Week notes

20 December – Thanks for all the support

The team is so ready for a break and this week note is simply a big thank you to all the wonderful people out there who have helped us this year. 

Our amazing Advisory Board have given us their valuable time to share their ideas and guide our work. You can see our Advisory Board members here:

Our board members

We’ve conducted weekly interviews with New Zealand businesses up and down the country who freely gave 15 or 30 minutes of their busy days to share their experience using Business Connect. The insights we get from these interviews help us understand how we can improve our platform and services.

There have been about 25 user testing sessions with lovely government folk who all gave up an hour of their time to try FormBuilder and help us make it more usable for non-technical people.

The people we have worked with to publish forms this year have pushed us to deliver, given us feedback and had confidence in our ability to host their service. Thank you for your partnership and trust!

We regularly meet with experts in security, accessibility and the inner workings of government like the Web Standards team, the crew at the Digital Public Service and Ministry of Business, Innovation, and Employment cyber-security. Thank you for your help throughout the year.

We also interact with teams delivering forms in governments abroad. Ngā mihi to the GOV.UK Forms team, FormSG in Singapore and GC Forms in Canada. 

It was lovely to receive some positive feedback from a government team this week on their latest forms. I’ll share it here because it makes us feel proud so why not!

“From our clients, they found that the portal is easy to access, and the forms are clear and simple to fill in. The process is super-efficient and transparent.

“From our teams, 80% response rate by the reporting due date, and then 95% response rate achieved after 1 day past the due date. The good portion of quality data received on time has helped our teams on contract management and reporting. 

“Thank you for your excellent work, support and guidance, Business Connect Team, and I am looking forward to working closely with you again in the new year.”

We’re excited for what 2025 will bring and look forward to continuing to work with good people who continue to find ways to make it easier for New Zealanders to deal with government.

Many happy returns from the Business Connect team

13 December – First form without a login goes live

Government service teams now have the option to create forms that can be filled in without an account creation or log in needed.

It’s been great to work alongside the Intellectual Property Office (IPONZ) to publish their form for inventors and creators who want to take their prototypes to trade shows, but still have their ideas protected.

This form is accessed by customers using a link on the IPONZ website. The form pop ups immediately and can be completed and submitted straight away.

We hope this will be the first of many forms in 2025, if you have a single-page form you’d like to digitise please email us to receive a link to FormBuilder and start building!

info@businessconnect.govt.nz

Chloe, Growth Lead

6 December – And it's live! Try out FormBuilder now

I’m delighted to announce that FormBuilder.govt is now available at the click of a button.

Try out the government’s form-building tool and tell us what you think. It’s instantly available with no login required, all you need to do is email us and you’ll receive the link immediately.

We’re trying to take the hassle out of creating and publishing government forms. The tool is designed for non-technical users and generates more accessible forms that deliver better quality data. It’s available to help you to get forms online, faster.

Next year we’ll do a formal launch, but in the meantime, we’d like to invite you to put it to the test. The team will get in touch to hear any feedback you may have to help us iron out any kinks and ensure the tool meets your needs to create smart online forms for your customers.

If you have a business-facing form that would benefit from being digitised, FormBuilder is here to help.

info@businessconnect.govt.nz

Tian, Product Owner 

29 November – Service Modernisation Roadmap

I’m pleased that FormBuilder has been included on Hon Minister Collins’ Service Modernisation Roadmap.

It’s in the ‘reusable digital components’ category which recognises the value our tool has for NZ Government in more efficiently creating online services for NZ businesses.

Paul James, Government Chief Digital Officer, has published the roadmap on Digital.govt.nz and commented, “We’ve worked with The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) to share the good work they’re doing with Business Connect and FormBuilder, a ‘no code’ form digitisation tool that helps agencies deliver better services to businesses.

“We want to see MBIE become the hub for government’s business services ecosystem and we’re pleased to be able to highlight and encourage agencies to leverage MBIE’s work.”

You can find the Service Modernisation Roadmap and Paul James’ commentary at the link below.

Delivering a unified customer service experience for digital government services(external link) — NZ digital government

Daryl, Director

22 November – Seal of approval for FormBuilder 

As the Test Lead for Business Connect and FormBuilder I’m responsible for the strategy and deliverables that make sure our platforms always meet requirements and give a great user experience.

My focus in the last week has been on testing our new FormBuilder tool from end to end. This means I created some forms, then took those forms and put them through our environments to get them published and tested all the way along. 

I found a few problems and suggested some improvements. This team is fast. They turn everything around in hours and days so I could get back in and retest. 

Today I was delighted to be able to give FormBuilder my seal of approval. All the evidence points to the fact that if you build a form with this tool and then follow our standard procedures and checks for publishing that form, it will perform as expected once it is live.

It’s stable and works as expected. I was truly impressed when I was building my forms, it’s genuinely easy to use and gives a great result. It has enough guardrails you can’t break it, but also allows plenty of flexibility to design a form that will suit a wide range of scenarios.

There’s likely to be more improvements needed or small issues that need to be addressed, but even now this product is really good. I’m looking forward to people from other agencies getting their hands on it and giving it a try. It’s coming very soon!

Dion, Test Lead

15 November – Sharing is caring at Product Aotearoa Conference

I attended a conference with about three or four hundred other product professionals run by Product Aotearoa. It was great to be with people who have similar roles to mine and reassuring that others are facing the same kinds of challenges.

I was surprised by the common ground in product management between central government and the private sector. The conference reminded me of some fundamental tools and frameworks and helped refocus me on what I should be doing in my role.

It was a nice way to re-energise at the end of the year and get excited for 2025.

Listening to personal stories and experiences from the speakers provided valuable lessons and takeaways. Overall, it was a fantastic day. I made new connections and enjoyed spending time with people from various companies around Wellington and New Zealand.

Shelley, Product Manager

8 November – FormBuilder success metrics

We’re starting to get excited about the prospect of having government people use the new version of our FormBuilder tool. This tool addresses many of the pain points reported in using the FormBuilder we tested earlier in the year.

As we think about how we’re measure usage of the tool, I’m keen to identify leading indicators that show people are engaging with it in a way that goes beyond just trying it out. I want to see what we can track that will give us a good idea of how many people are using the tool seriously and considering publishing a government form.

We have a few angles to pursue. We’ll look at how often someone refreshes their preview in one session. The presumption is that many refreshes mean they are building in earnest and busily iterating their form. 

We can also track how many times forms are downloaded and saved. How often people are emailing their form to a colleague and obviously how long they spend interacting with the tool. 

We’re forming some hypotheses about what we’ll see once the new tool is live. It’s designed to support the increased digitisation of government forms so the hope is that our leading indicators will give a true reflection and show plenty of forms coming through for publication.

Shelley, Product Manager

1 November – Analytics to support our customers

During the week I caught an interesting exchange in the customer support channel for Business Connect. A business customer gave us feedback that the “website kept crashing”. 

We offer the opportunity for customers to rate us out of 10 and leave a comment. This feedback is a big part of how we keep improving. We wanted to investigate, but it was quite a generic comment.

Our support team were trying to do some digging to see if anything obvious was going wrong but were not having any luck.

We use MouseFlow to better understand our users’ needs. MouseFlow is an analytics platform that helps us better understand our users’ behaviour. For example, how much time they spend on which pages, which links they choose to click, and their pain points. This enables us to improve and maintain our service with user feedback.

One of the team jumped onto MouseFlow to see if it could shed some light and tracked down the relevant session including a view of their journey on the platform! That showed a payment gateway outside Business Connect was causing the problem and saved our support team a ton of time in trying to solve the mystery by going down unnecessary rabbit holes of investigation.

It’s an unexpected benefit of having this level of analytics across Business Connect and just shows what a difference it can make in giving us insights into the online experience.

Shelley, Product Manager

25 October – Customers as champions

This week we’ve seen the fifth form go live for the Ministry for Housing and Urban Development (HUD). 

Working with the team at HUD has been a dream partnership. It’s probably the quickest and easiest delivery we’ve ever done and Radley Neethling is a big part of that! 

Radley is a Business Solutions Architect for HUD who has been busily building his own forms using FormBuilder. He even joined me in presenting to the Small Agencies Clinic last week. This is a great network run by Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) to give colleagues from smaller agencies a forum to share and learn. 

Radley shared his story about how and why HUD came to work with us and use FormBuilder. 

He emphasised the biggest benefits as the service being centrally funded and the speed at which they moved through the delivery process with help from the Business Connect team.

“It's paid for, security checked, all done. All you've got to do is get on and build the forms. Jump on now, you'll have a form tomorrow and next week it'll be published.”

Needless to say his comments to the Small Agencies Clinic had us blushing, we couldn't ask for a happier customer!

Chloe, Growth Lead

18 October – Saving your work

This week I was happy to see something special in our release. 

Our end users were being asked to write long answers for a new service and some of them were losing their work due to timeout or save not running on the partially completed screen.

We’ve all felt that sinking feeling when the computer crashes and you wonder if you hit save. The pain when you get back in there and realise all your work is gone.

The team immediately prioritised some discovery on how we could do better. 

We had a couple of options for how to solve this. We started down one path with a time-based repeating auto-save. This would auto-save every 10 seconds for example. We quickly changed tack and ran with a different solution when we realised that might put unnecessary strain on the system by auto-saving too often.

