4th December 2015 London, UK
I’ve recently been through an assessment for the legalisation service. Preparing for an assessment is no trivial task, and it’s fair to say at times you spend all day thinking about it, you go to bed thinking about it, you wake up in the night thinking about it, and when you wake up in the […]
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18th November 2015 London, UK
Throughout the alpha phase of our legalisation work we were measuring our work against the digital by default standard, and – inspired by the work of colleagues working onemergency travel documents – we set up a github wiki to document our work and evidence. By the end of the 7 weeks we were ready for […]
12th November 2015 London, UK
In my last post I discussed the FCO’s legalisation service and our plans to build a new digital service. So what have we done so far? After getting our spending controls approval, we used the Digital Services Framework to find development resources and appointed Informed Solutions to work with us. For development we’ve been following […]
10th November 2015 London, UK
Congratulations, you finally got that dream business job overseas! Your bags are almost packed, your cat is in storage and your vinyl collection is at your parents (wait a sec, did you get that the wrong way round?). It’s never simple, it’s always a rush, and here’s another fly in the ointment: you’ve just found […]
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16th February 2015 London, UK
Lessons in configuring a service, running pilots and handling diversity in skills As we’ve developed our new consular appointment booking service we’ve encountered several challenges along the way, not least getting into the embassy in Madrid, and learnt many lessons which we can apply to future transformation work on legalisation and emergency travel documents. Parents […]
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4th February 2015 London, UK
What we learnt about our appointments service during a visit to Madrid As the consular appointments alpha phase drew to a close, a visit to the Embassy in Madrid was a good opportunity for some face-to-face user testing, as well as a timely reminder of local conditions. First of all, the Google map pin for […]
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30th January 2015 London, UK
How the appointments service was developed, the teams involved, and the first training iteration While developing our consular appointments service through alpha to beta, we’ve worked closely with our partner BookingBug to customise their Software-as-a-Service offering to our needs – both user needs and organisational needs. As the development was not in-house good communication was […]
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26th January 2015 London, UK
The pilot programme for our consular appointments booking service has been running as a public beta for a few weeks now, so it’s time to take stock of progress. Since my last post on the discovery phase for consular appointments, we have focused on building and iterating the product, training staff on how to manage […]
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15th September 2014 London, UK
This is the last in a series of three blog posts discussing the discovery phase for our consular appointments transformation. See the posts on who, what, how and identifying user needs. As part of our discovery phase for the consular appointments service, having done a fair amount of navel gazing we also wanted to look at […]
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27th August 2014 London, UK
Armed with the background data on who books appointments and how, in this post I’ll look at what we’ve learned about user needs and the improvements we would like to make in the new service. Over the past 2 to 3 years our consular teams around the world have gradually adopted a third party website […]
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