The Teal Book wins Treasury innovation award

The UK government’s definitive guide for public project delivery – The Teal Book – has been named HM Treasury’s Innovation of the Year 2025 at the department’s third annual Innovation Day.

Produced by Government Project Delivery, which is housed by the National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA), The Teal Book sets out how government organisations can meet the functional standards required for effective portfolio, programme and project delivery. It fills the gap between what government expects from major projects and how teams can practically accomplish that.

“At the very simplest… we’ve been quite clear for a few years on what we expect departments to do when it comes to delivering projects,” said Owen Kennedy, deputy director at NISTA. “What we didn’t have was anything that translated that into, how can you actually then achieve these outcomes?”

Published in April 2025 following extensive internal trialling, The Teal Book is the first government “coloured book” to be delivered digitally by design – rather than as a static PDF. The first version took around a year to produce, followed by a further year of internal testing before the team felt confident releasing it publicly.

Bringing the profession with it

The team maintains that listening to users was fundamental. Rather than imposing guidance from the centre, they deliberately designed an extended engagement period to make sure organisations saw it as theirs.

“I think this project really brought people along with it,” said content designer, Carwyn Williams. “People feel like it’s their thing – it’s for them – that they’ve been able to feed back on it.”

That engagement is evident in the results. More than 1,500 pieces of feedback have been submitted by over 250 government organisations, with more than 7,000 new users registering to access the content. The Teal Book webpages have been viewed more than 160,000 times this year alone, with users typically exploring around nine pages per visit and spending over five minutes on the site. Demand has remained high months after launch.

“We’re not seeing that level of drop-off,” added William Emmett, one of The Teal Book’s authors. “It shows there is that user need.”

Digital-first… with real impact

The Treasury award recognised the project’s digital approach. By moving away from one-off documents, The Teal Book offers fully accessible guidance aligned to the GOV.UK design system, live updates as policy and expectations evolve, and smart navigation from high-level principles to role-specific responsibilities. A built-in, line-by-line feedback tool means civil servants can highlight text and suggest changes instantly, without waiting for formal consultation windows.

“I’m quite proud of us getting down in writing for the first time all this project delivery knowledge,” said Emmett. “There have been multiple attempts over many years… this time we actually did it.”

Kennedy believes the project has also shifted a culture at the centre of government. “It’s often hard for people to picture what a different approach might look like until there is something tangible to point to,” he said. “The Teal Book has been a catalyst – it’s shown what’s possible and sparked a bigger ambition to put users, design and technology at the heart of the products and services we deliver to support departments.”

The platform has enabled a new internal design system for future Government Project Delivery products, accelerating development and giving teams practical examples of what digital-first guidance should look like.

What’s next: adoption, automation and AI

The team stresses that the ultimate measure of success is still to come: improving the delivery capability of government projects. Departments assess maturity against functional standards annually, and any uplift over the coming years will provide a proxy for The Teal Book’s impact.

“We’re too early to say whether The Teal Book has delivered… an improvement in the likelihood of successful projects,” said Emmett. “We’ve got many years of trying to continue to embed it and to help organisations adopt it.”

Future enhancements include deeper functionality and stronger integration with assurance tools. The team is exploring how to support users who prefer printed materials while still maintaining the advantages of digital updates.

Kennedy also plans to link The Teal Book directly with capability assessments so the system can automatically highlight relevant guidance where organisations need to improve.

There is also a growing emphasis on artificial intelligence. “Large language models aren’t always coming up with the right answer for the government-perspective. So, a next step is to optimise our content for artificial intelligence,” said Emmett. The aim is for emerging tools to access the most accurate guidance when giving project-related recommendations.

Kennedy believes the shift is already visible internally, even if it is hard to quantify. “It’s really hard to measure how much the culture, the narrative, the thinking has changed… but our approach to product and service design is completely different to where we were three years ago.”

Following the award, other government functions have approached the team to learn from its success. The hope is that The Teal Book becomes not just a guide for delivery teams but a model for how government publishes guidance in the digital era.