Service assessments
Assessment questions
Example questions that delivery teams might be asked during a service assessment.
The delivery team will be asked questions during a service assessment.
These are examples of questions you might be asked. This is not an exhaustive list.
User-centred design
- What constraints are you working within? What are the barriers to removing or reducing the impact of those constraints?
- How do you know a service is the right way to solve the problem you’re looking at?
- How do you know you’ve got the scope of the service right?
- How did you define the MVP?
- Talk us through a few of the design iterations you tested - and explain why you rejected them
- How will users find the service initially?
- Why do users need the thing you’re planning to build or buy?
- What do you know about the offline parts of your user’s journey?
- How will you know your service joins up with those offline elements?
- Who are you inviting to your user research sessions?
- What are you doing to make sure users don’t have to provide the same information multiple times and reusing data from across government?
- How are you planning to make sure that the service doesn't exclude any existing or potential users of your service?
- How are you improving users’ experience across different channels?
- How are you implementing recommendations from the Accessibility audit on your service?
- What is your approach to access needs and assisted digital needs?
- What support will you offer to users who have problems with the digital part of the service?
Team and agile ways of working
- Which roles are in your team?
- How are you engaging outside of your team? For example, inside or outside your department, or with the ops and policy professions?
- Has the team disagreed on anything and if so how was that resolved?
- How are you using agile methods?
- How does governance work? Are there any issues you’ve had to escalate?
- Did you discover anything that will make it difficult to design the service your users need? If so, what are your plans to address the issues you found?
- Is the team sustainable moving into public beta and beyond to live?
- What are you doing to make sure other teams know what you’re working on?
Service performance
- What key performance indicators (KPIs) have you identified so far, beyond the mandatory four?
- What existing data sources did you use to decide on your KPIs?
- Which metrics demonstrate your service is meeting your users’ needs?
- How will you check the service is doing what your department needs it to?
- What data are you collecting and how are you using it to improve your service?
- What management and governance do you have? (for example senior information risk owner (SIRO) approval, not collecting personal data, retained a raw backup data view)
- Which KPIs will you publish on data.gov.uk
Technology and security
- What security threats does the service perceive and what mitigations?
- Will the service be processing personal data?
- Does the service perceive any data protection issues either via sharing or hosting? For example, hosting outside the UK/EU.
- Has the service engaged the local data protection team and gone through the DPIA screening process?
- What is the plan for maintaining the security of the system and system dependencies?
- Is the service adhering to secure by design and are the secure by design artefacts being produced
- Is the service adhering to Data Protection by Design and by Default?
- Is the service to be assured via GovAssure and will the GovAssure assurance artefacts be produced
- Has the service been penetration tested and approved by DDTS Operational Security and relevant remediations made?