How we created the vision to transform the Department for Work & Pensions
Yesterday, DWP hosted an event for the Digital Leaders community from across government, called Transforming Together. As part of the day I presented a case study of how we created DWP’s business transformation vision, by collaborating with a broad community, and communicating in new ways. This is the text of what I said, including links to some of the material I referenced.
I’m sure everyone here knows something about DWP, but in terms of scale, we have 90,000 colleagues who are working every day to administer the pension and benefits system that over 22 million people rely on.
And with the publication of the Spending Review today, we are all facing a significant efficiency challenge, and we all have users who rightly expect us to become more digital. And the good news is that we have a huge opportunity to rise to that challenge using modern technology, which DWP, for one, isn’t yet making best use of. And we know that’s the right thing to do.
When I joined DWP, we’d just started our digital journey with the appointment of Kevin Cunnington as the department’s new digital leader. So I could see the commitment in bringing in the right leader. To achieve a transformation at this scale, it has to be someone’s full-time job at the executive level. Kevin had set up the first Digital Academy in the civil service, and had begun to get our change programmes working in a more digital way, on services like Universal Credit, New State Pension and Carer’s Allowance.
Business transformation is about having a vision and working towards it
But what we didn’t yet have was a unifying vision for the future — a shared sense of where we will take the department, which is a genuine step change not just an incremental improvement.
Business transformation is about having a vision and getting everyone working towards it. So this is the story of how we created our vision.
“What is digital?”
And as we got started, the biggest question around the department was “What is digital?”.
The organisation saw ‘digital’ as being mainly about offering services online. One of our early successes doing that was Carer’s Allowance, which showed that doing the user research and iterating the service, we could make it work so much better for our users. The team managed to strip out a third of the questions, and reduced ineligible claims by 41%, saving us £128,000 every year.
That was great, and a breakthrough for us. But what we had mostly done was digitise a paper-based claim process, and the next challenge is to integrate to the back-end systems and processes, to really transform the way the business works.
And back then, many of our DWP colleagues weren’t convinced that “Digital by Default” could be right for us, because they’d seen so much evidence that helping people find work is a face-to-face business.
So we had to reconcile this, and as I got started, I went round the organisation to see how it worked. And one of my first visits was to Stratford Benefits Centre to see the back-office operation there. Like everywhere in DWP, it is full of committed staff who go to work every day to help people at the most difficult time of their lives, and our colleagues want to do that as best they can. It was immediately obvious that there’s a real opportunity at DWP to get the back end of the operation working in a more digital way. And it was equally clear that it wasn’t going to be possible to glue a meaningful online service on top of the existing technology, and the paper-based processes that the operation depends on.
Our Operations colleagues deserve huge credit for reducing that back office running cost by 18% since 2010, improving our efficiency to the point where we can’t keep “pedalling the same bike faster” any more.
That meant we had to get clear that digital is not just websites or digital services, but it’s about transforming the way the whole of the business operates. It’s great to be here with Lara Sampson, who has led some brilliant work building Universal Credit. This is not just a website, it will be a complete digital service that will modernise a significant proportion of the department.
So how did we get more people around the department thinking that way? One of our very early steps along the journey was to agree some guiding principles for our transformation, and here’s what we came up with.
Guiding Principles
We shared these in a blog on GOV.UK last year if you’d like to read them in more detail.
Getting to an agreed statement of intent for our transformation was a challenge at the time, even at this high level of detail. But it turned out to be a real breakthrough, in setting out the priorities, and laying out the balance between user needs and government needs.
And like other departments, we had change programmes working separately, doing things in different ways, and we were missing opportunities to deliver in the most effective way. And because we’re delivering the biggest set of welfare reforms for a generation, there’s an opportunity to do that change in the best way possible.
Very quickly, the guiding principles started to stick across the change programmes.
It was great when we saw them popping up all over the place, because we were starting to get a shared sense of purpose.
Programmes were taking the principles and making them their own — writing the right-hand column to be specific for their work. And this worked really well to get people acting in a more consistent way towards our overall transformation.
And we even made a huge version, which we used as a backdrop at our early conferences.
Knowingly designing the vision
That was a great start, but we needed more detail on the vision. I set up a new core team to “knowingly design” where the department is going. That’s important because there are many perfectly legitimate differences of opinion about what we could do, and together we need to consciously make decisions about what we will do. You can’t do that on your own; you need to start with a small group of the right people who can go on to bring in the rest.
And we wanted to do the work in a really inclusive way, where we could get more people speaking the right language, get people contributing and committing to the vision, and start using the same vocabulary for concepts like service design.
We really focussed in on what people need from the services we offer, especially taking into account that one in four UK adults, about 12 million people, can’t perform basic tasks online. So, for example, DWP’s customer experience of the future will be more automated wherever that’s safe, and we won’t ask people for the same piece of evidence twice.
At the same time, we looked at how the department could best be organised to deliver that experience. Behind the scenes, there are the core things we do, like evidence verification, decision making, payments, preventing fraud, and keeping it all secure.
