Operational excellence award goes to GOV.UK

The Civil Service Operational Excellence Award has been taken out by the GOV.UK team.

The team runs GOV.UK Notify, GDS’s notifications platform used across the public sector.

The Dame Lesley Strathie Operational Excellence Award recognises excellence in the delivery of public services. This includes putting user needs at the heart of a project and significantly improving the quality, value for money or productivity of services to the public.

GOV.UK Notify is delivered by a multidisciplinary team of 12 people, including designers, user researchers and developers. They work closely with service teams across the country to constantly iterate and improve it.

“GOV.UK Notify is a great example of a small, diverse set of civil servants challenging established ways of doing things, to rapidly deliver a product benefitting millions of people, whilst saving taxpayers millions,” said the judges.

“It’s ace. Obviously we’re incredibly proud of Notify and the impact it’s having right across the public sector, but this recognition for how our little team goes about delivering it really means so much to us,” said GOV.UK Notify Product Manager Pete Herlihy.

GOV.UK Notify sent its first messages in May 2016. It lets service teams across the public sector send emails, text messages and letters to their users.

It can be used by:

• caseworkers to send one-off messages to people after a call or a visit
• back-office staff to send bulk messages by uploading files
• systems automatically sending messages to people after specified events.
   

GOV.UK Notify is easy to use and easy for teams to integrate with their existing systems. It can be used without any procurement and emails can be sent through GOV.UK Notify at no cost.

So far more than 200 million messages have been sent using GOV.UK Notify, including more than 170 million emails.

It is being used by 438 service teams across 132 organisations — including 64 local government organisations, 58 central government organisations and 10 from the NHS. And this number is growing every day.

Among those teams is the DVSA’s MOT reminder service team, which also won a Civil Service Award — the Digital Award.

Image credit: ©stock.adobe.com/au/Alexander Vasilyev

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