Choosing and managing your users
Last updated on November 22, 2024Form design and management has a direct and significant affect on the citizen experience. You may want to limit access to CMS Forms to those with appropriate knowledge and experience to help prevent issues.
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Why limit access?
Forms have always been a very technical business tool, regardless of the media used. In addition to design, production, distibution and control aspects, forms have many business, legal and regulatory ones as well. As a result, they are often designed and managed by specialized teams for maximum quality, throughput and cost control.
Forms that are designed and managed well:
- Meet or exceed the expections of citizens and staff
- Improve the organization's reputation and brand
- Reduce processing costs through simplification and error reduction
- Reduce cost of ownership by using the most cost-effective technologies
- Can be quickly adapted to revised needs or requirements
- Minimize potential social, political, legal, financial or other risks
- Evolve with the organization and its services, capabilities and customers
Forms are critical to service delivery and experience. Their design and management should be treated as such.
Start with a "Forms Manager"
A Forms Manager is the lead of a ministry's forms team. They usually have considerable knowledge and experience in Forms Management. They may also have experience in areas like service design, operations management, resource development, or similar.
If you don't have a team, consider assigning someone this role anyway. They can act as a central point of contact and take charge of identifying forms, reporting on transition progress, and whatever else is appropriate for the ministry. It's beneficial to have someone with knowledge and understanding at an organizational level.
In terms of the Service Agreement with the ministry, the Forms Manager is the primary contact between the ministry and GDX.
Finding prospective users
The wide range of tools, techniques and requirements for building good forms are largely unknown to the average person. They may need considerable training and support to undertake this responsibility, especially if it won't be a regular part of their role.
Members of an established forms team are an obvious choice, but you may also see good progress and results by finding people with related transferrable knowledge and providing supplemental training and supports where necessary. Look to existing teams such as:
- A service design team who have designed or built forms
- A development team with quality front-end experience
- A web team who have managed downloadable or online forms
You are likely to find plenty of suitable individuals within your organization.
What about those PDFs?
CMS Forms can automatically generate PDFs of your forms, but if you want to reuse your fillable forms as templates, you'll need someone with the time, skills and tools to modify or recreate them. Look for someone with desktop publishing tools and experience. They can be part of your "forms team" or operate separately to provide templates as needed.