Start additional phases of work to improve your service

Date adopted: 
February 3, 2022
Last update: 
September 9, 2022

This guidance is for project teams that have already worked with eServices to launch a digital service. These teams are ready to proceed with additional phases of development work to improve the service.

Before you start

  • Review and prioritize existing user feedback for your service. This includes online feedback form submissions and in-person feedback.
  • Determine appropriate solutions to address user feedback. You can meet with an eServices delivery manager or user experience manager to go over your proposed solutions and talk about options. 
  • Review the product backlog from the previous development phase. Make sure your plan will include tackling high priority tasks from the backlog.
  • Determine if the planned work will require an update to your Privacy Impact Assessment (PIA) or Security Threat Risk Assessment (STRA).
  • Make sure you have funding in place to accommodate the work.

Get started

When it’s time to get started, you will still need to follow the government’s project process. There are some required eServices inputs, but for the most part – you can get to work on your own.

  1. If you want to work with the vendor that completed the last phase of work, email [email protected] to make sure that vendor is still on our qualified source list (QSL)
  2. You can set up a contract with the approved vendor. You can email [email protected] for a copy of our project scope brief template to use.
  3. If you require any optional services from eServices to get started with your work, contact your service delivery manager and add those services to the project service agreement. They will provide you with a cost estimate and update the agreement. For example, when embarking on a new phase of work you might need help:
    • prioritizing and determining solutions to address usability issues;
    • conducting user research or usability testing;
    • with the procurement process; or
    • wireframing a new feature.
  4. Once your project is underway, you’ll need to have the required service maturity assessments completed to ensure the new development work meets the digital service standards. These are conducted by a user experience manager on the eServices team. We recommend you book these 2 weeks out. You can email [email protected] to set up an assessment. Once you’ve passed the final service maturity assessment your service is clear to go live to the public.
  5. When it comes time to deploy to UAT and Prod, your vendor may need to work with an eServices web architect. If they aren’t already working with one, email [email protected] to set this up.
  6. The project team will test all of the enhancements to ensure they work before approving the move from UAT to Prod and once they are live.
  7. We recommend you also test the improvements on users to confirm they have improved the user experience.

As you collect user feedback you should add it to the product backlog so you can refer to it when you start planning your next round of improvements.