Most government programs start small. A pilot, one department, a few dozen nominations or applications. A PDF form and a shared inbox are enough to run it. Then the program succeeds and gets rolled out across agencies, and the same PDF form now arrives a few hundred times a round. Each one has to be opened, checked, re-keyed into a spreadsheet and forwarded to a review panel, who send their scores back by email.
If you are running a program like this, you know the symptoms already. What follows is why they happen and what the realistic options are.
Where it breaks
- Forms come in wrong. Blank fields, an old version of the form, a scan of a printout. Every one has to be chased, and the applicant is often someone who will only ever use the form once.
- The spreadsheet becomes the system. Somebody re-keys every submission into a tracking sheet. It is the only place the whole round can be seen, and it belongs to one person.
- Review happens in inboxes. Panel members get attachments, score them in their own way and reply. Collating the scores is a job in itself, and there is no record of who saw what and when.
- Reporting takes a day. When the executive asks how many nominations came from each agency, or how this year's shortlist compares to last year's, someone spends a day in the spreadsheet.
What to try first
If the volume is modest and the program is stable, an online form tool with a shared tracking sheet will get you through another round or two. A form builder can enforce required fields and produce a clean export, which removes most of the re-keying. Reviewers can score in a shared sheet instead of replying by email. It is not elegant, but it is cheap, and it will show you what the real requirements are.
It stops working when the process has stages. A manager nominates, the nominee completes their part, a panel reviews in rounds, a shortlist is approved and outcomes are sent out. Form tools are built for a single submission, not a workflow, so everything between the stages falls back to email.
What a purpose-built portal involves
A nominations or applications portal handles each stage online. Managers log in and nominate their people. Nominees get a secure link and complete their section, with questions tailored to the program and validated as they type. Reviewers see the applications assigned to them, score against the agreed criteria, and the system collates the results. Program staff can see the whole round on a dashboard and export the reports the executive asks for.
That is what we built for the NSW Public Service Commission, which needed to capture nominations for a leadership program across the NSW Government. The portal has tailored application questions, password-free secure access for people who use it once a year, staged review and detailed reporting across the whole process. It also had to work on the older browsers still running on departmental desktops, which is the kind of requirement an off-the-shelf form tool cannot meet.
A portal like this is not a large build by government standards and can be procured and delivered inside a single program cycle. The work that matters most happens before any code is written: mapping the stages, the roles and the rules of the program exactly, so what gets built is the process you actually run rather than a generic version of it.
If your program is still held together by PDFs and a shared inbox, have a look at what we build for government, or tell us what needs capturing and who needs to review it.
