Service Standard

8. Iterate and improve frequently

Make sure you have the capacity, resources and technical flexibility to iterate and improve the service frequently.

Work with your organisation to make sure that you’re able to focus on improvements that have the most value.

Why it’s important

Services are never ‘finished’. Using agile methods means getting real people using your service as early as possible. Then making improvements throughout the lifetime of the service.

Making improvements means more than doing basic maintenance like fixing bugs in code, deploying security patches and keeping call centre scripts up to date. If that’s all you do, you’ll be fixing symptoms rather than underlying problems. And over time, the service will stop meeting user needs.

Continuous improvement means you can respond to changes in user needs, technology or government policy throughout the lifetime of the service. So rather than having to be replaced, the service stays relevant until it’s ready to be retired.

What it means

Iteration is not just for the early stages of a service’s development.

Running a live service does not have to mean a full team working on the service 100% of the time during the live phase. But it does mean being able to make substantial improvements throughout the lifetime of the service.

Running your service in a sustainable way

Service standard points

1. Understand users and their needs

2. Solve a whole problem for users

3. Provide a joined up experience across all channels

4. Make the service simple to use

5. Make sure everyone can use the service

6. Have a multidisciplinary team

7. Use agile ways of working

8. Iterate and improve frequently

9. Create a secure service which protects users’ privacy

10. Define what success looks like and publish performance data

11. Choose the right tools and technology

12. Make new source code open

13. Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns

14. Operate a reliable service

Last update:

Added links to related guidance and other standard points. There is no change to the content of the standard point itself.

  1. Guidance first published