Business Connect now auto-saves each time the focus moves to the next field, auto-saves after 50 minutes of inactivity, presents a timeout warning, then after 60 minutes times out and takes users to the login screen.

This new save functionality will give end users confidence that their hard work will be safe and that they can draft their answers in Business Connect without fear of losing it all.

Tian, Product Owner

11 October – Quarterly planning

The team has been busy with quarterly planning this week. Every quarter we line up our overall objective for the next 3 months and then create objectives for each part of our team. 

This quarter our overall objective is – Be ready for demand in 2025. We have 3 smaller objectives for our growth, product and delivery areas sitting under that one.

Previously we’ve all come together as one big group for this planning process. This quarter I wanted to see how it might work if we were to hand the objectives to each team so they could draft their own key results and propose some big rocks.

The smaller workshops were great, with plenty of ideas and challenges flying around. It’s a good opportunity for teams to zoom out and understand where their work fits in.

We’re going to take the work the 3 squads produced and refine that into our Objectives and Key results. Off the back of this process, we’ll publish an updated roadmap on our website soon.

Shelley, Product Manager

4 October – Chief information Officer (CIO) Forum

This week I was pleased to be invited to present at the CIO Forum convened by DIA. It was a chance to give a short explanation of FormBuilder and our progress to date and it was nice to have strong support from Ann Marie Cavanagh, Deputy Chief Executive for Digital Public Service at DIA.

I also had the benefit of hearing about some other interesting initiatives including the Centre for Data Ethics at Statistics NZ and examples of Artifical Intelligence (AI) being explored to help both internal teams and external users.

It’s always encouraging to hear about the innovative work going on across government.

Shelley, Product Manager

27 September – New FormBuilder getting closer

We’re preparing for the next quarter and this week we’ve been trying to get clear about what’s required to make our newer, simpler version of FormBuilder available for widespread use.

The dream is to point government teams at the tool and see what forms they can create for their agencies. The forms will give NZ businesses a consistent, accessible online channel for services that up until now have only had essentially paper-based forms like word documents or PDFs.

The support we’ve had from government people for user testing and in attending our webinars is a good sign that people will grab the tool and get busy building forms.

This week’s FormBuilder webinar had participants from Inland Revenue, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment and Ministry for Primary Industries. What a great group it was! We had so many questions coming in on the chat, it was hard to keep up.

That’s the whole point of the webinars, so make sure if you do attend, you ask loads of questions.

Shelley, Product Manager

20 September – Customer interview

This week I spoke to the CEO of a small biotech company about his experience in using Business Connect to apply for a government service.

As always, I was grateful for the time he gave me. There’s nothing better than hearing first hand what it’s like to use the platform and the challenges business owners and administrators face.

The 3 things that Paul pointed out as taking him time or having room for improvement were around ability to save, time we indicate it will take to complete the form and a tricky spreadsheet template he was required to attach.

It was disappointing to hear that the platform timed out and Paul lost some work. He said that he decided to draft his answers in Word to avoid that happening again. I’m hoping to post a bit of good news about this in the next few weeks, as this is not something we want people to have to put up with.

On the positive side, he said he was surprised by the pre-population of the form through his use of the New Zealand Business Number. He said it saved him time.

“It picked it up and put the name of the company in and filled in the directors automatically. I thought that was cool.”

These interviews are part of how we find the right things to work on, whether new features or improving what’s already there.

Shelley, Product Manager

13 September – Service metrics for government teams

This week I’ve been pulling together a set of metrics we’re planning to share with the government teams using Business Connect. We want to start regularly sharing this information, but we’re starting relatively small and will ask for feedback before potentially expanding.

The first round of quarterly service metrics will include stats on total submissions, completion rates, satisfaction and number of customer interviews completed for the service. This will help service providers get a better idea of the performance of their form and may highlight areas of improvement for them too.

I’m interested to see what responses we get from teams once they’ve had a chance to review the metrics in October.

Shelley, Product Manager

6 September – Conference roundtable chats

I went along to Te Papa in the gale force wind for Future of NZ Government Summit 2024 late last week.

I was hosting a roundtable discussion with Mark Horgan, the Chief Advisor to Ministry of Educations Chief Digital Officer. Our topic was Ease of Interaction: How Government is Transforming Service Delivery.

We wanted to start with a bit of a thought exercise. We got participants to use a magic wand to whip up the most important thing to help progress toward unified service delivery.

The 4 roundtable conversations all reinforced each other in terms of the wishes people were making.

The most common magic spells cast were for a unique identifier, to make it easier to share data, for a centrally provided government tech stack and desire for alignment on language and what is ‘good enough’.

There were a few who highlighted the need for a clear strategy that stands the test of time, a mindset shift and a funding regime that drives the choices we know we need for unified service delivery.

In each conversation participants were seeking to give those interacting with government a consistent, inclusive experience and hopefully, ‘one place to go’.

There were lots of observations around how well we, as government, respond in times of emergency. One table wondered how to artificially create that environment and another proposed a benevolent dictator to get us where we need to be!

Here are some ideas about what happens in a crisis that allows us to achieve so much collaboratively:

1. Forces people to make decisions
2. No option to ‘do nothing’
3. More centralised management
4. Everyone has the same goal and priorities
5. Egos go out the window
6. More willingness to approve expenditure to get it done
7. There is CLARITY about what is good enough and what is nebulous/unimportant
8. Shared language.

It was great to chat and share with people from a wide range of roles and agencies.

Shelley, Product Manager

30 August – Heartfelt endorsement from Ministry of Housing and Urban Development 

This week the team worked alongside the Ministry of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to publish four of their forms on Business Connect.  
 
The forms make it easier for Māori organisations to regularly report back to the agency on the use and outcomes of the funding they have been granted.   
 
Radley Neethling, Business Solutions Architect at HUD has been a champion user on FormBuilder, creating all these forms himself with guidance from the Business Connect team and led the delivery from HUD’s side.   
 
I’ve really enjoyed working with Radley and was touched by an email he sent me today. I feel proud of the mahi tahi across our two teams and organisations.   
 
“I am writing this endorsement to express my utmost satisfaction and appreciation for the exceptional services provided by the Business Connect team. Our partnership will significantly improve our service delivery processes, creating a seamless experience for both our team and customers”. 
  
“From the beginning, FormBuilder's customisable and user-friendly interface allowed us to effortlessly design and implement forms tailored to our specific needs. The platform's advanced features, such as conditional logic and real-time validation, will enable us to collect accurate data efficiently, reducing errors and saving valuable time”.  
  
“In addition, the expert team at Business Connect guided us through the entire process, ensuring a smooth transition and facilitating seamless communication. The platform's automation features will allow us to focus on what truly matters - providing top-notch services to our customers”.  
  
“The partnership between HUD and Business Connect has truly been a testament to the power of collaboration and innovation. Our experience has been nothing short of exceptional, and I am confident that the HUD use case will further demonstrate the effectiveness and ease of delivery that these platforms provide”.  
 
It felt great to share this feedback with the team, and to report that Radley is already starting work on the next form he’d like to publish! 
  
Chloe, Growth Lead 

23 August – New service announcement

After a lot of hard work from both teams this week we published a new service for Kānoa, the Regional Economic Development & Investment Unit.

The application form for the Regional Infrastructure Fund is now available on Business Connect.

The $1.2b fund delivers on the Government’s promise to address the regional infrastructure deficit. It will help boost the New Zealand economy, increase regional prosperity, and create jobs.

We enjoyed collaborating with the Kānoa team to launch this service and playing a part in improving their customers’ digital journey.

Chloe, Growth Lead

16 August – User testing with experts

This week we were really chuffed to have help from some Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment digital experts. We put out a call for people to road test our new version of FormBuilder and were hoping for a quick turnaround.

The response was so heartening, with five folk volunteering their time to have a play with the tool and then giving us their feedback that same week.

We sat down with them and were blown away by the level of attention and energy they’d put into the task. The feedback was thoughtful and comprehensive. It came at the perfect time and has allowed us to make some changes that we’ll be testing again shortly. 

We’d like to get a bit of a rolling maul of testing happening, so we’ll be continuously recruiting. Let us know if you like to add your name to the list! It’s just a 40-minute session with a couple of the team and will help us a lot.

Susan, Principal Service Designer

9 August – Trust to innovate GOVIS conference

I got the chance to speak at the GOVIS conference in Wellington this week.

The theme of the conference was inspired by the need for the public service to face increasingly complex and demanding challenges, with limited resources to meet them. The only way forward is to innovate more, and the organisers believe we need to be trusted to do this and take some risks.

The Hon Judith Collins opened the event in her capacity as Minister for Digitising Government and emphasised the productivity benefits of digitisation. 

The most common points across all the speakers on the day were around the importance of trust and transparency, the value of digital public infrastructure and need to question how we assess risk.

I spoke about how using a shared government product like FormBuilder can save time and money. I tried to highlight FormBuilder’s potential as digital government infrastructure. That is, something that we build once and use many times. 

Great to chat with colleagues from across government and be reminded that there are many people working on this conundrum of digitising government.

