Making Digital Government Scalable

Working on a project of this size and scope, and through an extending period of restructuring presented many challenges.
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With reporting lines tangled or severed, loss of domain knowledge, flagging motivation, and being in the limelight, it was crucial to keep a level head and work alongside decision-makers to align, strategise and execute.
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Additionally, working with the sheer amount of data (components-wise) and ensuring that the design team was able to visualise the end goal, making decisions and creating artefacts that stood up to interrogation, was a looming challenge that required consistent vigilance and effort.

1. Standardisation Doesn’t Mean Rigidity, It’s a Foundation for Agility
When we began standardising components, some stakeholders feared it would stifle creativity or flexibility across different agencies. What we learned is the opposite: well-designed standards actually unlock creativity by removing low-level decision-making and allowing teams to focus on real problem-solving.

2. Design Systems Are Business Tools, Not Just Design Tool
This project reinforced that design systems aren’t about visual consistency alone—they’re about scaling expertise, reducing cost, and removing friction from delivery. We saw how reusable components lowered onboarding time for new designers and reduced dependencies on specialist knowledge.

3. Collaboration Beats Consensus
In a cross-functional environment like government, perfect consensus is rare—and often unnecessary. The turning point was realising that alignment doesn’t mean agreement on everything, but rather shared ownership of a direction. Designing the ratification process to invite critique while protecting momentum was key.

1. Evolving the System into a Design Platform
With the component library and transaction templates in place, the next opportunity is to turn TaPaaS into a design platform, not just a design system. That means enabling designers, developers, and product owners to self-serve configurations, preview builds, and collaborate without starting from scratch every time.

2. Layering in Data and Performance Metrics
To ensure the system remains useful and relevant, we’ll need to integrate feedback loops. This includes tracking component usage, adoption rates across agencies, and tying design performance to business metrics like completion rates and support tickets.

3. Cross-Agency Adoption Strategy
Now that the core is built, expanding TaPaaS into more agencies will require change management, training, and support infrastructure. We’ll need a dedicated onboarding framework, documentation, and clear communication of the value proposition, particularly for smaller agencies with limited digital capability.

4. Governance Without Bottlenecks
As more teams adopt the system, governance must evolve. A lightweight review framework, periodic design councils, and clear contribution models will help us maintain quality and consistency without becoming a bottleneck.

5. Improving Accessibility from the Start
Accessibility was a core part of our standards, but there’s always more to do. In future iterations, we want to build in accessibility testing and validation at the component level, using tooling that helps catch issues early and often.

6. Templating End-to-End Journeys
Right now, we’ve templated individual transactions. The next frontier is composing those transactions into full user journeys e.g., life events, business registrations, licensing processes. That requires smart orchestration, progressive disclosure patterns, and continuity of context.

7. Bridging Design and Development More Seamlessly
Though we’ve built handoff-ready documentation, there’s more to explore in bridging the gap between design files and front-end implementation, possibly through component libraries in code (e.g. Storybook, Figma Tokens, or design-to-code pipelines).