Building a statistical release calendar on GOV.UK Here to talk to you about the work we did, and the process we went through, with a fellow government organisation to create a new statistical release calendar on GOV.UK Sam Hall

About GOV.UK GOV.UK was released on 17 October 2012 Single domain for a UK government – replacing numerous other sites Best place to find government services and information Organisation behind this is GDS...

About GDS GDS = Government Digital Service, part of the Cabinet Office Formed November 2011 in response to call for “revolution not evolution” Leading the digital transformation of government – moving departments and services on to GOV.UK They aim to make on-line services so good that people prefer to use them to alternatives So, our project...

The Publication Hub The Publication Hub was launched in March 2009 Response to Code of Practice for Official Statistics requirement to pre-announce releases Served as home to all statistical release announcements across government However, by 2014 at the end of its technological life Expensive to run Large overhead – over 500 people announcing on it across government (all needing training) Existed in isolation GOV.UK offered ideal opportunities - already home to 24 ministerial departments and 331 other agencies and public bodies GDS also expressing interest in having a calendar facility on their site

10 Design Principles 1. Start with needs 2. Do less 3. Design with data 4. Do the hard work to make it simple 5. Iterate. Then iterate again. 6. Build for inclusion 7. Understand context 8. Build digital services, not websites 9. Be consistent, not uniform 10. Make things open. It makes things better These are GDS’ 10 Design principles These underpinned the process we went through...

The Process Started working with GDS in late February 2014 Began by identifying the minimum viable product (photo) Built around user needs

Agile GDS have multi-disciplinary teams who working agile Power of agile - had a working prototype within 4 weeks of starting the project Followed by further iterations 1800 calendar entries migrated to the new calendar, matched to new topics and QAd Roughly 16K redirects put in place Archive of Publication Hub at TNA (took 6 weeks to run) Presentations and demonstrations with OGDs to get buy-in and communicate change ONS managed the transition and announced on behalf of OGDs until trained

The new statistical release calendar Launched September 2014 Initial spike in traffic on the new site but now settled to similar levels to the old calendar Has saved £300K per annum New announcement process is quicker (half of the overhead for OGDs) and more efficient (from 285 to 2 release announcers in ONS) Simpler and clearer for front-end users Housed in more logical place (more visible) Project nominated for ONS Excellence Award

Iterative Continue to improve it Trello Product backlog Focused on user feedback/need