We are excited to announce that One Big Thing - our annual initiative to drive cross-Civil Service action around a shared priority - is back on 14 October 2024!
Last year's focus on data skills was a tremendous success, with an astonishing half a million hours of data learning undertaken by 212,000 civil servants. This year, the theme is Innovation: ‘One Big Thing starts with One Small Change’. This is all about using our combined creativity to improve how we work and how we serve the public!
We want all civil servants to be equipped with the knowledge and skills to innovate and feel inspired to experiment, collaborate, and share new ideas. “Innovation is and must be for everyone’’, as this year’s sponsor, Jo Shanmugalinham, Second Permanent Secretary at the Department for Transport, noted. We're out to prove that innovation is not just a buzzword - it's something within everyone's reach.
The power of small changes
From speaking with innovators across the Civil Service, we’ve seen first hand how innovation drives progress, and how innovators are at the heart of how we improve policy, process and service delivery:
- A team of six in the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government, in just six weeks, created an AI chatbot called “HR Harry” to answer HR queries.
- Civil servants are developing skills in data science, development and AI with Evidence House, an initiative led by the 10 Downing Street Data Science team.
- A team in the UK Hydrographic Office automated their licence request process to cut customer waiting time from an average of two days to an instant response.
- Project Spark, by Government Communications Service (GCS), is a Dragon’s Den style competition to encourage people to submit ideas that GCS will help them to develop. As a part of Project Spark, colleagues at the Met Office are driving accessibility in digital comms, in recognition that 1 in 5 people in the UK have a disability that affects internet and social media use.
These changes show that learning to innovate is about delivering the highest quality service for the public whilst also helping us make the Civil Service a brilliant organisation to work in.
How is it different from last year?
Building upon our experiences from last year, we have been working with departmental One Big Thing champions and a cross-government working group to design and develop the next iteration of One Big Thing to be even bigger and better!
We wanted to make this year more flexible and highly tailored - it’s not only about civil servant’s understanding the innovation process but applying their learning to make small changes that creatively respond to the unique local challenges they face in their teams or departments.
There will be three components to One Big Thing 2024:
- Learning: Civil servants will be invited to complete the ‘Innovation Masterclass’ – a short innovation e-learning course, which breaks down the innovation process into small steps in a way they can practically apply to their work.
- Team Conversations: Next, they will participate in team conversations to reflect on their learning and share ideas for a ‘small change’.
- Experimentation: Teams will experiment with delivering the agreed small changes.
One Big Thing 2024 runs from Monday 14th of October until Monday 14th of February. If you want to know more and keep up with the latest One Big Thing updates, visit A Modern Civil Service hub.
This is a guest blog from the One Big Thing team.
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