Property & Asset Management Portal Refresh

What was the problem?

• Legacy Solution - The current solution had been in place for around seven years. Systemwide updates had ceased after the first three years meaning that for four years there had been incremental and component-based upgrades. As such there was limited consistency across the application architecture meaning further configuration was difficult without deepening the now silo driven solution.

• Digital Uptake - The legacy solution had grown to service multiple parts of the business and the teams that sat within it. Due to this, there was minimal integration between those core component parts many of which sat in silo. On an initial assessment we estimated a digital uptake of around 50%. This meant that only half of the potential system related interactions were taking place supported by the digital solution.

• Manual Data Manipulation - The portal presented as a central hub within the property function. There were a number of key integrations around the business and with supporting organisation, including the key area of Asset Management planning. The limited ability to integrate meant that much of the data was passed between systems manually.

• Lack of a Complete Picture – With limited integration capabilities and heavy manual data processing the portal presented little ability to present a complete picture of the assets. As such, the Asset Management function were unable to accurately predict the status and financial viability of their assets.

“through years of ad-hoc system upgrades we were unable to formulate a complete picture of our assets this put us in the difficult position as a business of not being able to accurately forecast the financial viability of those assets”

Head of Asset Management

The organisation aspired to replace the current portal with a new cloud-based version which addressed all the key problems as outlined above.

What did The Crown Consulting Group do?

The Crown Consulting Group aligned by default to GDS standards and ran the discovery, alpha and beta phase of the project in complete unison with the internal business and technical teams. We then supported the organisation is putting the service Live.

As standard, our approach included the following areas of investigation;

User Research – Was designed to understand the users how they are currently using the system, the pain points they are experiencing and the ways in which they want to use the future system. Our emphasis around the user research was to identify and understand these perspectives from the full demographic of users. This included the core central teams, the teams sat within different areas of the business and partnering organisations, the wider property function and any identified citizens.

We used existing data, organisational structures and case files to identify are user groups. We use this to create our user personas and then used surveying, interviewing , group workshops, time and motion studies and general observations to identify the areas of consideration.

Our output included user journey Maps with the addition of sentiment an appropriate analysis at all stages of user interactions. We produced a comprehensive pain point and aspiration log, we qualified our personas and performed statistical analysis on all output metrics.

The above allowed our user research team to create issue trees and a number of hypothesis as to how the problem and component elements of the problem may be resolved.

Business Analysis – Our business analysis team was responsible for supporting the user research initiatives and working with the internal teams within the organisation and partnering organisations to identify complete process maps, business requirements and system and architectural improvements.

Working in Unison with the user research team the business analysis team drafted a complete set of user Storey based requirements for functional and non-functional elements of a new solution. In addition, the business analysis team created a full process taxonomy which outlined all processes that the solution needed to perform, support and accommodate. The process taxonomy served to understand where the citizen facing touchpoints were , where the integration points were and those processes which were run solely by the property function team.

Business analysis and user research worked together took a light and analyse the outputs of both initiatives. This allowed us to create a holistic viewpoint of the service on apply our standard people, process , technology stunts to understand the three core elements.

Design – In Unison with business analysis and user research or designers started by creating some basic wire frames to represent possible user journeys on a new portal. Designers and business analysis worked with internal team members external partnering organisations and citizens to assess validate and where necessary , refresh, the wire frames.

Following the completion of the business analysis and user research output, our design team involved the wire frames into working prototypes to illustrate some of the high touchpoint transactional process is that the new portal would need to facilitate. These prototypes we're directly linked to the hypothesis driven from the user research and the business analysis activities. The objective was to refine the possible solutions before the end of discovery so that we could enter an Alpha stage with two to three potential solutions to further enhance, test and explore.

Architecture – our architecture team was focused on addressing the need for integration, solving the problems around manual data handling and in accuracies within the data sets across the systems and identifying any architectural and infrastructure related improvements that may be required to affectively host a modern solution.

By default, are architects align to GDS standards. As such the latest WordPress version hosted on an AWS platform was identified to be the most strategically aligned technical solution. The added benefit of this direction allowed us to utilise many of the reusable code elements within the GDS stack. This granted the possibility for greater security controls, people management and platform monitoring capabilities.

“they worked to the standards outlined within the Service Manual and GDS project delivery framework to the letter, it was clear to me they are aligned by default. At all stages of the project are internal staff were included , supported and empowered”

Senior IT Project Manager

What was the outcome?

• Legacy Solution - The legacy solution was replaced with a modern WordPress instance hosted on an A WS platform. This not only aligned to government strategic direction but offered the organisation the ability to utilise many of the reusable code components that GDS have developed over the past five years. The benefit of this being, we were able to offer greater controls around security , platform monitoring and people management

• Digital uptake - initially we estimated the digital uptake of the legacy portal to be around 50%, this meant that only around half of the possible transactions we're using the digitally based avenues the portal provided. We agreed to set an optimistic 70% digital uptake on the new portal within the 1st six months with a stretch target of 75%. Through our increased knowledge of our users, greater understanding of the business process is the portal needed to facilitate and dramatically improved integration capabilities we exceeded the stretch target and attained a digital uptake of around 80% within the first six months from go live.

• Manual Data Manipulation - Architecture team worked in Unison with business analysis and internal teams to understand what and where the integrations were required. With the modern platform and reused code elements we were able to leverage greater control over our integrations completely redesigning these. Taking this approach allowed us to review the data elements needed to attain the objective. The new portal completely eliminated the need for manual data interaction. Integrations was split buy real time and batch updates as appropriate. The added benefit was that we were able to optimise performance through some revisions to the quality of service (QoS) structure within the organisation.

• Lack of a Complete Picture – Our platform revisions , GDS alignment and completely redesigned integrations meant we were able to use the portal to accommodate a single source of data which facilitated reporting and accurate asset management planning. This allowed the organisation and partnering organisations to access the same data about the same assets in real time.

Throughout the process, as standard, all our teams worked in complete unison with the internal representation to complete appropriate knowledge transfer, training and coaching activities as required across all areas of the business.

“refreshing to finally see a consultancy that put emphasis on knowledge transfer skills and training for in-house team members, this empowered our team and helped drive us to adopt new standards, technologies and approaches – Thank you!”

Head of Project Delivery.