If you think your team could benefit from using FormBuilder for an MBIE service, we’re keen to hear from you on hello@businessconnect.govt.nz

Shelley, Product Manager

2 August – Working with Kānoa – Regional Economic Development and Investment Unit

This week we’ve been setting the Kānoa team up to test a new form they’ve created with us.

What’s interesting with this one is that a wider group than usual have been teed up to test it. While it’s more work to collate feedback, it’s a nice way for Kānoa to help its stakeholders understand what’s coming.

Next week we’ll be reviewing the feedback with Kānoa and implementing the changes into the form.

It’s been great working with a team that has been so engaged with not only the form building side but also the delivery process of publishing a service.

Chloe, Growth Lead

26 July – Testing the standalone builder

Following all the feedback from our testing earlier in the year we now have our next version of the FormBuilder tool ready to test.

In response to what we heard, we’re making it available via a link so government users can get straight to it without a tricky login process. Hence the ‘standalone’ part!

We have also stripped out a lot of the noise from the user interface and reduced the options when configuring the fields themselves.

Those testing the builder will see they’re unable to delete elements that are essential for the form to work and won’t have access to field types that have not been tested for security and accessibility.

This quarter we’d love to get user feedback from those in government with experience of form building tools to see how we measure up. If you’d like to test our next version of FormBuilder please let us know.

Shelley, Product Manager

19 July – Completion rates

I’ve spent some time reviewing and comparing the completion rates across different services on the Business Connect platform. We have 26 services live right now and all of them have completion rates over 50%.

We’re tracking how many forms have been started and how many have been submitted. It’s clear to see that the shorter forms or those with less additional evidence required have higher completion rates. We also notice those that use plain language and have a reading age around 12 years also see higher completion rates.

We look forward to using field level analytics to identify where people are abandoning forms and try to help increase those completion rates.

Shelley, Product Manager

12 July – Service analytics

This week I was glad to hear about how well received our service dashboard was by New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. We’re able to provide a point in time picture of how the service is being used, that previously would have been impossible without the hard work of our data expert.

We can present the total number of forms started and the number submitted for a completion rate. 

We can also show customer satisfaction levels, verbatim comments from end users and how volumes are tracking over time.

It will be great to see how agencies and councils use this information and how we can add to it in time.

Shelley, Product Manager

5 July – Planning our work for winter

Far from going into hibernation, the team agreed some ambitious objectives at our quarterly planning session this week.

Our planning runs for two hours and is quite high level. We discuss and agree our objectives, key results and potential big rocks. This gives each squad licence to work on the most important things to achieve these outcomes and more detailed planning can come at that squad level.  

We look back to move forward and it was interesting to notice which things we hadn’t achieved over the last three months. What did we choose to spend our time on instead? Are we prioritising our agreed goals enough? How often are we talking about progress?

My big takeaway from the last quarter was that we need about 10 leads from government teams for every form published. This means we must generate far greater awareness of what we can offer to help grow the use of FormBuilder.

Alongside increasing awareness, our overriding goal for this next quarter is testing our simplified builder – created from what we’ve learned with FormBuilder to date. We’re keen to move toward allowing government people to self-serve to create their digital services. This is the next step in that process.

If anyone reading wants to take a look, build a form and give us feedback then please get in touch!

Shelley, Product Manager

21 June – Progress on our new prototype

Earlier in the year we set a goal to iterate from our learnings around the current FormBuilder tool. We want to explore an improved version of FormBuilder to provide a north star. A better and simpler builder that we could test and refine.

We took what we learned from user testing and established that we wanted to solve the following problems:

• Users not able to easily produce viable forms
• User couldn’t self serve to fix issues without our intervention
• Functions and logic were too advanced for the average user
• A disjointed experience, around building, reviewing and publishing
• Form templates were too hard to understand.

We hope our new prototype will alleviate these problems through:

• A prebuilt form template, where it guarantees success in form creation
• Accessibility features to empower keyboard users to be able to build a form
• Custom resources from the design system, no configuration required from builders
• A preview function at the click of a button
• Save your progress by storing the form JSON and continue with your form by loading into back the tool.

We’ve developed a clear product vision of what key features and functions we need to explore, but now we want to test all of this!

In Q3 we’ll be testing the prototype with the DIA Web Standards team and with government people who are interested and want to contribute.

Tian, Product Owner

14 June – Our first ‘Form as a link’ form

The big achievement this week has been our very first form for unauthenticated users going live. We’ve been calling it a form as a link.

Until now we’ve published all forms on the Business Connect platform, which means they sit behind a login. This new way to host lets you the publish your government forms so people can simply access your form via a simple URL with all the same accessibility, security and analytics.

And security has been the big emphasis over the past few weeks. The team has been working closely with MBIE Cyber Security to make sure that we’ve mitigated any risks and satisfied government security requirements.

In choosing to use this hosting option, government teams have to take responsibility for their privacy assessment to make sure it’s appropriate for their form.

Now we want to work with some more teams who are interested in digitising these kinds of simple forms. We’re confident we offer the features most teams will need and using this government digital product is free!

Shelley, Product Manager

7 June – Investing in user testing

This week we’ve kicked off a piece of work with Access Advisors to run some user testing on our behalf with the disabled community.

I’m so pleased we are making this investment to understand how our government digital product is meeting user needs.

To date we’ve focused on technical adherence to WCAG2.2, an internationally recognised standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). We still have work to do to reach AA level but are very close which is something the team is incredibly proud of.

This round of user testing will give us insights into the personal experience of interacting with our platform and forms. In providing a shared platform to government we want to give those teams responsible for delivering services confidence that our product meets NZ Web Standards for usability and accessibility.

It will be fascinating to see what recommendations come from this user testing. I’m expecting some things we haven’t thought of yet, which is the beauty of customer feedback!

Tian, Product Owner

31 May – Finding ways to help

This week I’ve been thinking about the teams who are seeking our help and the kinds of services they are trying to deliver. Often we receive enquiries from teams who have slightly more complex forms or a niche requirement that stops them being able to use basic online form functionality.

These services can be lower volume and therefore aren’t a priority for spinning up a specific project and spending budget to deliver a digital solution. 

It’s a tricky space, because we absolutely want to be able to help but equally, we have to be careful about investing in custom features that won’t be reusable.

We’ll discuss what we can and can’t deliver and really the decision lies with the service owner as to whether they can compromise or find a way to reimagine the service to make it possible. If they’re not able to do that, they have few if any options other than a paper-based approach or a form built in Excel.

There’s certainly a need in this space and we’ll keep trying to do as much as we can. When we deliver together in the spirit of compromise and partnership, the benefits for end users are great.

Shelley, Product Manger

24 May – Preparing for launch

This week the team has been busily testing and checking our first form for unauthenticated users to make sure it meets security requirements and is working faultlessly.

Up until now, all our forms have been published on the Business Connect platform. Users need to register for the platform with RealMe to start filling in the form.

It’s exciting to be able to deliver a whole new range of forms that don’t make sense behind a login. Now we can publish registrations of interest, feedback or enquiry forms that will pop up in a browser when someone clicks the link on a government website.

I’m grateful to the Regional Business Partners Network team for working with us on this. They have been our guinea pigs and so accommodating in terms of our timing. It makes a world of difference to deliver a new feature alongside a customer with real world requirements.

By using a common approach to deliver these kinds of forms, we can help users have a familiar experience across different agencies while also saving government time and money.

I’m looking forward to their form going live next week!

Tian, Product Owner

17 May – Global Accessibility Awareness Day

This week it was Global Accessibility Awareness Day on the 16th and I attended the Government Digital Accessibility Forum convened by Department of Internal Affairs. 

It was a good reminder of how much I have left to learn in this area. The more you look, the more you find! The stories and case studies were inspiring and have given our team a few ideas and challenged us too.

There were more than 200 participants and it was great to see people in government flying the flag. 

As I prepare to give a short talk at the Digital Accessibility Discussion Group run by the Ministry for Social Development next week, I became acutely aware of the inaccessible nature of my current slide deck. 

I’m also presenting at a government digital summit next week and I have slides with lots of content that will be entirely inaccessible for anyone in the audience with low vision. I was so impressed with Benni Eustace’s presentation and their clear articulation of the work on NZ Transport Agency’s new app. I’ll try to work some of their techniques into my presentation.

There’s so much to learn and I’m feeling lucky to be surrounded by knowledgeable and generous people in New Zealand Govt who are willing to share.

Shelley, Product Manager

10 May – Business owners generous with their time

As I sat down at the computer to jump on a call with a business owner, I was struck at how incredible it is that people are willing to take time out to talk to me each week.

Based up in Whangarei, this person was squeezing me in between two clients on a typically busy day. Despite this, she was so open to all my questions. She shared with me a bit about her business and her role. She talked through her experience using Business Connect step by step and answered all my probably ignorant questions about her industry.

We spent 20 minutes talking, with me taking copious notes and at the end she graciously thanked me! I’m now typing up my notes to pass on to the agency that manages the service she interacted with and pulling out some things that we might be able to improve.

These interviews help fill in the gaps between our analytics and in-platform feedback. This is the context that let’s us see the bigger picture, gives us empathy and a glimpse of the real-world experience of going through these government processes.

