Our team was tasked with producing a web app for Army personnel to access services within the directorate. Accompanying this is a Case Management System (CMS) for the directorate to triage and manage the allocation of services.

We built a bespoke solution that provides enhanced management capabilities as well as richer Management Information (MI) reporting. This allowed senior leadership to make data-driven decisions that inform resourcing and strategic planning within the directorate. Another benefit to the tool is the improved situational awareness and collaboration across the different business functions.

Activity within the directorate is sparse and not centrally managed, hindering the ability for senior leadership to make data-informed decisions. The departments are siloed, resulting in duplication of effort, breakdowns in communication, as well as lack of collaboration across the different business areas. This presented the following problems:

The directorate has a wide-ranging portfolio of services, encompassing various business functions such as software development, business analysis, data governance & assurance, cyber & security, and more.

Although the intention for the app is to accommodate for a wide range of services, we focused on two key services for this phase of the project. These were digital change requests to be processed by the Digital Discovery team and Requests for Information (RFI) for general enquiries.

We undertook a qualitative research approach by conducting user interviews to understand pain points and how that affected the wider business. We spoke to the heads of department as they were the appropriate user group to get feedback from a strategic perspective. The questions were geared around uncovering the following:

Once we understood the scope of the project we investigated each business areas operating model and other artefacts to understand their business processes and how they fit into the big picture.

We worked closely with the directorate's strategic team to map out the operating model of the directorate to understand the scope of services provided by the different business areas and produce a service catalogue. This helped us understand the directorate's business process as well as what information we needed to capture for reporting.

We were able to rapidly produce an MVP of the solution using a model-driven Power Apps interface to demonstrate the efficiency and value of our solution. The tradeoff with this interface is that the UI is not as flexible or customisable as a canvas Power App, however the next step was to iterate and develop the MVP into a fully-fledged canvas app.

The overarching goal of the tool was to provide the customer with a sense of transparency and clarity, as well as streamline the process of accessing services within the directorate.

Taking into account variables such as users not being familiar with what the directorate does, we wanted to ensure the interface was straightforward to new users.

We conducted a scenario-based usability test with think aloud to understand the user's rationale for their behaviour when interacting with the tool. The feedback gained was valuable and led to us making some minor quality of life updates before release.

It's been interesting to look at the directorate's process holistically while thinking about how to architect a service that is useful to both customers as well as the directorate's staff to quickly have both short and long term impact.

As the directorate has many business areas and teams, it's meant working with a lot of moving parts but I've enjoyed working with different stakeholders and aligning their goals together to increase collaboration.