Establishing cross-government service communities to address public sector fragmentation

From 2017 to 2019, I led a multi-disciplinary project team at the Government Digital Service (GDS) focused on reducing public sector fragmentation. In government, end-to-end user journeys (like starting a business or importing products) rarely sit within a single department; users often have to navigate up to 10 different departments and agencies to complete a single goal. This fragmentation forces citizens to understand government silos, while causing duplicate services, policy gaps, and unnecessary public expenditure.

As the Service Design and Product Lead, I supported the inception of the "Service Communities" initiative and spent two years leading a team to design and develop the tools, processes, and guidance required to join up government around shared user outcomes. My role included:

• Directly managing a multi-disciplinary team through user research, strategy, and service delivery.
• Designing operational frameworks to help multi-disciplinary, cross-departmental networks (spanning policy, digital, and operations) collaborate effectively.
• Developing scalable self-service tools and guidance to decentralize community creation across the public sector.

The primary structural challenge was breaking down deeply entrenched departmental silos to coordinate policy, legal, user research, and data across different arms of government.

The most acute challenge arrived late in the project lifecycle when our funding was suddenly pulled due to shifting centralized priorities. This threatened to abandon active cross-government networks abruptly, risking massive reputational damage, the loss of institutional knowledge, and the collapse of active communities that users were already relying on.

Through rigorous user research and iterative design, my team successfully built and tested a blueprint for self-sustaining communities. Before central project funding concluded, we scaled the initiative to six active cross-government communities comprising over 100 members across 20+ departments and agencies, including:

When the funding cut occurred, I successfully negotiated a one-month emergency extension to execute a responsible off-boarding strategy. During this sprint, we partnered with the central GOV.UK Service Manual team to institutionalize our research into permanent online guidance and blog posts, allowing any civil servant to start a community independently. We also managed stakeholder relations to smoothly transition the six active communities into self-governing entities, several of which continue to operate independently across the UK government today.

• Start a Business (15 departments)
• What to Do When Someone Dies (6 departments)
• Import-Export Goods and Services (10 departments)