who are in the thick of their own digital service delivery.

I’m looking forward to watching the other sessions that I missed for ideas on how to help more people from across NZ government building and publishing their forms using our products.

We’ll publish a link here once the video is on YouTube.

Shelley, Product Manager

3 November – Call for builders

This week is a bit of a milestone. We’re ready for those in government interested in our FormBuilder tool to have a look!

Learn more about FormBuilder.govt

We’d like to get people set up with a login and trying out the builder. Your feedback will show us what needs to be clearer or to improve.

We’ve already conducted an early access trial and been inviting those agencies wanting to publish services, to have a go at building their own. It would be an incredible Christmas gift for everyone behind the FormBuilder tool if we could see a new service created and published by another team.

Earlier in the week Eddy from the eInvoicing team at MBIE jumped in to start building a form they’d like to offer to companies to register as eInvoicing enabled software providers.

Software providers(external link) — eInvoicing

Our updated roadmap details how FormBuilder fits into our work and how we’re trying to get it into the hands of agencies and councils.

Business Connect roadmap

It’s fully funded for government agencies and councils to prototype application forms, publish those to the Business Connect platform and receive the application information in a case management portal or by email.

Email hello@businessconnect.govt.nz to get going!

Shelley, Product Manager

27 October – Design fundamentals bootcamp

I had the great pleasure of attending a Design Thinking Fundamentals Bootcamp this week.

Design thinking is a human-centred approach that aids organisations to solve their most complex challenges to create positive customer experiences. It is a glimpse into the world of design and the 3 parts of design thinking: Process, Methods, and Mindset.

This course gave me a better understanding of how to dig deep by asking open ended questions and really figuring out a customer’s needs, wants and desires along with their motivation and create a product or service that people love. We also explored effective brainstorming techniques and allowing time for people to ‘flare’ and generate ideas without judgement and then ‘focus’ to refine those ideas and create concepts.

I am excited to apply what I’ve learnt into designing and creating forms for our users that meet their needs as business owners and administrators. Thoroughly enjoyed this 2-day course and cannot wait to find more courses to attend to further my understanding of design and become a better form builder at Business Connect.

Josh, Advisor

20 October – Working with Whaikaha

Over the last week we’ve been meeting with the team at Whaikaha - the Ministry for Disabled People. We reached out to ask for support and advice on making our platform as accessible as possible.

The team were generous with their time and keen to help make Business Connect a great example for other government departments.

We’ll start with some of the internal team putting Business Connect to the test and giving us feedback. This will help us determine whether we should do further user testing and what else we can consider implementing for the platform.

I’m thrilled to be working with the people responsible for leading partnership between the disability community and Government. We need their knowledge and expertise to make this channel as useful to as many people as possible.

We’d also like to offer better advice to those agencies and councils using Business Connect so they can create accessible pathways to their online services.

Shelley, Product Manager

13 October – FormBuilder testing – what happened next?

On 22 September we mentioned the first round of user testing with participants from Ministry of Social Development, the Association of Local Government Information Managers and Customs.

Since then the participants have built their own forms without manual assistance from the Service Design Team.

We were excited to learn how it all went, so Josh and I got them back in to discuss their experience. Neither of us were expecting such high enthusiasm to progress, as Formbuilder.govt was ticking their agency’s digital needs.

We were also feeling proud that the resources we have built to enable agencies to build their own forms hit the mark. We provided ‘How to videos’, content writing tools, guidelines for content writing, CSS cheatsheets and spent a lot of time building common form elements so that form builders could simply drag and drop them in their form, ensuring consistency and code accuracy.

Of course, being service designers we followed up with a feedback opportunity. Below is a snippet of the responses.

What do you see as being the main benefit(s) of using FormBuilder? 

• Ability to build forms at pace and therefore scale the number of forms we can add to Business Connect.
• Ready built forms for all local government, with obviously consistent content and layout, with great flexibility for completion.

Do you see FormBuilder being a part of your organisation's tools?

• Yes, I can see it being part of what we use to deliver digital forms.
• Yes, would be great to have a local government repository for forms, which all local government organisations can access. It would cut down on time to develop new forms.

Next step

Inviting a larger group of participants to test the FormBuilder.govt concept in a ‘beta’ environment. Please get in touch if you’re keen!

Susan, Service Designer

6 October – Transparency is the best policy

I’ve been part of the Business Connect Engagement Team for 3 years. Each week I meet with government organisations who are considering using the platform to deliver their forms online and attend regular check ins with councils and agencies that have already onboarded with us. Our ethos in working with our government partners is that transparency and honest communication is the best policy.

Sometimes this means we must communicate disappointing news for example an enhancement they’ve requested has not been prioritised yet. Overall though, I think our stakeholders appreciate our honest approach and feel like they have been given the full picture of a situation and the reasons behind our decisions. In return, we encourage our stakeholders not to hold back when giving us feedback! We want the truth and ultimately it helps inform how we improve the platform in future.

Over the years, we have built strong relationships across government and are seeing the results of this through organisations sticking with us and individuals championing Business Connect by helping to drive it forward within their organisations.

