From a stalled legacy system project to award-winning success
The Home Office team arrived at Zaizi HQ on Monday with a problem they had been unable to solve previously. By Wednesday, they had prototypes and a roadmap to finally tackle their legacy system.
The client
Home Office
Zaizi’s role
Strategy
Agile
Product management
Service design
User research
UX & content design
Engineering
Architecture
Devsecops
Cloud services
The client says…
“Zaizi are receptive to the customer’s pain points, adept at finding the problem space and able to identify the best suitable product for end users. Our collaboration with Zaizi was even recognised with a prestigious award.”
Rabah Belatri, Senior Technical Delivery Manager, Home Office
The brief
The Home Office team relied on an outdated spreadsheet system to handle highly sensitive applications, which could not cope with the growing demand.
This led to wasted time on manual paperwork and increased environmental impact and security risks associated with the need to store the documents physically. Since the data was only available in paper, it was not electronically accessible for management to make informed decisions or conduct analysis.
Past efforts to address the issue lacked stakeholder engagement and failed to meet user needs due to a lack of agile working methods and consultation with end users.
The Home Office knew they had to move away from the legacy system and find a new, more secure, and sustainable solution. And they needed quick visibility of potential alternatives to address the problem.
The team wanted to involve all stakeholders, including senior managers and end users, in developing a customised solution capable of processing the highly sensitive data. The digital solution would also allow senior leaders to access the data, enabling them to conduct reporting and analysis.
Transformation Day: Find out how to make a start on solving your complex digital problem
The delivery
Before the Transformation Day workshop, our analysts assessed their current digital and technical setup, including analysis of any previous work, metrics, business processes, feedback etc.
To understand the client’s needs and requirements, we undertook four interactive sessions with ten members of their team. We brought in a multi-disciplinary team consisting of design and technical staff.
Together with the client, we traced their journey and identified goals, problems, and barriers hindering their ideal state. We then conducted a design exercise to prioritise potential solutions.
The workshop gave them a roadmap to completely replace the legacy system. At the end of the week, we conducted a technical evaluation of the design to see what we could deliver.
“Zaizi understood the problem. Through the workshop, their subject matter experts assessed our situation, came up with suggestions, and defined a roadmap for a successful product. During those workshops, through early wireframes, we were given illustrations of what the new system could look like.”
Rabah Belatri, Senior Technical Delivery Manager, Home Office
The outcome
By taking a comprehensive and holistic approach, we worked with their stakeholders to map out the entire problem. This allowed us to step back and identify areas where we could streamline the process and introduce a new, sustainable way of working.
The short-time frame allowed us to accelerate the decision-making. It meant all the stakeholders were aligned and — as they were in the sessions — had visibility and ownership of the problem.
Based on our analysis and final report, Zaizi was commissioned to undertake a beta phase of the work. Our approach involved breaking the roadmap into three-month missions to eliminate the legacy system entirely.
The new digitised and automated system is completely paperless. It:
- is more efficient and secure
- is not reliant on spreadsheet and storage of physical documents
- has improved data integrity
- is easily integrable with other systems
- is easier to monitor and audit
- provides analytics to inform decision making
Recently, the Home Office recognised the importance of the project and awarded the team a prestigious internal award for innovation.
“Constant engagement, iteration and transparent ways of working from Zaizi helped the stakeholders shape the requirement. It led Zaizi to deliver a successful MVP and deploy live early in the lifecycle of the project. The solution addressed our pain points and allowed us to realise business benefits early.”
Rabah Belatri, Senior Technical Delivery Manager, Home Office
Other case studies
-
Helping local councils revamp taxi licensing to boost efficiencies and reduce costs
-
Wrap-up: Our impact on digital government services in 2023
-
Secure and cost-effective archiving of court judgments with serverless technology
-
Working with users to improve support services for leaseholders and park home owners
-
Exploring the case for a national landlord register
-
Creating new, more efficient operations for a central government organisation
