Parliament Digital Service

Taking on a project which is guaranteed to be mentioned in the media, in the Commons and Lords chambers, and whos budget, time scale and effectiveness will be scrutinised by reporters, members of parliament, students, and the general public, etc, can be daunting. The stakeholders are many and the expectations are high.

Dealing with, and re-creating a behemouth like the UK Parliament’s website is a challenge. Due to its many stakeholders, user types, and content types, it had experienced some feature creep, and the ux and architecture of the site needed a complete overhaul.

It was clear that in order to re-create the parliament website, we had to approach it in bite size chunks.

PDS set up a collection of 5 “tiger teams”, each consisting of a product manager and content creator, a UX researcher, a digital analyst, a UX designer, and a developer. Although other resources and skills were brought in from time to time, these tiger teams took on the responsibility of owning the part of the site they were working on the the time. I and the other leads, sat across all these teams and ensured that they had the resources and tools they needed, liaised with stakeholders, and led that charge in educating internal staff in PDS (Parliamentary Digital Service), the House of Commons, and the House of Lords about the importance of a new website and how UX and user research fed in to that. We also stepped in where needed to lend a hand directly to the teams, and of course managing our individual, specialist teams, hiring, and managing leavers.