Discovery is the first phase
in delivering a digital service,
and it could be understood
as let's say a scoping phase,
where you create a shared understanding of
what the service is, 
who is it for, why is it important,
and sort of what does
a good service look like,
so that you get a 
sense of the kinds of issues
to start exploring and potentially
testing in the subsequent phase. 
You start by reading lots of information.
At the point by which you get to discovery phase,
any government department will
have thought about its digital strategy,
it will have published it, it will have 
involved a lot of people in defining that vision. 
So what you want to do is familiarise yourself
with what has already been published, 
and what potentially you may not know, so you want to 
understand what are the knowns and what are the unknowns,
and those are the ones
that you want to discover. 
You do it in about, three phases and you roughly
want to take about 3 to 4 weeks to do the whole thing. 
After you've done your research and
preparation, then you want to get the right people in the room
for a series of workshops. You want to
understand by the time you've finished discovering
you want to understand really
clearly who are the users of a service, 
what are the most
important things they need, 
and also how potentially would
you go about developing a new service,
and who would be the people that 
you would need to put in place to start with an alpha. 
You will know the discovery is finished
when you've met 3 or 4 main things. 
So the first thing is you will have a really
clear idea of the scope of the new digital service, 
and you will have a shared understanding
and buy-in from all the senior stakeholders
into what are you actually
trying to prove and achieve.
You will have a pretty good idea of
how you are going to measure success, 
and before that you
will know what success looks like.
And then most of all you will
start thinking about all the different 
people that will need to
be involved in building an alpha. 
Be prepared to challenge any
assumption, and I mean really any assumption
So start asking why, and then
always ask why one more time.
And some really interesting things will come
up, especially as you're trying to understand,
you know, when people articulate
a vision for a service that they want, 
and asking them why
they can't do this today,
well actually not taking
anything for granted will often times
 uncover some pretty
deep-rooted assumptions
that are quite
important and often times if
not challenged would
potentially derail the project
 because you have
started off the wrong track. 
