Developing capabilities

Build a team around the problem or opportunity

Make sure your delivery team has the right mix of capability to solve the problem or opportunity.

It's okay to bring different capabilities into the team as they're needed.

Consider what skills you need and how you might up-skill your staff. This helps to keep skills and expertise as a shared resource for your agency.

Consider the mix of people you need to hire to build a team and when to have the right capability within your project team.

Allocate resources after go-live

Consider who you'll need after go-live. Plan to have skilled people that will maintain and improve your product or service.

Attract and keep talent

Plan how to keep the knowledge and skills as people move on. You could do this by:

• creating a team culture where everyone learns from each other and builds capability
• documenting the history of the project along the way. This way anyone new knows what's happened and why things happened a certain way.

When using external services add a need for knowledge sharing in the contract.

Develop and build digital skills

Look for opportunities to build the digital skills and ways of working for people in your team. For example:

• Enroll team members in a digital skills training course. For example, design thinking, user research, content design and so on.
• Have your team subscribe to a digital community of practice.
• Collaborate with stakeholders within and outside government on digital initiatives and best practice.
• Share learning in regular team catch ups.
• Seek opportunities for mentoring or shadowing as part of their learning and development.

This will help you to have the right people in place to share the knowledge to maintain the product or service.

Join a community

• Join the NSW Design System community to connect with digital creators across NSW public sector. It's a place to learn, collaborate and share expertise.
• Find out more about NSW Government Communities of Practice. Connect with people who work in various disciplines.

When to do it

Plan for the skills and capabilities you need at the outset and after your service goes live. Look for ways to build and develop your team's skills to maintain and improve it.

Who's responsible?

Anyone in your agency or team who looks after hiring. They will also give your team access to the tools and resources to deliver better digital services. This could be people like the director of a product team or a product owner.

Why you need to do this

Building the digital capability of existing staff is crucial for delivering digital services. So is developing specialist skills and attracting the right people. It saves money, time and resources that you can direct towards other priorities.