Sarah Ravenhill

Hello. Welcome to our experience report. I'm a digital manager with nearly 20 years, everything from ITIL all the way through to digital transformation, and some of that we can talk to you about today.

Caitlin Smith

I'm Caitlin Smith. I'm from Equal Experts. It's a global consultancy, and I'm here to support talking about our experience transforming HMPO, the Passport Office.

If you have any questions about Equal Experts, we've got [unclear] here, if you want to talk to him afterwards. It's really great to be back. I spoke in 2021, so really pleased to do that.

So who is His Majesty's Passport Office? It's a part of a wider organization, which is called the Home Office in the UK. From the Passport Office perspective, we process 7 million applications per year. We have 50 million valid passports in the UK. There are six types of citizenships in the UK. Across the UK, we have seven regional offices that we're supporting, and 3,000 caseworkers and 500 digital staff.

Our area has about 100 digital staff within that, and we're supporting the casework side of the application. So we support one product. There's one product, which is the passport, and we have the application that supports the caseworkers.

There have been 11 government digital strategies in the UK since 1996, all seeking to address usability, efficiency, and legacy systems. But there are not many examples of ones that have truly transformed from a digital perspective.

Here is an example of the transformation program that we're under. There are 100 projects that sit within this transformation. So transforming the Passport Office, and it has legacy systems, it has new services that are being built out. This just shows you the scale of the transformation program.

And so what we're going to share with you today is our particular program, this four-phase journey in this complex, regulated environment: retrospective, [unclear] through time. So each one in turn: steel threads and building, the scaling, and the long year and long [unclear].

We can't cover everything. Sarah is going to talk about our target operating model, any of our education programs, [unclear], all the rest. We both talked about two things we learned in there.

Sarah Ravenhill

[Unclear] in the room diagram, this country. So this is from being a disruptive unit within our business to a trusted partner.

On the right-hand side, that's actually a very, very basic diagram on micro and technical steps to grow from the very first three micro app components.

So this is where we started. This is what we had to deal with in the beginning. We had a many-people situation, case [unclear], very, very difficult change, and workflow in this system is governed highly by movement of paper.

That picture on the [left/right] hand side of this diagram, and these application forms, going to caseworkers. They did not have that paper, they could not access the process. It [unclear] all kind of stuff.

And the casework they did was on [unclear] sites, seven, and slightly different ways of working. It was repetitive and very, very, very boring.

And so we started off with our little team. We did technical [unclear], and this got to carry on. But when people realized we were building, they had a panic. This organization [unclear].

And so really comforting Scrum, which is nice. And then what we didn't tell them was we put in this really advanced CI in the background, government. We didn't [unclear].

We've [unclear] these in what was going to be the program costs, very, very good. They don't necessarily work within our digital teams. And they gave us a document about this: four different business frameworks, [unclear] scenario [unclear] our stakeholders.

So we brought visual tools, things that everyone would probably be familiar with: service blueprints, story journeys. And we identified from those [unclear].

Having done all that and seeing what was left, we knew we could not do all that. So I think the secret sauce in our transformation is to connect to your old system. So a new one and our old one are actually integrated at the moment. There are drawbacks to that, but what this means is if your new system can't do anything, you can pass a case into the old, and you're not disrupting the business.

Ready, went to our [unclear] and said, "Can we put the [unclear]?" And they said, "No, we need the [unclear]." And said, "And we want to continuously, routinely, manually sample the system. You're still doing the right things." That still makes me wince seven years later. It really [does].

So this was the point. We chose tests, education program, a lot of translating for non-tech people. But that was really, really successful.

So my lesson in that is: don't hide when you're advanced. Share the good stuff.

At the end of the stage, created one passport, just one, and [unclear] was our stakeholders got [unclear] much.

So steel threads are great, and you've got to build out your complexity there. At this point, the program said, "That's great. Have one year to build [unclear] old system," took years [unclear] the spending.

They say to you, "Three to four years, what are you going to be doing in three to four years? And tell us how it would be exactly, exactly what it costs." We'll come back to time to build.

And so the program didn't know it was asking us for this. This one year is just not enough time. We took those story maps, great artifacts we developed, brought them back, showed them off. "Look, this is what you're asking for." Great.

So they gave us some more time, but not a lot more. So everything we were doing there then had an outcome. Even if it was end to end, we used this, we were [showing] everything achieved. So that was quite successful.

[Unclear] was probably one of the most complex technical developments we did. If you're running an [unclear] and you want a person to push the next application button, you have to match to their skills and their experience or their team, and make sure they work with their team around again. And then what happens if some of the users think the team doesn't have skills?

So we did all this really big, very, very successful [unclear]. But at this point, even though users had feedback, analysis was taking a very long time [unclear] work, also guidance users.

So pilot user group, innovative for government department. They don't believe in UCD for this stuff. They're going to train everything out. This group took a lot of fighting for. Volunteers, they came [unclear] with us, co-located. This was my dream. And they gave us some real feedback, and we were able to really [bring] down the analysis, because instead of waiting for documentation, just go ask the person in the next room, "What does that mean?" They would tell you. So that really, really sped things up.