And all of those people and systems need to be connected together in a way that’s flexible, so that we can quickly set up the machine to deliver the government’s policy objectives.
So as our vision came together the key themes began to emerge. We’ll continue to be a ‘multi-channel business’ through JobCentres, phone and online. Making good use of data is going to be central to delivering the vision. Our services need to be able to keep evolving to meet users’ needs. We need to focus on our people priorities, and change the way we do change. And we have to become great at the 6 key ‘foundations’ at the bottom of the picture.
To power all of that, we need to start making best use of technology that’s now commonplace in the outside world. I’m sure you’re aware that some of our mission-critical technology dates back to the 1970s, so this is a big and complex challenge by any measure.
Critically, we want to get to a point where entire systems don’t have to be thrown away and rebuilt for every new policy.
It’s been a huge team effort to get to this stage. You need to be prepared to get into the detail of how things really work, and not just wordsmith papers. And you have to collaborate and learn along the way — we didn’t just invent this vision in an ivory tower, it belongs to everyone at DWP.
We know the themes in this picture are a close match with what some other departments are trying to achieve. And there are departments where it doesn’t necessarily match as closely, and that’s fine! The challenge is for each of us to have a clear vision for what we are working towards.
So at DWP we were delighted that we got to the point where our Permanent Secretary could say he was “very confident” that we can improve our services, going into the Spending Review. The outcome of that is ‘hot off the press’, and we’re now firming up our detailed plans to deliver it.
And in my team one of the next challenges is to shine a light into some of the “dark corners” of the department, and make sure we have a clear approach to how far to go with transforming them. For example, we’re looking at the areas where we have teams of people doing manual processing which the operation currently depends on, like re-keying fit notes, or building bundles of cases to pass to HM Courts & Tribunals Service.
Communicating the vision
In any transformation you need to collaborate and engage people around the journey. Communicating in a different way has been something we’ve set out to do from day one. One really good way we found to pass on the picture was to make a newspaper.
Here you can see our first newspaper, arriving the night before a series of events in Leeds.
That got great feedback, so we made a second newspaper for this series of events, which again includes the 2020 Vision in the centre pages, so everyone can have a copy to take away.
We’re constantly trying to work in the open, both within the department and beyond, because we recognise it makes things better. It hasn’t always been easy, and some of the material is necessarily sensitive. But we do want to share our work with everyone who’s here today.
To help pass on the 2020 Vision, we made a video, which we’ve now shared in our ‘DWP Story’ events with 6,000 leaders from all over the department.
This video was made by someone who was making films as a hobby while he was working in DWP Operations, and we’ve now recruited him into our team.
The video ends with the Permanent Secretary saying that our picture will evolve, but we’re using it now to spark conversations about our future and what it means for each of us. The feedback from those conversations has been great. The video was a real milestone for us, because people really appreciated being able to see all the moving parts on one page for the first time. We’re really proud of this, and especially that all of the members of our Executive Team have given it their commitment.
Getting to this stage was difficult. Lots of people weren’t sure of the value of what we were doing, and thought we didn’t need a picture. But now it’s everywhere around the department, and we’ve really shifted the mindset from “we don’t want this” to “when can we have it?”, which is great. So my advice would be: don’t be put off! Our environment can be tough, and Kevin’s support has made a big personal difference to a lot of people.
So now we need absolute focus on delivery. And that’s why we also have an event here for leaders from across DWP, which is themed around “doing the right work, in the right way, with the right people, in the right places” to achieve the vision.
Transforming Together
Something that’s really helped has been finding the right ‘translator’ for our work, who knows the department inside-out, has trusted relationships, and who also understands what we are trying to do. We’ve been really privileged to work with Chris Hayes over the past 6 months, and it’s been clear how much positive impact that’s had on our progress.
Another thing that’s helped us go faster has been referencing good work that’s been going on in other departments. So for example, when I first suggested that we needed a senior group to be the custodians of our vision, and to hold change programmes to account for building it, a lot of people were unconvinced. But when I told the stories of other departments who were also setting up a Business Design Authority, it was much easier to convince DWP colleagues we needed something similar. And since then, we’ve been talking with other departments to help them with what we’ve learned.
The only way to do a lot of this work is to do it ourselves within our departments. But there are clearly some things that need to work for all of government, which we shouldn’t all be constructing separately.
We know one critical platform we have to get right is identity, and we heard from Janet Hughes and Nic Harrison about the great work they’ve been doing together on GOV.UK Verify. It’s a perfect example of how shared platforms only work when they’re plugged into the departments, so we have to collaborate together to make them successful. And we’d like to start mapping out the other opportunities for sharing across departments.
As John Manzoni said in his introduction to the day, transformation is in our hands, and we can support each other to achieve great things. We’re already forming links across departments, and today we’re exploring this together as we build up the community across government. We recognise some departments are ahead of us, and some are just getting started.