This week I’ve also been reviewing the verbatim feedback we received through the platform in April. There are more than 70 comments which represent a gold mine in terms of what we’re doing well and what is frustrating people. 

Having direct contact with users informs our future work and helps us prioritise the things that will help business owners and administrators the most.

Shelley, Product Manager

3 May – Our journey to enhance inclusivity with automation testing

At Business Connect, we are committed to creating a platform that is accessible to everyone. As part of this effort, we have embarked on a journey to integrate accessibility automation testing into our development cycle. We are pleased to share our progress so far and the benefits we have seen. 

Our goal is to ensure that our platform is usable by everyone, regardless of their abilities. We recognised the importance of automation testing in achieving this goal. By adding automated accessibility testing to our development cycle, we are able to:

• Reduce the time and effort required for manual testing
• Identify accessibility issues earlier in the development cycle
• Improve compliance with accessibility standards (WCAG 2.1)
• Improve the user experience for all users.

While we are still on this journey, we are encouraged by the progress we have made and the improvements we have seen in the accessibility of our platform. We look forward to continuing to explore advanced features of automated accessibility testing to further improve the inclusivity of the Business Connect platform. 

By sharing our journey, I hope that we inspire others to prioritise digital accessibility and explore the benefits of automation testing. Together we can create a more inclusive digital landscape.

Anastasia, Senior Test Analyst

26 April – Listening out for opportunities

I regularly meet with service teams who want to know more about FormBuilder to help them figure out if it’s the right tool for them. I hear the same 2 questions over and over again:

1. Can FormBuilder be used for citizen-facing forms?
2. Is there an option to provide forms that don’t sit behind a log in?

Our conversations with teams across government suggest there’s a real need for help in government service delivery for citizen-facing services. Our restriction to business-facing services is often a barrier to councils and agencies using FormBuilder as they’d prefer something that can serve all their customers.   

While we’re not yet able to widen the net to citizen-facing forms, we do have a more exciting answer for the second question. Soon, we’ll be launching a new way of hosting government forms ‘as a link’ on the council/agency’s website.

The form will open in a new browser tab, ready to be completed, without the user having to log in. We anticipate this feature opening up FormBuilder to be used for more government services and form types.

As a team, we have some ideas of what types of forms will be fit for purpose ‘as a link’, e.g., surveys and complaints. We also have a long list of service teams we’ve spoken to who have told us about the types of forms they are looking to deliver. Last week I sat down and tallied up the most popular form requests. It was really helpful to have a visual representation of this to more easily measure areas of interest.

One surprising example of a commonly requested form type is surveys with an educational purpose. We’ve had 4 service teams from different central agencies communicate the need for surveys that provide the users with insights, suggested actions or a score depending on how they answered.

We’ll be keeping our ears open for other ideas from government teams on how a ‘form as a link’ could be used.

Chloe, Senior Advisor

19 April – Problem solving is a team sport

This week I watched the team do a piece of problem solving on my behalf and was blown away by the speed of the response.

Last week I asked them to find more than one simple solution to the following problem we are encountering with a service. The challenge was “how might we avoid a business having to re-enter some key information?”

Our team principles push us toward building things that are generic and reusable. With this in the mind the team took as wide a frame as possible when it came to brainstorming solutions.

This week I sat down to review the 3 options they had agreed to put forward. They were laid out clearly and the benefits in taking a multi-disciplinary approach to create and assess them were obvious.

For me, being able to respond to a client agency within a week and a half of this question being raised helps keep momentum up and show that we move quickly. We don’t sit on things while we try and get them perfect, we take our ideas and test them.

Shelley, Product Manager

12 April – Bring on the forms, let’s build!

This week in a meeting I introduced myself as a service designer and that got me thinking about how much my role has changed within the team.

For the last 7 or so months I’ve been working as an Advisor on FormBuilder.govt. That means I’ve been building forms, applying our patterns, working with agencies and councils and have delivered multiple services.

That feels kind of amazing and I’m so happy that the work I’m doing is making businesses interactions with government easier. But what really makes me happy is how much I’ve learnt over the last 7 months.

I came into the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment with roughly 12 years of customer service under my belt ready to take on something new and learn as much as I can. Now I work within the Service Design space and I’m loving it. I’m being mentored by experienced colleagues and I feel like I’m quickly becoming an expert with FormBuilder. I get a kick out of discovering new and quicker ways to do a build every time a form comes across my desk.

Josh – Advisor, FormBuilder.govt 

5 April – New quarter, new objectives!

This week the whole team got together for quarterly planning. I always feel that towards the end of the quarter we’re slightly diverging from each other onto different tracks and the session feels like it’s just in time to get us all back on the same page.

We worked in groups to create our next set of objectives across 4 different work areas. Our FormBuilder product, growth and marketing, service delivery and operations.

We’re still in that phase where we need to balance moving the product forward based on what we’ve learned and publishing new digital services on behalf of government service teams.

Where we’ve landed for April to July is that we’ll provide more hands-on support for government builders using FormBuilder to help them publish services. We’ll also work to provide a demo version of FormBuilder that will have 2 main benefits.

Firstly, it gives people in government a look at the builder without it being behind a login. This means less work for our team and more people get to play with the tool.

Secondly, we can start to get feedback quickly on a simpler builder with only the most useful features and a more intuitive user interface.

The other big focus for the quarter will be our new option for hosting forms. Our sole hosting option until now has been the Business Connect platform, a one-stop-shop for NZ businesses. In this quarter we’re looking forward to our first form published ‘as-a-link’. This means the end user can access the form without needing to log in. The form will pop up in a new browser, ready to be completed.

I hope this feature will mean more teams can use FormBuilder for their services, we’re looking forward to seeing what new opportunities this creates. We’ll have an update at the next FormBuilder webinar on 24th April.

Register on the homepage and we’ll see you there.

Shelley, Product Manager

29 March – Reflections on FormBuilder trial

This week we presented progress and learning to our Advisory Board. Every quarter this group meets to offer us ideas and guidance as we’ve worked to be the fastest way to deliver great government digital services. 

The Advisory Board includes representatives from the international trade, farming, hospitality and tech sectors along with senior people from central and local government.

The sessions come right before quarterly planning and always offer a different perspective to consider. Given how close we all are to this work, it’s vital to have people outside the team challenge us and contribute.

Over the last quarter we’ve run an experiment to see what happens when we leave government people to try FormBuilder without much help from our team. As we outlined for the Advisory Board, we’ve had to concede that there are some real barriers to builders independently producing a form that could be published onto the Business Connect platform.

There are 3 main reasons and they give us some clear direction on what we need to do:

1. The tool is too technical and advanced for an average user. When people log in for the first time they feel overwhelmed. The page is quite cluttered and presents a huge range of functionality, much of which we don’t really want people to use.
2. It’s hard for people to translate their service into the pattern we use on the Business Connect platform. The pattern consists of commons screens that bookend a service and we know from research that those using the platform find the pattern easy to use and familiar. However, those building forms often try to replicate their PDF and get stuck.
3. The experience using our products is fragmented and it doesn’t support builders to flow through a process and publish a form. The builder, form preview and support material are in 3 totally different places with different logins. Not ideal! 

Most of this is because we want to get something into peoples’ hands as early as possible. It’s better to learn and iterate the product over time than try and build the perfect experience out of the gate. 

As we shared what we’ve learned with the Advisory Board it felt good to be able to honestly reflect as a group and get input to help chart our next steps. Our full team quarterly planning session is next week and I’m always eager to see what the team comes up with.

Shelley, Product Manager

22 March – Support from DIA Web Standards

This week, collaborating with the DIA Web Standards team was incredibly beneficial. They offered not only support and guidance but also technical advice based on best practices. They're committed to sharing success stories, inspiring us to excel in accessibility with FormBuilder.

The Web Standards team will complete a thorough assessment of accessibility barriers for government people using FormBuilder, aiming to help us pinpoint areas for improvement and implement solutions.

We have a goal that FormBuilder is a fully accessible government tool and as we see uptake across government we will continue to prioritise accessibility. It’s great to get help on how we make the builder more inclusive and show progress based on need.

The team is also considering who they might connect us with in government to learn from others’ experiences and strengthen our efforts. They mentioned agencies like Waka Kotahi and Stats NZ, who are doing great work around accessibility.

With the DIA's support, we're confident in overcoming obstacles, embracing innovation, and creating a more inclusive digital future for New Zealand.

Tian Liu, Product Owner

15 March Week – Council user group

This month we had our first quarterly council user group of 2024! There was a fantastic turn out with 18 representatives from 13 councils across Aotearoa.

We use this forum to share important news about what’s happened over the quarter and to discuss what’s coming up next. It’s also chance for our local government stakeholders to come together to and hear how others are using the product. We are a small team and these sessions are an effective way of communicating one-to-many.

This time around we had 2 guest speakers. Mike Manson, Chief Executive for the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) spoke about the work they are doing to standardise council services and processes for councils to adopt. Mike sits on our Advisory Board and has been an advocate for Business Connect and FormBuilder since the early days.

We also had Malcolm Johnston, board member with the NZ Institute of Liquor Licensing Inspectors (NZILLI) talk about their commitment to maintaining our alcohol licensing forms to ensure they stay up-to-date and adhere to relevant legislation.

