Live

The live phase is when your service is operating in a business as usual (BAU) manner. It’s where you spend most of your time and money. Live is about continuous improvement and support. You will also need to address any issues identified during beta at this stage.

Planning for live should be included in your business case. Your plan should include:

• a sense of the number of staff and the budget you will need in live, not just to maintain it, but to deliver continuous improvement
• what ongoing tech and cyber security support you’ll need

This is also an opportunity to use systems thinking. Systems thinking is an approach to problem solving that takes into account the overall system as well as its individual parts. Successful elements you have worked on can be scaled up or reused in other parts of your organisation. The Digital Scotland Service Standard ‘Use and contribute to shared digital practices, processes, components, standards, patterns and platforms' contains information on how you can do this.

The purpose of live

Live is where you refine the service. In beta, you decided how to sustainably run your service and now live is where you build on it. A sustainable service is one that has a plan, performance data and the right resources that allow for improvements throughout its lifetime.

Resources could include:

• staff for ongoing support
• design support for continuous improvement projects within live (for example User Researchers and Content Designers)
• support for users who cannot access your digital service

At the start of your live phase, you should know what continuous improvement is needed, what budget you’ll need and your plan for resourcing these requirements.

Improvements can include things like:

• adapting to changes in user behaviour
• responding to technical problems
• making the service simpler to use

The live phase is about going further than just essential maintenance, for example only fixing bugs and updating software. If you only respond to issues as they arise you risk building up technical debt and your service may stop meeting users’ needs.

You also risk building up design debt. Design debt is the combination of all the imperfections of the user experience in your service. It’s a normal part of every developing service but requires a plan of how you will address it in the future.

Having a plan for change and improvement will protect your service against these challenges. You should also:

• maintain your prototype during live
• use the prototype to test any improvements before rolling them out to your live service
• have a plan for continuously getting user feedback in the live phase 
• do this through activities like asking for feedback on your site’s pages and usability testing 

You can use performance data and analytics to decide what improvements should be made. You should be measuring the success of your service and deciding where to focus your improvement work using indicators like performance metrics, user feedback and web analytics. 

Continuous improvement

Ideally, your live service should aim to meet the Digital Scotland Service Standards. These standards can also help you identify areas of improvement for your service in the future.

Change is inevitable and services must adapt. In the future there will be changes in spaces like government policy, the technology we use and in user needs. Good continuous improvement means making small improvements regularly. This approach helps avoid the need for large scale transformation projects in the future.

Resources

Here are some tools to help you keep improving your service in the live phase:

• Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
• Development Operations (DevOps)
• The Fugle Innovation Model

Related guides

• Discovery
• Alpha
• Beta