The other part of government departments is your approval always [unclear]. So for this, we involved the concept of team [unclear], include policy. They'll come in and work with us. So approvals left. We're speeding things up and we're reducing the volume. So this is about [unclear] three, we many passports.

Caitlin Smith

Thanks, Sarah.

So we've gone from the first phase, one passport printed. We've then gone to building out our foundation, and then we've got 2 million passports printed. We're now at the next phase of our journey. So how do we scale that up?

Originally, we started to plan out: we're going to slowly train, bring on our users. So imagine those 2,000 users, and we suddenly had to start thinking about how we were going to prove this out.

So we wanted to work with our stakeholders so that they would have confidence, and we didn't want to change our way of working. So we talked about having feature flags so we could continue to develop in the background, but give them confidence in terms of when we turn those features on.

As a part of this, you imagine thousands of users, we needed to be really clear on how we were going to manage these changes and how we were going to educate the users. So what we did is we grew a change specialist group, but they were within our team. They were embedded with the engineers, the developers, the product teams. They knew exactly what changes were coming, and then they would work with the teams, the training teams, the operations teams, to help to decide when to turn the feature flags on and to be able to roll out the new feature.

And so that was starting to work really well. We were slowly starting to scale out, and then we had the pandemic. This suddenly changed our whole direction.

If you imagine the old system, you had to physically be in the building to process the application. So at this point, none of the caseworkers or the users could use the old system. So we needed to suddenly bring on, at pace, all these users onto the brand new system.

It was a whole experience because before, people were reluctant to move onto the new system. Now you had them begging to move onto the new system, which was fantastic, a blessing and a curse. But this brought around new challenges. We had them wanting new features quicker, sooner. We were trying to maintain the service at pace while trying to continue to deliver this new service.

So we had new challenges. We used data to inform how we were going to prioritize and how we worked with our stakeholders to prioritize that.

At the end of this phase, we had 7 million passports printed, and we had roughly 1,000 caseworkers on the system.

So we're now at the end of our journey. We're at that long tail. This is a hard bit of the journey. There's some fundamental changes to the way our users use the system. So they now have a concept of a national queue.

Imagine before, when they had all their regional centers, they were able to manage their own queuing system: when they take the applications, how they process those applications. But now, with the new system, there was a single national queue that they distributed the work, which means they had to start thinking about different ways of processing the applications. The whole business processes around that needed to change.

They used a lot of the data to help now manage and provide that insight to be able to manage that workload. And now that we're at that end of the journey, we do still need to have that robust change control because we know we need to get to the end to see the real return on investment. We still keep that tight, but we try to keep it lean.

And then we do that by having a concept of a quartet with our product family. So we have our digital service managers, the operations team, all the teams working together to make those priority calls.

And we decided, at the end of this, it's about our edge cases. So we have our long term, 96% of the applications are now going through the system. So how do we tackle that last little bit?

We brought back the concept of the pilot group. So instead of just making technology changes, that could be policy changes, or it could be business process changes. It's about the diminished returns.

So we have this group together, working away to decide which features to work on, which policies to change, and we're on track to deliver at the end of the year.

So at this point, we've done 17 million passports printed. We have over 2,000 caseworkers that can use the system throughout that end of journey.

Sarah Ravenhill

And this is the system we've produced. So we now have an award [winning] digital system.

It's [unclear], you can right [unclear]. You're to remind us for the customers when it comes documents to all the basic text comparison stuff on your application form, send passport. Yeah, you have to do that, absolutely.

And so they get this very direct interface with just the thing that they need to see. And those things are presented in the most efficient way we can, because we focused on the new user design during our [unclear].

And these are the benefits. So we have a colleague who said, when [unclear] that slide, that the [legacy] system [unclear] dots at the time taken in. The blue dots at the bottom are the new one. Huge, huge advances here.

Even the two-minute saving at the bottom left really adds up, because these 5% [unclear]. So [unclear].

You said elsewhere in the conference, this is not about automating people's jobs. You're getting these people to focus on the more important work. So things like prevention, human value.

Caitlin Smith

Okay, so where are we?

When we started this journey, the press was all over the Passport Office. People in the UK really value travel, so when they can't get their passports, it hits the headlines. But we're now at a point where you can see here we're having positive press. People are happy with the system. We still have our [unclear], but right now it's fantastic.

We've got 96% of the intake now going through the new system, with 60% of the casework now automated. 17 million passports printed. We're deploying roughly 2,005 deployments a year.

And here are some examples of feedback that we've received. This is from a customer that has used the system, the customer-facing system, for many years and is really, really happy with it. And then we have some internal users who, again, now can focus on the task at hand. So they're really happy.

Digital transformation is possible in a complex, regulated environment. We want to leave you with a number of lessons.

For us, agile, cloud platforms, and CI/CD are crucial foundations. Get those in at the beginning. Evolve your working practices alongside technical pipelines. This was really a transformation, both business and technology. It's really important that that's considered.

Get your data into the hands of your stakeholders. Get that transparent. Allow them to make the decisions. Allow them to see what's going on.

And you can't change user behavior through training alone. And this is user research, pilot. Get as close to users as possible.

So yeah, thank you for listening today. Hope [unclear]. We need anything [unclear]. We're also [on the] stage conference.