The buy in we are getting from local government industry bodies like ALGIM and NZILLI shows that other groups across government can see the benefits FormBuilder and Business Connect can deliver. It’s also such a boost to the teams’ morale.

It was great to see lots of familiar and new faces at the session and I was really pleased to see everyone so engaged. I’m looking forward to meeting again at the next session in June.

Chloe, Senior Advisor

8 March – Welcome to FormBuilder today

It’s been another flat tack week. I counted up and I’ve been involved with meetings and workshops with 60 central and local government people in just the last fortnight. It’s great to have so much interest in FormBuilder and Business Connect.

In February we had a session to imagine the ideal future onboarding for government people to FormBuilder. It was inspiring, but also feels pretty aspirational! This week I asked the team to review and improve how we’re doing it right now.

We want to give those trying the tool the best chance of creating a form and making it available to their customers.

Since October last year we have given 44 people from a range of agencies and councils access to FormBuilder. There has been a mixture of results as some people log in just once and others create multiple forms.

As we drew a flow diagram on the whiteboard we thought about how to support builders, but also how to manage this growing number of people using the tool. For now, instead of immediately giving people access to FormBuilder we’re going to invite anyone interested to join us for a monthly webinar to learn more and then decide if they want to try the tool.

We’re keen for people to bring a form with them. Having something tangible in mind makes it easier to engage with FormBuilder and get going. Once you’re ready you can share the form with colleagues and get them to fill it in.

We also recognise that waiting for the next webinar won’t always make sense. For anyone with a more pressing need to deliver a service, we’re happy to get you up and running more quickly.

The next webinar is taking place on 27 March so please join us to find out more, ask questions and meet the team behind FormBuilder and the Business Connect platform.

FormBuilder Webinar(external link)

Shelley, Product Manager

1 March – FormBuilder Workshop series

This week we collaborated with the Digital Public Service team in DIA to hold the first of our monthly sessions introducing people to FormBuilder.

We’ve again taken inspiration from colleagues in Canada and the UK who use a regular session like this to manage interest. We’re a small team and being able to group together those from across government who want to know more just makes sense.

We had 14 participants from DIA, MSD and Te Whatu Ora join us for an interactive demo. We invited them to log in to FormBuilder and build along with our expert to get a feel for the tool. We had a few access problems, but I think there are some simple things we can do to reduce that.

It’s a work in progress and we’ll make improvements for the next one, but it did help people get a sense of what FormBuilder can do.

I felt proud of the team during the session. We had technical, service design, product and customer experts in the room to educate and answer questions. It’s fun to show people what you have worked on and get real-time feedback. My favourite comment was, “We needed this 20 years ago”. This really helps give the team a lift!

I’m looking forward to more feedback from participants and of course the next workshop! If you want to join us please email hello@businessconnect.govt.nz to jump on the invite list.

Shelley, Product Manager

23 February – A great partnership

This week I presented to a group of government stakeholder engagement professionals alongside Heather Finn from NZ Customs.

I did my bit explaining what FormBuilder is and how it could help then handed over to Heather to talk from a Customs point of view about the tool and about Business Connect.

Having partners who are willing to share their time and story means a lot to me. It helps those considering using FormBuilder and Business Connect get a better sense of what it might mean for their customers and their organisation.

We’ve worked with Customs since the beginning and they launched the first service on the platform in 2019. Over that time our teams have learned and grown together.

Heather described how being able to use an existing platform meant they could move forward on improving subsequent services, like the Secure Export Scheme (SES), without making a business case for funding.

I was happy to hear that the whole scheme is now much easier to join and be part of and the time it takes a business to complete the application has reduced dramatically from months to a matter of hours.

“Making the application simpler and clearer has also meant a more efficient process as any available officer can log in and progress an application rather than needing a dedicated officer for each application. Less time is needed to train our officers and it gives us a single source of truth for data. By using Business Connect to make changes and updates, much less manual effort is required updating at our end.”

— Heather Finn, Manager Business Improvement and Innovation, NZ Customs

Big thanks to Heather and I’m looking forward to sharing a stage (and a laptop) with her again sometime soon.

Shelley, Product Manager

16 February – Support from the experts

This week I sat down with 3 representatives from the New Zealand Institute of Liquor Licensing Inspectors (NZILLI) to review our alcohol licensing forms.

NZILLI has agreed to support our team to ensure the forms remain current and fit for purpose.

It’s reassuring to know that we have experts behind us, and we hope councils will feel even more confident about these 5 alcohol licensing forms.

The updates suggested by the advisory group were valuable and I have already implemented them. This really reminds me how much easier it is to make changes to existing forms using FormBuilder. Previously I would have been writing a lot of user stories for developers!

Now the master templates for On licence, Off licence, Club licence, Special licence and Temporary Authority are ready for councils to adopt starting with Ōtorohanga District Council.

We’ll meet with the NZILLI advisory group on a quarterly basis to check if there’s anything to update.

I feel grateful to Malcolm, Anneke and Antoinette for dedicating their time to help create standardised templates that work for councils.

Susan, Service Designer

9 February – Connecting with Singapore

This week I was given access to the Singaporean government’s form building tool. Over the past 6 months I’ve been blown away by the willingness to share from other government teams abroad.

SG is officially my new favourite builder! It’s so simple and clean and sits at about the right level in terms of what it allows users to do. Not too advanced but includes important features many forms would need.

It was a nice touch to see our logo had been pre-populated when I logged in!

I’ll continue to trial it and I’m looking forward to a meeting with the team behind the tool later in March. I think we can learn a lot from them and these kinds of exchanges with international teams are helping to leap our thinking forward.

Tian, Product Owner – FormBuilder.govt

2 February – Making it easy to get started

This week the team sat down to do a workshop on how best to onboard government people to FormBuilder.

It’s still early days and so far we’ve tried:

1. Mini workshops with a hands-on activity
2. Sending people instructions and resources and letting them just play around with the tool themselves

Neither option has been more successful than the other and I would go as far as to say neither option has been a winner. I suppose it depends on learning styles and motivation. 

We’re working on our welcome instructions and video. I’m looking forward to testing those with some prospective builders from within the Ministry for Business, Innovation and Employment.

The workshop today was a chance to think way out into the future and imagine our ideal onboarding. One thing that clearly emerged was the desire to see people able to try FormBuilder without the need to create an account.

Our model for this is GCForms from the Canadian Government. It lets people see what the builder can do before they go through the sign-up process.

GCForms(external link) — Government of Canada

This approach, of deferring account creation, quickly gives the customer value and removes frustration caused by putting hurdles between them and what they’re trying to do.

This is what we’d like to work towards. In the meantime, we’ll look at what else we can do to make it easier to get started.

Shelley, Product Manager

26 January 2024 – Templates are the ticket

This week we completed another of our local government template forms for use by councils. This brings us to a total of 7 templates.

Using a template and then tweaking it for a different council’s requirements has helped better meet the needs of those delivering council services. It gives them a solid starting point and encourages standardisation across councils while still allowing flexibility to cope with local differences.

I’m looking forward to partnering more closely with the Association of Local Government Information Management (ALGIM) to enable the creation of more templates covering a wider range of council services.

So far we have the following:

• Registration of a food business
• Alcohol licences
• Registration of a premises
• Notice of management change
• Trade waste permit
• Application for waiver or exemption
• Licence to trade in a public place

The Business Connect platform, FormBuilder tool and templates created by and for local government are all centrally funded. I’d like to see more councils using them to save time and money.

Shelley, Product Manager

19 January 2024 – A milestone moment

eInvoicing delivers first service using FormBuilder.govt

The Business Connect team hit an exciting milestone this week.

The first service built by someone outside of the Business Connect team went live using FormBuilder.govt... the whole process taking just 4 working weeks from requirements gathering, to gaining approvals and to going live!

Eddy Horwood, an advisor with the eInvoicing team at MBIE used FormBuilder.govt to create the form and with some help from the Business Connect team, he could progress the form to a state where it was ready to be published on the platform. The eInvoicing Ready Software form allows businesses to apply to be added to the list of eInvoicing ready software providers on the MBIE website.

For me, it feels momentous, we’ve been working towards this goal since the concept of our own drag ’n’ drop form building tool came about in late 2022. In time, it will be a game changer in how services are delivered as more and more service teams across government build and publish their forms quickly and seamlessly using the tool providing major cost savings for agencies looking to digitise.  

We’re ready for more service teams to create their forms using the tool. If you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you – just email Hello@businessconnect.govt.nz.

Chloe, Senior Advisor

12 January 2024 – Empower others

This week we had quarterly planning and refreshed our objectives and key results. I was struck by how much the squads were able to achieve in just 1 short breakout session. We’re rallying around a strategy for the quarter that puts more focus on our new customer group - government builders.

The goal is to make digital government simple, fast and cost effective to deliver. The tools we’ve created have the potential to transform hundreds of inaccessible document-based services into truly digital ones.

The team is trying to prioritise development that maximises the usability of our FormBuilder tool to increase adoption and the range of services remade digital for New Zealanders.

This means we need a better understanding of the needs of those in government who deliver digital services. We'll get this through interviewing different kinds of users from a wider range of agencies.

We’ll continue to raise awareness of the opportunity to sign up more builders and we’ll aim to make it easy for them to know whether FormBuilder is the right tool for their service.

