UK Ministry of Justice
Identifying service opportunities in civil justice
Understanding whole system civil justice journeys using service mapping and user insight to prioritise needs in civil justice.
While at the Ministry of Justice in 2014, I worked across several high-profile digital service change projects. These included civil claims, GOV.UK design system, tribunal services, divorce services, a lean traffic fine pilot (launched in months), service mapping tools and investigating opportunities for digital service improvement.
The client
The Ministry of Justice is a major department responsible for justice across all of the United Kingdom. It manages 300 courts, 100 prisons and all civil and criminal law with over 13k staff.
This work sat within Civil Justice which has a budget of £8 Billion, civil claims sits within this with around 400k civil claims made each year.
My role
To evaluate Civil Claims exemplar scope and identify achievable next-step digital opportunities.
To share civil justice service journeys with key stakeholders in digital, HMCTS and policy to improve organisational understanding.
To identify further ongoing digital opportunities for civil justice.
The work
Scope
To investigate civil justice service journeys and refine the scope for the UK government exemplar commitments of the time as well as identifying MVP opportunities. Additionally, this work was about better understanding whole user-centred service journeys and transactional services both within the ministry and externally to other departments.
Description
This work was conducted in a small strategic research team made up of user-researcher Sarah Herman and domain experts. We worked to propose a number of potential digital transformation opportunities, their value and cost to the business and users.
This work also led approaches to explaining user-centred full-service provision in UK government; front to back, digital to real-world with every eventuality. We used system-based service mapping to show the scale of these services identifying key service characteristics for example issues, pain points, systems and volumes. ( You can find out more on my blog posts here and here.)
Outcomes
Used by senior leadership to inform decision-making for ‘civil claims exemplar’ as well as creating a backlog of digital transformation proposals.
Demonstrated digital service proposals with combined business and user evidence to support user-centred business cases.
The approach was rolled out to further service transformation projects including traffic offences, divorce, tribunals, money claims and collaboration with other services across GDS.
Helped inform the UK government's approach to service design and continues to be referred to. Find out more on my original posts here and here.
About the work
Tools to support decision making: Combining user and business insight together across digital, user experience, risks, cost and savings.
Value of understanding users: Working with digital leads and user research this work was used as an example to demonstrate the value of combining user and expert insight across quantitative and qualitative research.
New methodology: Developing new methods of working across multi-disciplinary teams. Including setting best practices for service mapping, business case approaches, service design, user-centred design and evaluation.
Champion service design in government: This work and approaches were widely shared within the Ministry of Justice, GDS and other government departments and agencies. It was used to demonstrate the value of user-centred service journeys and best practices.
George “was someone I trusted to deliver high-quality work… The impact she has on the design of the service speaks for itself, and her passion for helping a team deliver the best work it can is clear to see.”
Eddie Shannon, Head of Design
MOJ Digital