1. Introduction

This guidance will help to:

• ensure a smooth handover process; from software vendor to software owner
• standardize software project delivery and deliverables in line with best practice; increasing quality, and normalising communication and expectations across projects to make it easier for teams to work together and transfer existing responsibilities or assume new responsibilities
• assist product owners who may be unfamiliar with Digital Penang’s approach to delivery and expectations for products.

These standards are designed to help teams follow best practices when designing and building services. They will also be used to ensure that all services meet a minimum level of quality.

Standards work most effectively when they have wide acceptance across the teams who will be using them. Sharing drafts of standards with teams and getting feedback from them frequently is the best way to ensure their relevance. The authors of these standards welcome all feedback; you can find the email address at the bottom of this section.

This standards document is designed to highlight areas of specific importance to Digital Penang. It should not be considered to be exhaustive and should be applied with your best judgement in mind. It can be helpful, for example, to look at other examples of projects and review the pro’s and con’s of different approaches. Most importantly you can always reach out to your product owner and/ or delivery manager for advice on how to apply parts of the standards.

There are complementary standards for digital products and delivery provided by MAMPU (Malaysian Administrative Modernisation and Management Planning Unit) as part of their efforts to modernise the Malaysian the public sector. The Digital Penang standards broadly support the MAMPU standards and only diverge where there is necessity or a refinement to be made. You can find the MAMPU documentation at https://sqa.mampu.gov.my/index.php/ms/. We also link to it in several places throughout this document in order to support Digital Penang’s choices.

Robust standards are particularly important in government because governments provide so many services, it can be difficult to make sure they’re all designed, built and operated in the best possible ways.

You may find that:

• government is split into different departments, divisions and teams
• people work in many different locations
• teams don’t always communicate or know what other teams are doing
• there’s no shared idea of what a good service is or how to build one

This can mean that:

• different parts of government build the same thing at the same time
• services look and feel totally different from one department to the next
• departments spend money on big digital projects which don’t work or provide a service no one needs

Following standards can help you to:

• save time and money
• build services which are simpler, faster and safer for users
• empower teams across government with shared ideas of good practice.

If you have further questions and/or inputs to the content in this document, feel free to contact Digital Penang at contact@digitalpenang.my

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