This quarter I’m excited to see experiments to try and simplify things for builders by using AI to convert their existing forms. We’re looking at ideas to increase the proportion of users who create and finish a form.

One challenge this quarter will be ensuring the team is allowed to remain focused on the objectives and big rocks we've agreed. There are likely to be requests for services that are beyond our core patterns and feature set. I’m clear that we’re creating products that meet the needs of the many, not the few.

Shelley, Product Manager

15 December – Reflections on 2023

I orea te tuatara ka patu ki waho
A problem is solved by continuing to find solutions

It is always hard to sum up an entire year’s worth of work in a few paragraphs, but if there was just one word for this year, it would be ‘remarkable’.
 
Normally the Christmas push has me feeling tired, but this year I’m feeling energised and hugely satisfied at the progress made. My role is to build an environment where teams can deliver great things and enjoy themselves while doing it. We have gone from me thinking that ‘something isn’t working here, my approach isn’t hitting’ to ‘something really clicking, and the team absolutely firing on all cylinders’. 
 
A year ago, we were still trying to work out how to move Business Connect forward and were focused on services to build. We changed that to a product led approach, built, and launched our fantastic new form building tool ‘FormBuilder.govt’, and now we are seeing genuine, organic interest in the product.
 
We had our final advisory board meeting this week. The board checks on our progress and gives feedback on our intended direction. It is always a good measure of where we are at and where we should be. We received some great questions around what we intend to do with form builders, and how we can onboard agencies faster. There is work to be done but we are comfortable with the product direction, and approach.
 
When I look ahead to 2024, I can see that we are very well placed to continue the execution. The team is lined up to deliver a raft of additional services that small businesses are crying out for. I go into the festive break immensely proud of the work the team have put in this year.
 
Kua hua te marama, here’s to celebrating a successful year.
 
Daryl Pettitt
Director, Business Connect

8 December – Bringing builders together

This week we had our first drop-in session for builders using FormBuilder.govt.

We’re in the early stages of getting people from across government to try the tool. We already have 8 builders from local and central government learning to use the tool and creating their own forms.

I was happy to see 4 builders join the drop-in session with Josh and I. We wanted to bring people together to run through a ‘how to’ and then open up for questions and feedback.

For me it’s so important to get that time to talk to people face to face. We learned a lot in just half an hour!

One of our builders emphasised the importance of having a shared space to learn from other people’s forms, “don’t put us in silos.” Another was using FormBuilder.govt to show others internally what it could do, “we’re migrating all our pdf forms, so this is timely.”

The third was interested in discussing how to create a best practice form that would work for other councils and commented, “the pre-built template with the pages already there along with the NZBN and NZ Post look ups was great.”

The last builder wasn’t sure how to share what he’d built with his colleagues or what the next steps were if they wanted to publish the form, “what’s the next step to get things going?”. We were glad to clarify and are hoping this service will go live before Christmas.

Big thanks to everyone that attended – so nice to have an informal session like that.

We’re planning to run these sessions monthly and I’m excited to see the numbers increase. They’ll be a great source of ideas for improvements to make it even easier to create digital government services.

Email hello@businessconnect.govt.nz if you’d like to join in!

Shelley, Product Manager

1 December – FormBuilder turns 1

We've been working on FormBuilder.govt for a year, and the progress we've made has surpassed expectations! The demo this week left me in awe of our form tool's advancements. I’ve been involved since the design phase and seeing it in action was incredible.

Creating forms with a drag-and-drop tool- check. Publishing without the need for a developer – check. The transformation in the last few months has totally changed the way we deliver.

Manual data entry and complex configurations are a thing of the past. Our team has carved out a niche in which publishing a form to Business Connect is now simple, automated, and lightning-fast. Seeing a form effortlessly glide into the test environment demonstrated how far we’ve come.

Here’s to breaking down barriers and pushing efficiency to new heights! I'm proud of the team and everything we've accomplished.

We are constantly innovating and optimising our form building capability. Come and give the tool a whirl, create a form and tell us what you think.

Tian, Product Design and Experience

24 November – Otorohanga services launch

Conversations with Ōtorohanga District Council started back in August 2023. The Council was looking to revamp their website and digitise forms. @Webshed was the delivery partner for this project. Webshed was aware of FormBuilder’s capabilities and decided to work with Business Connect on digitising the forms. (We can tag Rebecca on LinkedIn)

Using FormBuilder, we built and launched 5 services in less than 2 weeks:

• Trade Waste permit
• Application for waiver or exemption for hospitality businesses
• Notice of management change - for hospitality businesses
• Registration of premises
• Licence to trade in a public place

This allowed us to build master templates which give other councils the opportunity to adopt these existing services faster and more efficiently. We also set a record for the most services Business Connect has gone live with, in a single day. How exciting is that!

Ōtorohanga District Council has other services that they would now like to see on Business Connect. We will continue to work with Ōtorohanga to save their businesses time and improve customer experience. If you are a local council looking to build online forms, we want to hear from you. Please contact us on hello@businessconnect.govt.nz.

Let’s get building.

17 November – ALGIM Conference

This week, I attended the ALGIM (Association of Local Government Information Management) Conference in Wellington, along with my colleagues, May Chin and Chloe Carroll. The theme of the conference was ‘Navigating Uncharted Territory’.

Being relatively new to Business Connect, it was a wonderful opportunity to connect with our stakeholders and understand how we can better support their digital transformation journey. Business Connect works with several councils already and looking to onboard more.

What I gathered from interacting from people across local government was that the issues they face are broadly similar. It reinforced some of my understanding of how Business Connect can improve the experience of small businesses when dealing with government. We are on the right track but there’s plenty more to be done.

I found the opening keynote delivered by Thomas Frey, one of the world’s foremost futurists, very interesting. It got me thinking about the future of Business Connect and FormBuilder, the impact of generative AI on what we do, and how businesses might access government services in the future. Thinking about AI and its impact on the way we work, here are some potential questions that we would need to work through - how can AI improve efficiency and effectiveness of government services? What is the impact of AI on data and privacy? How can we build trust around how AI is being used? How can we eliminate bias in decision making?

I look forward to having these conversations and more with our stakeholders as we continue to find ways of making government services more accessible and reliable.

Sushrutha, Business Development Lead

10 November - FormFest

This week I participated in FormFest, a virtual event showcasing governments working to make services accessible to everyone through online forms.

We were introduced to the organisers Code for America and the Digital Services Network by our friends in the GOV.UK Forms team.

I felt proud that we were presenting alongside public service people from UK, Canada, US and France at national, state and city levels.

The presentation I gave charted my experience of our path from launch in 2019 through COVID to the present day highlighting how much we’ve learned and changed along the way.

I tried to make it an honest account and share how I was feeling at various points. We got some great questions during the Q&A that, for me, showed just what experts were taking part. The questions were pretty detailed and were obviously from people who are in the thick of their own digital service delivery.

I’m looking forward to watching the other sessions that I missed for ideas on how to help more people from across NZ government building and publishing their forms using our products.

We’ll publish a link here once the video is on YouTube.

Shelley, Product Manager

3 November – Call for builders

This week is a bit of a milestone. We’re ready for those in government interested in our FormBuilder tool to have a look!

Learn more about FormBuilder.govt

We’d like to get people set up with a login and trying out the builder. Your feedback will show us what needs to be clearer or to improve.

We’ve already conducted an early access trial and been inviting those agencies wanting to publish services, to have a go at building their own. It would be an incredible Christmas gift for everyone behind the FormBuilder tool if we could see a new service created and published by another team.

Earlier in the week Eddy from the eInvoicing team at MBIE jumped in to start building a form they’d like to offer to companies to register as eInvoicing enabled software providers.

Software providers(external link) — eInvoicing

Our updated roadmap details how FormBuilder fits into our work and how we’re trying to get it into the hands of agencies and councils.

Business Connect roadmap

It’s fully funded for government agencies and councils to prototype application forms, publish those to the Business Connect platform and receive the application information in a case management portal or by email.

Email hello@businessconnect.govt.nz to get going!

Shelley, Product Manager

27 October – Design fundamentals bootcamp

I had the great pleasure of attending a Design Thinking Fundamentals Bootcamp this week.

Design thinking is a human-centred approach that aids organisations to solve their most complex challenges to create positive customer experiences. It is a glimpse into the world of design and the 3 parts of design thinking: Process, Methods, and Mindset.

This course gave me a better understanding of how to dig deep by asking open ended questions and really figuring out a customer’s needs, wants and desires along with their motivation and create a product or service that people love. We also explored effective brainstorming techniques and allowing time for people to ‘flare’ and generate ideas without judgement and then ‘focus’ to refine those ideas and create concepts.

I am excited to apply what I’ve learnt into designing and creating forms for our users that meet their needs as business owners and administrators. Thoroughly enjoyed this 2-day course and cannot wait to find more courses to attend to further my understanding of design and become a better form builder at Business Connect.

Josh, Advisor

20 October – Working with Whaikaha

Over the last week we’ve been meeting with the team at Whaikaha - the Ministry for Disabled People. We reached out to ask for support and advice on making our platform as accessible as possible.

