Checking your current capabilities

How quickly you can take advantage of what CMS Forms offers and the resulting benefits depends in part on how ready your ministry is.

On this page:

• Assessing your readiness
• Success factors
  • You have a forms team
  • You can assemble one
  • You can put someone in charge
  • Your forms are managed
  • You have a general plan
  • You know your goals
• Getting expert advice and guidance
• Taking the next step

Assessing your readiness

No new application or platform will instantly solve your business challenges. You'll need consider things like:

• How to apply the platform's capabilities to your business
• How to identify, train and support users during transition
• How to optimize the tool and intergrate it with business processes

Getting a sense of your ministry's state of readiness for a platform like CMS Forms will help you understand the potential resource investment and set expectations for how quickly you can start getting the value from it.

Since CMS Forms is for building and managing forms, primary success factors are going to be related to the state of forms and Forms Management in your ministry.

Success factors

Forms Management is an important business capability that supports all Information Management and Service Delivery capabilities. For decades, ministries were required to "establish and maintain a Forms Management Program." This could have been just a set of internal policies and procedures through to a full-service, in-house corporate program.

The following forms-related success factors can help you determine your ministry's current state of readiness. While not exclusive of additional success factors - such as executive support or a digital strategy - they can help you identify resources and opportunities to successfully transition from paper and PDF forms.

You have a forms team

Forms design and management is a specialized technical field, so some ministries centralize this function as a corporate service. The size and composition of the team is determined by things like the number and type of forms, frequency of change, and breadth of services. Job titles can vary, but industry-standard roles include:

• A Forms Manager to manage the design, development, and delivery of the ministry's forms management services
• Forms Analysts to develop best-fit forms or related solutions for business, technical, and citizen needs
• Forms Developers to implement those solutions into electronic formats using multiple platforms and technologies
• Forms Designers to implement those solutions into physical formats, including templates for system print output
• Forms Technicians to provide technical, business and service support for team members and their clients

If you have such a team, you may be well positioned to take quick advantage of CMS Forms. Team size and capacity will be your primary constraints.

You can assemble one

Forms teams employ multiple disciplines and skillsets to deliver their services and value to the ministry. They possess or have easy access to knowledge domains like:

• Business, process, and data analysis
• Graphic, technical, and interaction design
• Coding, programming, and development
• Policy development, interpretation and application
• Information, data and records management

If you have such individuals with available capacity, you may be able to assemble a team to focus on transition and transformation. As users gain experience with the application and process, both quality and efficiency will increase, allowing you to achieve results sooner.

You can put someone in charge

If you don't have a team and are unsure if you can assemble one, you might ask business areas to provide resources to transition their own forms. Coordinating, supporting and monitoring these efforts should be lead by an individual who can:

• Develop their own knowledge and skills
• Coach and support new users in their learning
• Track and report on progress to management and executive

This is essentially the role of a Forms Manager described earlier and elsewhere. Although a slower approach over all, you'll build capability and capacity across your ministry, while documenting and proving ministry-wide progress and results.

Your forms are managed

Beginning in a more print-focussed era, some ministries offloaded things like form production and distribution to (then) Queen's Printer. A smaller forms team may have coordinated business and performance aspects for the ministry, or business areas might have managed the services directly with the Printer. These services were discontinued in 2015 and the records and design files returned to the ministry or business areas.

From that point on, ministries and business areas needed to use in-house or contracted resources to create or revise forms. Skills and resources are rarely evenly distributed, so some forms may have been regularly revised and invested in, while others have remained unchanged for a decade or more. If your business areas have at least kept their form records complete and updated, they'll be able to provide needed information such as:

• How many forms are used, what format they're in, and how old they are
• Which forms generate issues for users or extra costs for government
• Whether any in-progress or planned service improvements include forms

This will be valuable in developing priority criteria and lists, so you can make the best use of available resources.

You have a general plan

You know you need to modernize service experiences. Maybe you expected that this would need to be done with application development. You have at least a basic plan on how you'll prioritize your development resources, perhaps based on:

• The visibility level of the service
• The volume of service provided
• The citizen need (such as accessbility)

You can use this plan to guide your development of new "front-end" service experiences separately and ahead of developing the "back-end" applications.

You know your goals

Your plan (or plans) aren't finalized yet, but you know the goals you want to achieve. You may have these documented in your Service, Business or Technical plans. Some of these goals could be:

• Provide citizens with modern, accessible and mobile-friendly digital access to services
• Align service and application development with standards and initiatives like the Digital Principles
• Ensure that service and application development complies with applicable policies and regulations
• Be responsible with taxpayer money by choosing efficient and effective solutions and methods

Knowing your goals can help you justify adding CMS Forms to your technology toolkit and allocating resources to use it to achieve your stated goals.

Getting expert advice and guidance

Government Digital Experience (GDX) are not just experts in using the applications we develop and manage. We have extensive experience in designing services and helping ministries develop their own in-house capabilities. This includes specialized expertise in forms design and management.

Before, during and after the onboarding process, we can provide guidance and suggestions for things like:

• Starting and good-fit approaches to building capability within your organization
• Developing Forms Management as an independent or intergrated capability
• Helping you adopt or adapt processes and standards for your needs
• Connecting your users to learning and support resources

Our primary focus is on the citizen experience, so we're motivated to help you succeed in creating the best ones possible.

Taking the next step

Now that you have a sense of your current capabilities and starting point, you're ready to begin onboarding.