Transforming how scientists apply for licences in the UK - Alpha and beta phases

A regulator’s legacy technology needed replacing with a GOV.UK-compliant system, whilst maintaining business continuity.

Background

In 2017 a regulator reached out to us for help replacing their legacy digital system. The system is used by scientists to apply for and manage licences, and by the regulator to grant or refuse those licences.

Brief

The existing system, built in 2012, had a number of problems including:

• applications were emailed in paper format and staff had to input them by hand
• lack of mobile optimisation - a serious drawback for staff doing on site inspections
• the system wasn’t technically robust and work sometimes failed to save
• licences were issued as encrypted PDFs that some people couldn’t open
• unintuitive for new users, with a steep learning curve to understand how to perform simple tasks

“This system is the last place I’d look for licensing information” Scientist

These problems were reflected in a failed government service assessment, with just 3 out of 18 original Service Standard points being met.

What we did

The regulator's contract with their legacy supplier was due to expire in August 2019. Our brief was to replace the existing system with a compliant service, with minimal impact to the regulator’s operations.

We started by identifying the highest priority user needs. We then carried out rapid development cycles as we researched, designed and tested different features of the new service. In total we held 222 research sessions over 2 years, iterating our designs continually based on findings from these sessions.

A hand-drawn image of a new page from the service

Our delivered solution:

• removed the need for manual data entry in the application process
• digitised and improved licences, making them easily visible to authorised users
• was more technically robust and designed to support mobile working
• used clear and intuitive design patterns to aid first time users

Preparing to go public

The riskiest part of the service involved migrating over 18,000 licence records from the legacy supplier into the new system. We created a data migration strategy that involved automated and manual checks of the data and data cleansing.

A risk report detailed the most serious risks and the mitigating actions we’d take should anything go wrong. >Once the data was migrated, 15 research establishments with the most complex datasets were invited to check their data before we went live.

A mocked up example of a licence in the new service

Results

The service passed 3 government assessments and went live on time, with the legacy system going offline simultaneously. There were no disruptions to the regulator’s operations, with the new service going live over the weekend.

The new service saw a 50% reduction in the number of iterations of draft project licence applications, decreasing time and burden on senior staff assessing applications. There was also a 50% reduction in the time taken by staff to process personal licence applications.

The service is now an exemplar for large-scale digital transformations and features in a blog post for the services in government blog. It also features in Kate Tarling's excellent book The Service Organization.

Feedback

“The new system saves us so much time and is so much better. We are happy [with the] level of improvement and change!” Establishment licence holder at a major UK corporation

“Overall this project and the work the team are doing is really impressive.” Government service assessor