The team were generous with their time and keen to help make Business Connect a great example for other government departments.

We’ll start with some of the internal team putting Business Connect to the test and giving us feedback. This will help us determine whether we should do further user testing and what else we can consider implementing for the platform.

I’m thrilled to be working with the people responsible for leading partnership between the disability community and Government. We need their knowledge and expertise to make this channel as useful to as many people as possible.

We’d also like to offer better advice to those agencies and councils using Business Connect so they can create accessible pathways to their online services.

Shelley, Product Manager

13 October – FormBuilder testing – what happened next?

On 22 September we mentioned the first round of user testing with participants from Ministry of Social Development, the Association of Local Government Information Managers and Customs.

Since then the participants have built their own forms without manual assistance from the Service Design Team.

We were excited to learn how it all went, so Josh and I got them back in to discuss their experience. Neither of us were expecting such high enthusiasm to progress, as Formbuilder.govt was ticking their agency’s digital needs.

We were also feeling proud that the resources we have built to enable agencies to build their own forms hit the mark. We provided ‘How to videos’, content writing tools, guidelines for content writing, CSS cheatsheets and spent a lot of time building common form elements so that form builders could simply drag and drop them in their form, ensuring consistency and code accuracy.

Of course, being service designers we followed up with a feedback opportunity. Below is a snippet of the responses.

What do you see as being the main benefit(s) of using FormBuilder? 

• Ability to build forms at pace and therefore scale the number of forms we can add to Business Connect.
• Ready built forms for all local government, with obviously consistent content and layout, with great flexibility for completion.

Do you see FormBuilder being a part of your organisation's tools?

• Yes, I can see it being part of what we use to deliver digital forms.
• Yes, would be great to have a local government repository for forms, which all local government organisations can access. It would cut down on time to develop new forms.

Next step

Inviting a larger group of participants to test the FormBuilder.govt concept in a ‘beta’ environment. Please get in touch if you’re keen!

Susan, Service Designer

6 October – Transparency is the best policy

I’ve been part of the Business Connect Engagement Team for 3 years. Each week I meet with government organisations who are considering using the platform to deliver their forms online and attend regular check ins with councils and agencies that have already onboarded with us. Our ethos in working with our government partners is that transparency and honest communication is the best policy.

Sometimes this means we must communicate disappointing news for example an enhancement they’ve requested has not been prioritised yet. Overall though, I think our stakeholders appreciate our honest approach and feel like they have been given the full picture of a situation and the reasons behind our decisions. In return, we encourage our stakeholders not to hold back when giving us feedback! We want the truth and ultimately it helps inform how we improve the platform in future.

Over the years, we have built strong relationships across government and are seeing the results of this through organisations sticking with us and individuals championing Business Connect by helping to drive it forward within their organisations.

Chloe, Senior Advisor

29 September – Straight into the last quarter of 2023

The team all gathered to look back at what we’d achieved this week and ahead to what we’ll be busy with next.

Our last 3 months was all about setting ourselves up to bring in government people from outside our team to use the FormBuilder tool and make digital service delivery as easy as possible.

In saying that, we also delivered many new features and enhancements to help save NZ businesses time. There are new reminders, notifications, search functionality not to mention a big investment in making the platform accessible.

The objectives and measures we’ve set for ourselves this quarter were all driven by the team putting their heads together to work out what will get us closer to our goals of saving businesses time and government money.

A common theme this quarter is our need to ‘Do it with data’. To make better decisions, assess impact and prioritise our work.

Read the updated roadmap here

Shelley, Product Manager

22 September – FormBuilder.govt user testing

With the success of FormBuilder.govt, Business Connect has entered its first round of user testing with 3 people from Ministry of Social Development, the Association of Local Government Information Managers and Customs.

These users have been given a dummy form to create over the next couple of weeks, after which we will be meeting with them again to see how they got on and gather any feedback to further refine our resources and teaching methods.

This was a fun experience for me. I’ve never carried out any user testing before but have always really enjoyed teaching people about things I am passionate about. I am excited to see how our users have progressed and how their contribution will make the experience even better for future builders.

Josh, Advisor

15 September – Transforming Sprint Prioritisation: From Battle to Harmony 

Looking back at the evolution of our sprint prioritisation process, it's fascinating to see how we've transitioned from what used to resemble a battlefield of conflicting interests to a harmonious orchestration of goals and collaboration. In the past, it often felt like every sprint was a battleground, with stakeholders jostling to get their stories pushed through and satisfied. 

However, our journey has led us to a significantly more organised and streamlined approach, bringing about a multitude of benefits. Here's why our sprint prioritisation is now less chaotic and everyone is onboard with achieving our quarterly goals: 

• Strategic alignment: We've anchored our sprint prioritisation to our broader strategic objectives. By ensuring that every story aligns with our overall mission, we've eliminated the scramble for attention and resources that used to dominate our sprints.
• Transparency and communication: Open lines of communication have become our allies. Transparent discussions about the rationale behind story selection have brought clarity to our decisions, minimising misunderstandings and conflicts.
• Data-informed decisions: We've embraced data-driven insights to guide our prioritisation. This has fostered a more rational and objective approach, lessening the subjective clashes that used to characterise our sprint planning. 
• Value-oriented approach: Prioritising stories based on their potential value to our users and stakeholders has shifted our focus from the quantity of stories to the quality of impact. This shift has garnered support for our prioritisation decisions.
• Quarterly planning consistency: Our goals set during quarterly planning provide a stable foundation. With a shared vision, our sprints are no longer battles to gain fleeting advantages but rather united strides toward our larger objectives. 
• Empowered teams: Teams now have the autonomy to make decisions about what they can realistically accomplish in a sprint. This empowerment has instilled a sense of ownership, reducing the tension surrounding forced commitments. 

As we continue on this journey of transformation, it's incredible to witness the harmony that arises when everyone is aligned, empowered, and focused on the bigger picture. Our sprint prioritisation process has evolved from a battlefield into a collective symphony of progress.

Aaron, Solution Architect

8 September – Accessibility testing

This week let’s talk accessibility testing.  Accessibility testing is a subset of usability testing and is defined as a type of software testing performed to ensure that the application being tested is inclusive for all groups of users.

Inclusive software products allow use of assistive technologies by users to help them navigate through the software product when they have hearing, vision or other permanent or temporary disabilities.

To ensure we at Business Connect are compliant and inclusive we are working on a program where accessibility is treated as a must have during the development lifecycle.  As a team we review and prioritise each new piece of work with accessibility in mind. We refine the work we do in Business Connect and collaborate with the project team to ensure that accessibility requirements are met and integrated into the design and development.

Accessibility testing tools are used to support the manual testing, and we as a team are committed to adding these as part of our Testing Best Practices.

Future state – accessibility standards are fully integrated and met during the development lifecycle day to day.

Dion, Test Lead

1 September – GOV.UK Forms

This week we had a call with 2 senior product managers in the GOV.UK Forms team within Government Digital Service (GDS). 3 of us jumped online to meet with Adam and Katie at 8:30pm our time.

While we were a bit tired before the call, we felt energised afterwards. The experience of talking to people who have a similar mission but are months ahead of you is like the chance to shake a magic eight ball that really can predict the future.

We bombarded the team with questions including:

• Where do you see your product in 2, 3 or 4 years?
• How are you preparing to scale the use of your form builder?
• Are you under pressure to crank out forms and get a high volume of end-users? How do you balance that with the right product choices?
• How have you structured your team?
• Does anyone check that the forms are well designed and user friendly before they are published?
• How do you measure the value you’re delivering?

Each time we speak to people at GDS we come away with a new perspective and about 50 more questions we’d like to have asked.

This time the key takeaways were having a focused value proposition, keeping it super simple when measuring how much time we’re saving for government and the importance of automating onboarding and support processes before scaling.

Shelley, Product Manager

25 August – Customer interviews and user testing

This week I’ve been experimenting with my regular customer interviews. I’ve been doing weekly phone interviews with businesses who have used the Business Connect platform for around a year now. They have been an incredible source of insight and a great reality check.

With the most recent interviews I’ve been asking if we can do the session as a video call. So far I have done 3 in this way and have asked some questions about incorporating a user testing element.

I want to explore whether this could be a weekly opportunity to do a short, targeted remote user testing exercise. I’m trying to figure out how to make it easy to do user testing as part of our continuous discovery approach.

It has been helpful asking what people think, before launching into it. My 3 video interviewees have been open to the idea, but asked for bit of forewarning which sounds sensible!

Shelley, Product Manager

18 August – How we work

I’ve been having one-to-one meetings with each member of the delivery teams over the last week. Business Connect has multiple delivery squads running, with the squad compositions changing based on the nature of the work. 

One of the key insights for me has been the benefit of giving the team the responsibility for setting up how we work. 

I think previous ‘ways of working’ can create a bias within a leader for how a team needs to be set up. I’ve certainly been guilty of trying to push other structures that have worked for me in previous organisations.  Instead, we have hit a sweet spot. I see the team suggesting ways of working, to best suit the work being delivered.

One of the key factors in enabling a high-quality delivery has been lining the squads up to deliver against the product outcomes.  Arguably the most important part of this is trusting the teams to prioritise and organise themselves. Here’s how we have things set up right now.

