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Knowledge transfer into government – eight ways to deliver success

Government

Learning & Development

The digital skills gap is a major pressure point for civil servants tasked with delivering digital public services. Opencast’s skills report offers practical suggestions on transferring knowledge to – and from – in-house government teams, including through training, communities and good practice. We share eight examples of knowledge transfer from our work.

Training to boost digital skills

Training is an obvious route to boosting in-house digital skills – and works best when it balances on-the-job learning with peer support and training.

As a certified training provider for a central government department, Opencast has helped upskill more than 150 of its people, supporting those with limited experience in agile, QA tools and Scala. We have enabled agile maturity and ways of working, which has had a positive impact on the pace and efficiency of service delivery. Our training embeds Government Service Standards (GDS) and the Technology Code of Practice and is growing digital delivery capability for the department.

Close-up of hands typing on a laptop placed on a white desk, with another open laptop and monitor in the background.

Raising the accessibility bar

Ensuring digital services are accessible is a must for government delivery teams with responsibility for delivering accessible outcomes.

We helped one central government department address this challenge with open-invitation workshops introducing accessibility principles, as well as advanced sessions identifying accessibility issues in projects and hands-on use of assistive technology. We developed self-paced learning and tools – now widely used – to help project teams understand why accessibility processes are needed from the start. This work has raised the profile of accessibility and helped improve understanding – building confidence and cascading knowledge that development teams can apply every day.

Embarking on any digital transformation programme is a daunting prospect – especially for teams looking at this for the first time.

We joined a non-departmental public body to help deliver its first transformation programme, sharing knowledge and upskilling permanent team members including a digital service owner with little experience in Government Service Standards, agile or user-centred ways of working. doing approach helped upskill the in-house team in standards and agile principles, emphasising the need for stakeholder engagement, cross-organisation alignment and user focus. The team passed its first GDS assessment and the digital service owner was promoted into a position to influence future ways of working.

Upskilling for digital transformation

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Embracing feedback on content

Content reviews are a vital part of the content creation process, with guidance and content crits among the tools to deploy.

An Opencast content designer led a presentation to a government department’s content community about content reviews, kickstarting new guidance for content designers across the department. Sharing knowledge with the community and clearing the air on peer reviews and content crits, the presentation explored how each benefits content quality – and discussed when each review should be used in the content development lifecycle. The key message was: embrace feedback! New guidance followed, and content crits are now blooming. This was a successful knowledge share overall, leaving the community empowered to up their content game.

Person wearing a blue hoodie and headphones around the neck gestures with both hands while seated in an office setting, with computer monitors and partition panels in the background.

Communities improve UCD practice

Improving best practice and thinking on user-centred design (UCD) ultimately helps deliver digital services that work for the people using them. Communities of practice can help.

Working with a central government department, our consultants were proactive in contributing to communities of practice, with user research (UR) specialists leading lunch-and-learn sessions for the UR community. Opencast and client URs co-wrote guidance on how to moderate inclusive research sessions with vulnerable participants, helping teams work safely with users. To develop stakeholder thinking, we established a service design community (SDC) that fostered and created a unified community voice. The SDC also drove joined-up thinking across services, helping to improve senior-level design briefs.

Building emotional intelligence

Many factors differentiate a great business analyst (BA) from a good one – but one that stands out is applying emotional intelligence principles in their work.

Invited to talk to a community of practice at a central government department, two Opencast BAs adapted an interactive workshop to the daily challenges that community faces. In-house BAs learned emotional intelligence skills and techniques that they could engage with and immediately implement in their day-to-day work– helping them build meaningful relationships with colleagues and stakeholders. The BAs were invited to return with more workshops to a wider audience at the department.

Close-up of hands writing on a yellow sticky note with a marker at a wooden table, with another note partially visible underneath.

Problem solving with problem statements

Problem statements help teams to identify, explain and solve technical problems, then stay on track with the issues they're solving.

Working for a central government department, an Opencast business analyst volunteered to help upskill an in-house team with no experience in triaging and prioritising change requests on its backlog. This exercise helped the team to understand the value of writing short problem statements in helping to prioritise requests. An end-to-end walkthrough used a real-life change request to show the in-house team how to write and use statements – and the team now uses this as a template for its own statements.

Mentoring for real-world insights

Mentorship is a cornerstone of any good knowledge-sharing. Opencast’s business analysts actively engage with their client counterparts, providing real-world insights, guidance, and support.

Working on a central government department’s IT programme, our business analysts worked closely with apprentice client associate BAs to help build their knowledge and develop their training portfolios. One-to-one sessions, conducted over several months, explored agile concepts and their real world application including how to write effective user stories, acceptance criteria and best practice business process modelling. The upskilling of associates has helped create a stronger pipeline of skilled in-house business analysts at the department.

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