The DSS Pre-Assessment Diagnostic helps digital teams, product owners, and government partners prepare for a formal Digital Service Standard (DSS) assessment.

It provides an independent review of your service against the 13 DSS criteria, helping you understand your readiness, identify gaps, and plan improvements before a stage-gate or live assessment.

This diagnostic gives you a clear, evidence-based picture of how your service aligns with the Australian Government Digital Service Standard, highlighting strengths and practical areas for uplift.

The diagnostic references both policy intent and practical implementation maturity, making it suitable for early discovery through to live stages.

The assessment is built on the Digital Transformation Agency’s (DTA) Digital Service Standard, which sets out the principles for delivering high-quality, user-centred, secure, and sustainable digital services.

Evidence is gathered through guided interviews and document review across 13 principles. The system adapts based on how your service is designed and delivered.

1.Have a Clear Intent
A clear, high-level definition of the user problem being solved balances their needs with government priorities and requirements.

2. Know Your User
Deeply understanding the contexts and reasons that users choose or avoid a service will reveal how to make it more valuable to them.

3. Leave No One Behind
A deliberate effort to challenge assumptions and design for marginalised users will ensure the service is inclusive, accessible and useful for all.

4. Connect Services
Designing and building a connected, interoperable service grants users a simple, seamless experience and enables government to function as one.

5. Build Trust in Design
Making sure the service is useful, easy, inclusive, transparent and stable will build users’ trust and confidence in government.

6. Don’t Reinvent the Wheel
Drawing on other agencies’ experiences and adopting common platforms, patterns and standards will deliver value for government and familiarity to users.

7. Do No Harm
Understanding how a service impacts users’ digital rights and privacy will protect them from adverse and unintended consequences.

8. Innovate With Purpose
Innovating with clear intent will give meaning and justification to harnessing new technologies and avoid new for the sake of new.

9. Monitor Your Service
Continuous monitoring and measurement of services will ensure they operate smoothly, remain secure and cater for users’ evolving needs.

10. Keep It Relevant
By responding to users’ feedback and changing needs with impactful improvements, the service will remain fit for purpose.

You’ll receive three key outputs at the conclusion of the diagnostic:

1. Readiness Snapshot

A maturity overview showing how your service aligns with each DSS principle, including relative strength, risk areas, and next steps.

2. Evidence Pack

A structured record of interview insights, documentation, and artefacts gathered during the process — suitable for internal assurance or for briefing your formal assessors.

3. Roadmap for Uplift

A prioritised set of recommendations for addressing gaps before formal assessment, helping you focus on the changes that matter most for compliance and service quality.

The diagnostic is designed to be light-touch and adaptive. Effort depends on project size and the quality of existing documentation.

• Small teams or early-stage services: typically 1–2 contributors (product manager, designer) over 3–5 days.

• Established or beta-stage services: 3–5 contributors (delivery, UX, dev, operations) over 1–2 weeks.

• Large or complex services: 5–8 contributors, 2–3 weeks with deeper evidence review.

The platform reduces time and friction by focusing questions dynamically — collecting only the evidence needed to form a confident assessment.

Unlike traditional consulting reviews, this diagnostic uses adaptive assessment technology to gather and evaluate evidence intelligently.

It eliminates slide decks and spreadsheets, providing consistent, evidence-based insight in a fraction of the time.

• Independent: No vested interest in project delivery outcomes

• Structured: Consistent scoring and rationale across principles

• Actionable: Roadmap linked directly to observed evidence

• Scalable: Suitable for single products or multi-service portfolios

This assessment is not a substitute for a formal DTA stage-gate review, but it prepares you for one.

It is also not a delivery audit or a process compliance checklist — it is a readiness and maturity assessment that focuses on principles, not paperwork.

• Product and delivery teams preparing for a formal DSS assessment

• Agencies seeking independent review of service quality before gate review

• Digital service managers wanting to baseline maturity and plan improvement

• Consultants and partners helping government clients lift DSS performance

The Digital Service Standard Pre-Assessment Diagnostic is available for a fixed price of $1,250 AUD (ex GST).

Once purchased, you’ll have 30 days from the date of activation to complete the self-assessment and evidence submission.

Our system will automatically generate your deliverables — including your readiness snapshot, evidence pack, and roadmap — based on the information provided by that date, or sooner if you complete the exercise early.

Extensions or deeper follow-up reviews can be arranged separately if required.