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https://dwpdigital.blog.gov.uk/2014/08/21/creating-a-dwp-business-design-and-transformation-community/

Creating a DWP Business Design and Transformation Community

Now that DWP has defined what business and digital transformation means for the department, we're fully focused on developing some of the things we need to make it happen.

One of the important building blocks is a business design, made up of an operating model for the department and a transformation roadmap that tells us what needs to happen when.

We're not starting from a blank sheet of paper. There are design decisions being taken every day across the department in our programmes and elsewhere, a range of operating models, an existing business architecture model and a number of separate transformation roadmaps. So our first priority has been to harness all the expertise we have, creating a business design and transformation community to work together to transform delivery across the whole department. The community crosses strategy, change, IT, operations, estates, HR, analysis and more.

Our first tool for doing this was to create a "rich picture", a one-page sketch of where we are as a department, where we think we might be by 2020 and the changing environment and challenges along the way. It's intended to be a tool to help us make the right design choices and stimulate debate. Our business design and transformation community co-created this picture through a couple of workshops, with the help of an artist who used the discussion on the day and the outputs to draw and then iterate and refine the picture.

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Rich picture, a one-page sketch of where we are as a department, where we think we might be by 2020 and the changing environment and challenges along the way

We're using a tried-and-tested business design methodology, which is helping us to pull off the art and the science of business design. As this approach is different from what we've done before, we created a Business Design Academy to explain the method to our community. We all spent a day learning about the approach, and we now have a shared understanding of business design and the methodology, and we're starting to populate the model with knowledge from around the department.

Business Design Academy
Learning at the Business Design Academy

And we've been working across the department to develop the business design in an agile way, with a weekly sprint cycle, collaboration and iteration built in to everything we do and regular show and tells to make sure it's all visible and delivered incrementally.

We’d love now to learn about what others are doing in business design, so we can extend our community across government. We’re also planning to build our team as our need for business design expertise increases.

Please feel free to get in touch.

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