The civil money procedural rules are very complex and the systems, processes and people work around a legacy case management system that required significant manual effort and reliance on paper-based record keeping and maintenance. HMCTS weren’t sure about the priority of transformation of services and the risks and dependencies between them and on other services, as well the as the constraints of the chosen case management platform.

Our team led workshops with a wide range of civil money stakeholders to identify and agree an approach to run parallel design work streams for standard direction orders and general application services, collaborating with the client, end users and other delivery stakeholders.

Whilst the judiciary were the primary sponsors of the program they were also one of the key users of the service, alongside legal professionals and court staff. Cognizant realised the sensitivity of users involved and worked closely with the HMCTS delivery and product teams to appropriately engage all the user groups, ensuring a level of collaboration and co-design during both the Discovery and subsequent design sprints to Alpha.

Ensuring that user needs were a key driver to determine the choice of technology, the Cognizant design team collaborated with Enterprise Architects, evaluating user needs against the various technology options and providing a risk-based acceptance measure for the key features required to deliver the service effectively.