When public sector digital, technology or innovation projects happen, we all want to know one important thing: what's the impact?
Technology projects are usually really complicated, require millions of pounds of investment, and take a huge amount of time and organisational resource. Yet measuring their true impact remains one of our biggest challenges today. Without robust evidence tracking both outcomes and social value, we’re missing crucial insights into what has happened, whether it has worked, and what we might learn to inform future projects.
Today, we're really proud to be launching the latest guidebook in our series on evaluating digital projects in the public sector. Our first guide, which resonated across the public sector, focused on the foundations of digital evaluation: why it's important, how to get started, and the importance of a clear Theory of Change.
We hope our last edition can help teams start their evaluation journey, and the second can empower them to take the next step: putting evaluation into practice.
One model that many people have heard of but are unlikely to have used before is the Randomised Controlled Trial (RCT). RCTs involve teams randomly rolling out an intervention, policy or service to some users but not others, which allows them to better understand and isolate its impact. Currently these kinds of trials are common in other policy areas - like the healthcare sector or homelessness policy - but are rarely used for digital and innovation projects. The result is that digital projects often lack the evidence base we see in other sectors.
We believe this needs to change. Digital and innovation projects should benefit from the same standards of evidence as any other major policy intervention. That’s why we’ve created this guide - accessible for digital and innovation teams, as well as economists - to show how technical evaluation methods can work in practice. From RCTs to statistical analysis tools, we cover a strategic view of evaluation approaches. It also helps teams to strengthen their qualitative research approaches, which are often just as important as quantitative tools for understanding the impact of projects.
To make this practical, we've packed the guide with lots of examples of how to put these evaluation methods into practice. Whether you’re working on AI consultation tools, place-based innovation funds, digital skills programmes or cross-government data platforms, you’ll find relevant case studies showing how these methods work in context. Our aim is to show that for almost any project, digital and innovation teams can use a range of different evaluation methods to properly understand their project's impacts.
Join us for the launch event on the 6th November 2024 at our offices in London. We have talks from digital and evaluation leaders from the Cabinet Office, MHCLG and leading UK academic and research institutions.
We hope that this guide - and this event - can help to bring together a community of practitioners interested in digital impact. And that we can all work together to build an evidence base that can shape and guide our digital and innovation projects going forward.
For any further information about the report, our or work on digital evaluation more broadly, please reach out to our Director, Johnny Hugill (johnny@public.io).
You can read the full 'Evaluating Digital Projects' and 'Evaluation Methods' Guidebooks below:
Partners
Key takeaways from a panel of experts from the public sector, academia and private sector advisors, on methods for evaluating digital projects.
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PUBLIC's perspective on Labour's mission to make Britain a clean energy superpower and the challenge of turning political promises into tangible progress.
An innovative solution tailored to support local councils in delivering their digital services.
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Exploring strategies for empowering local authorities.
A practical guide for evaluating digital, data and technology projects in the UK public sector; in this article, the guidebook’s authors, Johnny Hugill and Dr. Steffen Triebel explain its context and objectives.
In the first of our Expertise Spotlight Series, we sit down with Johnny Hugill, Deputy Director of Commercial, Spend & Impact at PUBLIC, to discuss shaping the UK’s landmark Procurement Act, insights into this transformative legislation, and the opportunities for driving innovation in procurement.
PUBLIC has partnered with Ignite Procurement to help public authorities to deliver more intelligent and sustainable procurement.
The Ministry of Defence is the single largest customer for UK industry, committed to £190bn over the next decade. Given this scale and the critical need for capabilities, its vital that MOD procurement is fit-for-purpose. In this blog we explore the current procurement system, its disconnect with SME’s, and how change is coming.
How can the UK government leverage the thriving domestic FinTech sector to improve its own financial systems?
The UK’s trading relationship with the European Union (EU) is back in the headlines with the Government seeking to resolve problems with the Northern Ireland Protocol and restore devolved government to Northern Ireland. But away from the politically-charged headlines, two other elements of the Government’s new trade policy could be particularly impactful, one operational and the other legislative.
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Implementing more sustainable trading and supply chains has become a key priority for modern businesses and governments. And new policies like Germany’s Supply Chain Act have begun to formalise legal requirements for international trading actors. But little work has been done to-date to develop government customs and documentation systems that properly capture, record and monitor this data. This new trend, known as ‘green customs’, presents a major opportunity for the UK Government as it scopes out a vision for a new UK Single Trade Window. In the second article of our Single Trade Window blog series, we take a look at how the UK could make this a reality.
The transformation of supply chain data sharing across sectors is crucial for international trade that is digitised, frictionless, and secure.
