I am delighted to be able to share our updated GOV.UK Roadmap for the 2020 to 2021 financial year. Like all good roadmaps, it shows what we’ve done, what we’re doing and where we’re going next. And, it will be a living document that’s periodically updated. The next iteration is planned for later this year.
Our roadmap publication is part of our commitment to working in the open, enshrined in our tenth government design principle: “Make things open: it makes things better”. It means anyone – whether they work on GOV.UK, frequently use GOV.UK or are merely curious – can see how we’re improving GOV.UK for everyone.
This accompanying blog post provides some important context for our roadmap. It explains how we structured the roadmap, how we plan our work and what’s coming next.
Roadmap format
On the roadmap we grouped our work into 6 areas, covering the 4 portfolios of the GOV.UK team: hosting platform and publishing applications, accounts and data, tactical and strategic, and content. They’re listed as big thematic goals of our work, and how we’re going to achieve them. We want to make sure we’re showing the scope of our work, the crossovers between the streams of work, and when we hope to complete it.
How we plan and structure our work
Over the past few years we have adapted our ways of working and our roadmap development to ensure that we are consistently supporting both users and government, especially recently with Brexit and the impact of coronavirus (COVID-19).
We’ve been creating our roadmap with the future strategy for GOV.UK in mind – the roadmap sets out how we’re working towards that ambitious vision. We have agile product teams in place to support this, although many of these plans don’t lend themselves to the quarterly mission structure we’ve used in the past, so we’ve moved to longer delivery cycles to allow us to develop strategies and long-term products, like COVID-19 support work and GOV.UK Accounts.
Our teams
There are about 25 delivery teams working across GOV.UK, ranging from small-ish agile multi-disciplinary teams to larger product and content design teams. Please keep an eye on GDS’s careers page, if you are interested in helping us reach our goals.
The future
The GOV.UK roadmap outlines our current delivery and plans for what could be next – some of these are being worked out right now and some will take a while to develop. We will continue to work transparently, so look out for more blog posts on our work over the next few months, and an update to the roadmap later in the year.
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