Map a citizen life event end to end across the agencies and touchpoints involved, not just a single department's process.
Digital Transformation & Artificial Intelligence
Designing Digital Public Services Around Citizen Life Events
Redesign government digital services around real citizen life events, such as having a child or losing a job, instead of siloed department transactions.
🗓️Duration5 training days
📚Content4 modules · 8 sessions
🎓On completionAccredited attendance certificate
About the programme
Course Overview
Citizens experience government through events such as having a child, losing a job, starting a business or bereavement, yet most digital public services are still organised around the internal structure of individual agencies rather than around those events. The result is citizens navigating multiple logins, repeated data entry and disconnected forms to complete something that feels, to them, like a single task. This course teaches service designers and public sector teams to map life events end to end across agency boundaries, identify the touchpoints that cause the most drop-off and frustration, and redesign services around the citizen's actual journey rather than a single department's process. Sessions cover life-event journey mapping, data-sharing and once-only principles that avoid asking citizens for information government already holds, accessibility and inclusion requirements for public services, and the governance needed to coordinate redesign across multiple agencies with different systems and incentives. Participants leave with a mapped life-event journey for their own context, a redesigned service concept, and a governance plan for coordinating delivery across agency boundaries.
Expected Learning Outcomes
Identify the points in a life-event journey that cause the highest drop-off, delay or citizen frustration.
Apply once-only and data-sharing principles that avoid asking citizens to resubmit information government already holds.
Design a redesigned service journey that meets recognised accessibility and plain-language requirements.
Build a business case for a life-event service redesign that spans multiple agencies' budgets and systems.
Establish cross-agency governance structures that keep a life-event service coordinated after initial launch.
Measure the effect of a redesigned life-event service on completion rate, time to completion and citizen satisfaction.
Who Should Attend
Government service designers responsible for redesigning citizen-facing digital services.
Digital transformation leads coordinating projects that span multiple public sector agencies.
Policy officials who own a specific citizen life event, such as birth registration or job loss support.
User researchers conducting studies with citizens navigating government services during a major life event.
IT architects responsible for the data-sharing infrastructure that connects agency systems.
Accessibility and inclusion specialists reviewing public service journeys for citizens with additional needs.
Course Modules
Select any module to see its sessions and points.
01Understanding Citizen Life Events as a Design Unit
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Identifying and Scoping Life Events
- Define a life event as a citizen's real-world situation, such as starting a business, rather than a government transaction category.
- Select which life events to prioritise for redesign based on volume, citizen impact and current service failure rates.
- Scope the boundaries of a life event so the redesign covers the full journey without becoming unmanageably broad.
- Distinguish life events that sit within one agency from those that genuinely span multiple agencies and systems.
Session 2Mapping the End-to-End Journey Across Agencies
- Conduct citizen interviews and diary studies to capture the real sequence of steps taken during a life event.
- Build a journey map that shows every agency, form and login a citizen currently has to navigate for one life event.
- Identify duplicate data requests where citizens are asked for information already held by another part of government.
- Highlight moments of high emotional stress, such as bereavement or job loss, that require particular care in service design.
02Redesigning the Service Around the Citizen
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Applying Once-Only and Data-Sharing Principles
- Apply the once-only principle so citizens are not asked to resubmit data that another government system already holds.
- Design consent and data-sharing agreements between agencies that respect privacy law while enabling a joined-up journey.
- Identify the technical interoperability standards needed to exchange citizen data safely between agency systems.
- Address citizen concerns about data sharing transparently within the redesigned service.
Session 2Designing Accessible, Plain-Language Service Journeys
- Write service content in plain language that a citizen under stress can understand without prior knowledge of government processes.
- Design the service to meet recognised digital accessibility standards for citizens with visual, motor or cognitive impairments.
- Provide assisted-digital and offline routes for citizens who cannot or will not complete a service entirely online.
- Test the redesigned journey with citizens who represent the full diversity of the population served.
03Coordinating Delivery Across Agency Boundaries
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Building Cross-Agency Governance and Funding Models
- Establish a governance structure with clear accountability for a life-event service that spans multiple agencies.
- Negotiate funding and resourcing arrangements when the agency that benefits most is not the one bearing delivery cost.
- Resolve conflicting priorities between agencies whose individual mandates do not naturally align with a joined-up journey.
- Define service-level agreements between agencies for the data and processing steps a joined-up journey depends on.
Session 2Managing Legacy Systems and Technical Constraints
- Assess which legacy agency systems can support real-time data exchange and which require interim workarounds.
- Design a technical integration approach, such as a shared API layer, that avoids replacing every legacy system at once.
- Sequence technical delivery so citizen-facing improvements can launch before every backend system is modernised.
- Plan for agencies operating at different levels of digital maturity within the same life-event journey.
04Launching, Measuring and Sustaining Improvement
2 sessions · 8 points
Session 1Piloting and Scaling a Redesigned Life-Event Service
- Run a controlled pilot of the redesigned journey with a defined citizen segment before national rollout.
- Collect completion rate, time-to-completion and citizen satisfaction data from the pilot to justify wider rollout.
- Address operational issues, such as call centre volume or staff training gaps, revealed during the pilot.
- Plan a phased national rollout that accounts for regional variation in agency systems and local delivery arrangements.
Session 2Sustaining Cross-Agency Ownership After Launch
- Assign ongoing ownership for the life-event journey so it does not fragment back into separate agency services over time.
- Monitor the service continuously for new failure points as agency systems, policy or citizen expectations change.
- Report life-event service performance to the public in transparent, comparable terms.
- Use lessons from one life-event redesign to accelerate the next, building reusable patterns and shared components.
What the participant receives
4 course modules
A structured syllabus
8 training sessions
across 5 days
32 detailed points
Applied, detailed content
Accredited attendance certificate
On completing the programme
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