This article is written by Mark Buttanshaw, strategy lead for Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service, UK

“Change” and “transformation” are terms public servants are well used to hearing — especially as they work to respond to the Covid-19 pandemic.

But despite the fact that some tend to over-use these buzzwords, they are also fitting words for what is happening in government right now. Not long ago, our then chief executive, Susan Acland-Hood, reflected that our reform programme to modernise the courts and tribunals had helped our response to Covid-19.

In the UK, you don’t have to look far to see that digital-led changes in government aimed at reducing costs is the new norm. This applies whether you’re in local government, central government or the wider public sector.

When it’s conceived well, digital-led change is focused on designing services based on what citizens need.

The seven lenses of transformation, published by the Government Digital Service and Infrastructure & Projects Authority (the UK’s government’s centre of expertise for infrastructure and major projects), is one of the more recent go-to guides in a very extensive field of research and practice.

In Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS), we’ve been developing our own framework for change, combining service design (which is already relatively well-established in government) with lesser known "business architecture" approaches. I believe our approach holds real value for public servants.

Here are some of the things we’ve learned that show how these very different disciplines can work together effectively.

Service design starts with the user

When we start to design a new service, we work with user researchers who help us to understand what our users currently experience when they interact with us.

We create "user journey maps", which document their path through the justice system, and statements of user needs, which help us understand better what different users require and why they might each be engaging with us. From these, we can start to identify the current “pain points”, or things which don’t work well for users, and what we want to change as a result.

Here’s an example to bring the theory to life. When rethinking the court procedures that support people through the difficult stages of applying for a divorce, we wanted to put the user at the heart of the process. We first identified some of the common pain points during an already upsetting time for people, such as long application forms that require reams of guidance due to dense legalese language.

By targeting this specific pain point, we cut the average time it takes someone to complete a form from just under an hour, to less than 25 minutes. We also reduced the rejection rate of these forms from around 40% to less than 1%. You can read more here on our blog about how we’ve been reforming this service.

A new way of thinking about services

Divorces and many other proceedings in civil, criminal and family courts or tribunals are complicated. They can go down a number of routes, including court hearings. We therefore wanted to design not just a series of individual services, but a whole new way of thinking about what our organisation offers. That’s where business architecture comes in.

By framing our design around “those things which we as an organisation need to be able to do”, we’ve identified the most effective practices, and as a result have challenged the silos in which HMCTS has traditionally operated

This relates to how our organisation sets up centralised back-offices within our Courts and Tribunals Service Centres (CTSCs) to handle administration consistently.

So what is business architecture?

Business architecture is a relatively new discipline which has only been around in its current form since about 2010. To understand its roots, check out enterprise architecture.

Business architecture helps senior leaders see connections within their organisation: similar things being done in similar ways by different teams which together point to the most effective outputs, and so reduce inconsistencies across team practices.

By framing our design around “those things which we as an organisation need to be able to do”, we’ve identified the most effective practices, and so have challenged the silos in which HMCTS has traditionally operated.

We've then organised these activities – whether in a back-office or front-of-house – in a more consistent way. This has helped us be more efficient (an invaluable asset in the public sector), and in turn has provided a more consistent service to everyone participating in court or tribunal proceedings.

Designing consistent services

Fundamentally, business architecture is about finding a common language within an organisation to describe what it is trying to do. In HMCTS, business architecture has given us the vocabulary to achieve a top-down view of what the organisation should look like once we reach the end of our reform programme.

Service design has meanwhile provided the detail to this, so that as we analyse a specific service, we gather more insights on users so as to alter that service based on them.

Combining these two disciplines has helped us design user-centered services consistently across our organisation. We call it our "framework for change".

Here are six tips to apply this same thinking to your own organisation:

  • Start with understanding what your organisation or service does (its business capabilities) and how users interact with it (their unique user journey)

  • Based on this understanding from doing your own user research, create a vision for what you’d like to improve

  • Working with others to design new ways of working for the future. Sometimes the change will be technological, at other times it will be based on how you organise your people or your processes

  • Start to deliver those changes

  • Iterate repeatedly as you learn new things – just enough at each stage to move forward, without knowing everything at once

  • Write things down so that you can follow a repeatable process for different services and can see how they connect to each other. – Mark Buttanshaw

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