Chloe, Senior Advisor

29 September – Straight into the last quarter of 2023

The team all gathered to look back at what we’d achieved this week and ahead to what we’ll be busy with next.

Our last 3 months was all about setting ourselves up to bring in government people from outside our team to use the FormBuilder tool and make digital service delivery as easy as possible.

In saying that, we also delivered many new features and enhancements to help save NZ businesses time. There are new reminders, notifications, search functionality not to mention a big investment in making the platform accessible.

The objectives and measures we’ve set for ourselves this quarter were all driven by the team putting their heads together to work out what will get us closer to our goals of saving businesses time and government money.

A common theme this quarter is our need to ‘Do it with data’. To make better decisions, assess impact and prioritise our work.

Read the updated roadmap here

Shelley, Product Manager

22 September – FormBuilder.govt user testing

With the success of FormBuilder.govt, Business Connect has entered its first round of user testing with 3 people from Ministry of Social Development, the Association of Local Government Information Managers and Customs.

These users have been given a dummy form to create over the next couple of weeks, after which we will be meeting with them again to see how they got on and gather any feedback to further refine our resources and teaching methods.

This was a fun experience for me. I’ve never carried out any user testing before but have always really enjoyed teaching people about things I am passionate about. I am excited to see how our users have progressed and how their contribution will make the experience even better for future builders.

Josh, Advisor

15 September – Transforming Sprint Prioritisation: From Battle to Harmony 

Looking back at the evolution of our sprint prioritisation process, it's fascinating to see how we've transitioned from what used to resemble a battlefield of conflicting interests to a harmonious orchestration of goals and collaboration. In the past, it often felt like every sprint was a battleground, with stakeholders jostling to get their stories pushed through and satisfied. 

However, our journey has led us to a significantly more organised and streamlined approach, bringing about a multitude of benefits. Here's why our sprint prioritisation is now less chaotic and everyone is onboard with achieving our quarterly goals: 

• Strategic alignment: We've anchored our sprint prioritisation to our broader strategic objectives. By ensuring that every story aligns with our overall mission, we've eliminated the scramble for attention and resources that used to dominate our sprints.
• Transparency and communication: Open lines of communication have become our allies. Transparent discussions about the rationale behind story selection have brought clarity to our decisions, minimising misunderstandings and conflicts.
• Data-informed decisions: We've embraced data-driven insights to guide our prioritisation. This has fostered a more rational and objective approach, lessening the subjective clashes that used to characterise our sprint planning. 
• Value-oriented approach: Prioritising stories based on their potential value to our users and stakeholders has shifted our focus from the quantity of stories to the quality of impact. This shift has garnered support for our prioritisation decisions.
• Quarterly planning consistency: Our goals set during quarterly planning provide a stable foundation. With a shared vision, our sprints are no longer battles to gain fleeting advantages but rather united strides toward our larger objectives. 
• Empowered teams: Teams now have the autonomy to make decisions about what they can realistically accomplish in a sprint. This empowerment has instilled a sense of ownership, reducing the tension surrounding forced commitments. 

As we continue on this journey of transformation, it's incredible to witness the harmony that arises when everyone is aligned, empowered, and focused on the bigger picture. Our sprint prioritisation process has evolved from a battlefield into a collective symphony of progress.

Aaron, Solution Architect

8 September – Accessibility testing

This week let’s talk accessibility testing.  Accessibility testing is a subset of usability testing and is defined as a type of software testing performed to ensure that the application being tested is inclusive for all groups of users.

Inclusive software products allow use of assistive technologies by users to help them navigate through the software product when they have hearing, vision or other permanent or temporary disabilities.

To ensure we at Business Connect are compliant and inclusive we are working on a program where accessibility is treated as a must have during the development lifecycle.  As a team we review and prioritise each new piece of work with accessibility in mind. We refine the work we do in Business Connect and collaborate with the project team to ensure that accessibility requirements are met and integrated into the design and development.

Accessibility testing tools are used to support the manual testing, and we as a team are committed to adding these as part of our Testing Best Practices.

Future state – accessibility standards are fully integrated and met during the development lifecycle day to day.

Dion, Test Lead

1 September – GOV.UK Forms

This week we had a call with 2 senior product managers in the GOV.UK Forms team within Government Digital Service (GDS). 3 of us jumped online to meet with Adam and Katie at 8:30pm our time.

While we were a bit tired before the call, we felt energised afterwards. The experience of talking to people who have a similar mission but are months ahead of you is like the chance to shake a magic eight ball that really can predict the future.

We bombarded the team with questions including:

• Where do you see your product in 2, 3 or 4 years?
• How are you preparing to scale the use of your form builder?
• Are you under pressure to crank out forms and get a high volume of end-users? How do you balance that with the right product choices?
• How have you structured your team?
• Does anyone check that the forms are well designed and user friendly before they are published?
• How do you measure the value you’re delivering?

Each time we speak to people at GDS we come away with a new perspective and about 50 more questions we’d like to have asked.

This time the key takeaways were having a focused value proposition, keeping it super simple when measuring how much time we’re saving for government and the importance of automating onboarding and support processes before scaling.

Shelley, Product Manager

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

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

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

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