Key outcomes and squads:

• Reduce the time it takes for a business to complete what they came to do (Time squad)
• More businesses are using Business Connect (More squad)
• Maintain a strong and stable platform (Trust squad)
• The fastest way to deliver great government digital services (Fast squad)

I’ve enjoyed the one-to-one sessions I’ve had, they let me check in with the people who are building and testing the platform and features.  This quarter it looks like we have done what we came here to do, the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. These sessions also work if things aren’t going so well. I can find out directly when we aren’t hitting the mark. 

The feedback has changed how I deliver and communicate across the team.  

Daryl, Director for Business Connect

11 August – Reducing government API integration friction with FormBuilder

This week, one of our focus areas has been on streamlining the integration process with our FormBuilder tool to provide a smoother experience for agencies and councils. We understand the importance of seamless connections between platforms, and we've been actively investigating ways to enhance this aspect of our service.

One exciting avenue we explored was the creation of connectors into various platforms and the idea of publishing FormBuilder connectors. Our team embarked on an experiment where we utilised our webhook notification to trigger a Power Apps cloud flow. This Cloud Flow then called the Business Connect GET Case Details API, within a few steps we were able to easily extract the case submission details and store a copy within our test Power Apps Dataverse.

The end-to-end process was very swift, with data flowing into Power Apps in under 30 minutes.

We have an assumption that over the next few years agencies will be looking to adopt more drag/drop type workflow automation tools to manage their integrations between systems and back office workflows. We think this will mean more government agencies may be searching for pre-built connectors that they can drag/drop instead of manually setting up API integrations with code.

As we continue to innovate and optimise our services, we invite collaboration and input from our community. If any of you are intrigued by the possibilities of Business Connect integrations, integration connectors or have unique use cases in mind, we encourage you to reach out. Your insights and ideas could play a pivotal role in shaping the future of this GOVT.NZ platform.

Aaron, Solution Architect

4 August – Accessibility is crucial

This week I’ve been asked on a few occasions about how our product stacks up from an accessibility standpoint. Accessibility is crucial, as it ensures that digital content, like forms, is usable by individuals with disabilities.

During the past few months we have been working to improve accessibility on the Business Connect platform by tackling issues identified through independent accessibility testing. Things that were found were common problems in form accessibility include unclear labels, poor keyboard navigation, and missing alternative text.

Using these learnings, we’re working to integrate these accessible design principles into the FormBuilder tool, so forms built using our tool have clear labelling, keyboard-friendly navigation, and proper image descriptions. Our mission continues with accessibility improvements and using findings from testing to fine-tune our accessibility features. Our commitment is to ensure all forms created using Formbuilder are truly inclusive and user-friendly.

Tian, Senior Service Designer

26 May – Power of partnership

The work that we’ve been doing alongside New Zealand Trade and Enterprise (NZTE) has catapulted us forward. Our new FormBuilder tool has benefited from their involvement because we’ve been able to prioritise features that we know are actually needed and will definitely be used.

Partnering with an agency that is digitally mature and has incredibly talented UX and developer professionals ready to go has been a real pleasure and has meant we can keep pace with each other to get everything in place.

Now we have a service live on the platform for NZTE that delivers applications directly to their CRM and allows them to post results and communications back to the customer. Our new Get and Put APIs are both in use by NZTE and we’re delighted to be able to use their adoption of Business Connect as an example for other agencies and councils to follow.

Shelley, Product Manager

28 July – Demonstrating our speed

This week I’ve been reflecting on how far we’ve come in terms of our ability to respond quickly.

We got wind of a new service about to be launched to support businesses with funding and approached the service team responsible to let them know how we could help.

The team were planning on a pdf form for this service to meet tight timeframes and deliver within budget.

We got enough information to start prototyping the form on Tuesday and had finished it by Thursday. We ran the team through a demo on Friday and showed them our plan for making it available for customers on the Business Connect platform within a week.

It felt incredible to be able to confidently take this offer to a team and know that we could follow through if that is what they wanted to do.

The other encouraging side of this was that 2 of our squads were almost unaware of this new service and kept focus on their planned work rather than having to jump in to help make it happen.

Shelley, Product Manager

21 July – Putting the usability of FormBuilder to the test

This week the thinking has been going into initial user testing for FormBuilder.govt. We want to see how easy or hard it is for form builders outside our team to pick it up and produce a great form.

We’ll begin by testing ourselves! Some of the uninitiated team members will be tasked with building a form. We’ll see what the challenges are and there might be some work for the developers as well as improvements to our guidance and guardrails as a result.

This is going to help us have better sessions with first users from other agencies. We hope to be lining those up sometime in August.

Shelley, Product Manager

14 July - Publishing forms without a big release

This week we released a service for the Insolvency and Trustee Service without the need for a hotfix or a full release. We could independently push the service through to our staging environment without all the extra overhead that comes with a release.

This saves time and means someone non-technical can build and then release the service without needing to pull in the technical team. We’ve proved we can do it, and this is the toe in the water for services being published more quickly and easily. Here’s one to consider - if we had to, how could we release a service every day?

Shelley, Product Manager

7 July – Saying no is hard, but it’s important

This week we had an approach from a service team that needed to implement a new register and ask businesses to submit information twice a year.

The budget is low for the project and there are few options. Business Connect represents a great way to deliver this new service. The question arose of our ability to add features that would give more ‘register’ type back-office functionality.

While this kind of register functionality is on our roadmap it is not what is strategically most important right now in terms of value back to NZ businesses and scaling the platform.

I’m proud to say that we bravely said not right now and prioritised our existing roadmap over the immediate needs of that team. We are likely still going to deliver the customer-facing aspects of this service and can provide the data to the service team via API or our case management portal.

Shelley, Product Manager

30 June - Organising the work                 

I just love that our team has a spirit of experimentation. We are fairly Agile, but we just go with what works.

One of the squads has taken a more intentional approach to the order of things in their sprints. Several big user stories landed on the test team at the end of the last sprint and caused a bit of test team chaos. Like 3 big rocks landing in a peaceful pond.

This sprint the fast squad will ensure all large stories are developed in the first week or so giving the test team time to work and the second half of the sprint will be spent on investigations and proofs of concept.

These pieces are work are just as important but won’t land on the test team. In fact, they will likely set the squad up nicely with development work for the following sprint. The work has been arriving at the right time and made it easy for the test team to manage.

This also means we have flexibility to drop stories today and focus on things that are higher priority if something comes out of leftfield. This is because the work the squads are doing in the final week of sprint is not for the current release, so there is less pressure on our people.

Shelley, Product Manager

23 June - Smaller squads, stronger outcomes

We were being slowed down by the need for our big team of developers to be across every aspect of our roadmap. The planning and refinement sessions were mammoth and tied everyone up for long periods with not all content relevant for everyone.

In April we made the decision to break down into 4 small squads. Each squad was given a product outcome to focus on and one or 2 key results for the quarter.

What we saw was an immediate shift in productivity, speed and culture. The smaller squads had fewer and shorter meetings, deepened their knowledge on their own key areas and were context switching far less.

In just 3 or 4 sprints we have seen more ownership, more autonomous working, better problem solving, more understanding of prioritisation and more high-value features being shipped.

This structure might not be what we stick with, but it has been a game changer for team culture and productivity.

Shelley, Product Manager

16 June - Accessibility baked in

Something incredible is happening. Over the last few weeks the team has brought in a new step in our development process to help ensure we factor in accessibility as early as possible. The developers working on Business Connect now use Axe to test their code along the way and address any issues that it picks up.

The whole team is embracing the kaupapa and kind of relishing the chance to upskill in this area.

It means when our testers step up to do their thing, many of the bugs they normally have to catch are already resolved and greatly improves the quality of the code we’re shipping. We want Business Connect to be as accessible and inclusive as possible so we’re always looking for ways to make this part of how we work.

Shelley, Product Manager

9 June - FormBuilder.govt dashboard

Our vision for the FormBuilder tool is that it’s available across government and easy to start using. We know that it must be intuitive to succeed. Our product owner for the tool challenged his squad to start thinking about how a user would manage and configure forms. There was no directive on what the solution should be.

The team went away and worked on the technical solution while bringing in our design lead to make sure whatever they produced was usable and met user needs.

What they have developed will now need to be tested with users but is a great example of empowering our creative people to problem solve and run with the best ideas.

Shelley, Product Manager

2 June - New FormBuilder.govt tool

We’ve gone live with a service created using FormBuilder.govt! Our partnership with New Zealand Trade and Enterprise has resulted in a new service for New Zealand businesses who want to qualify as an active investment for high-value investor migrants.

More than a year ago we recognised that with our current toolset and ways of working we were going to struggle to scale to achieve our vision of being the easiest way to transact with government.

The cost and time to build was still too high, even with reusable components and the time saving from having a base platform certified for hosting with no need for procurement.

Looking abroad we noted what Canada, Singapore and the UK were doing with a form builder offering and we began exploring how to create our own.

The result is FormBuilder.govt which we hope will one day be the NZ government’s form builder. It is a tool for non-technical users to drag and drop government forms and publish them for users to experience great digital government services.

Our time to onboard a new service to the platform has dropped from 8 weeks, with all hands to the pump, to just days.

Shelley, Product Manager