
Replacing a bespoke legacy licensing service

- Company: Marvell Consulting
- Client: Major UK government department
- Year: 2018 - 2022
- Region: UK-wide
- Product: Engaging with your users and stakeholders to understand the problem to solve, Delivering best-in-class digital services, Training and coaching in digital delivery methods
- Artificial intelligence (AI) and software solutions
- Organisational digital transformation
Introduction
• users to submit a number of complex licence applications
• the regulator to assess, request amendments, or grant applications
• everyone to view, manage and amend those licences throughout their lifecycle.
The legacy service wasn’t in any way user-friendly, required users to rely on manual workarounds and offline processing, and it wasn’t technically robust–often users would lose extensive work that hadn’t saved properly.
The regulator asked us to replace the service, by defining updated requirements, designing build and subsequently maintaining it over 4 years.
Challenges
Our team began by gaining a deep understanding of each of the licensing processes, and how they all linked together, and what user’s universal experience of the regulatory service was. This included mapping out the end-to-end service and key user journeys and holding extensive user research sessions with users, the regulator and stakeholders, to understand all of their needs for the service.
We could then design a completely new approach to how users and the regulator could use the digital service to achieve each of their goals as seamlessly as possible.
We conducted continuous user testing of these designs, meaning we could refine and improve designs throughout delivery, and ensure the final service definitely met their needs.
Solutions
all users could be onboarded to the new service smoothly
all legacy licensing data and historical data was migrated securely
there was no disruption to the regulator’s operations throughout
Our service drastically users licensing experiences by:
• improving the application forms to collect better and more actionable information from applicants
• providing users with much greater visibility of their licences and licensing information
• improving submission and assessment workflows, so all users had better visibility of how their applications were progressing
• providing a flexible yet robust user permissions model–meaning users no longer had to rely on sharing passwords
Following our initial go-live, we continued to support the service for 2 further years, making continuous improvements to the services and continually adding in new features.
Results
• a 30% increase in user satisfaction
• a 50% reduction in certain licence application processing times
• a 25% reduction in annual reports being submitted late
And possibly most importantly, confidence in the regulator’s ability to provide an effective service increased from 77% in 2018 to 85% in 2020 – this includes a rise in those very confident from 15% to 46%.
Our approach was celebrated as exemplary across the department, and a case study of our project was included in Kate Tarling’s seminal book on transforming digital services and organisations, The Service Organization.
“Marvell Consulting has been integral in the transformation of the [departments] digital operations. The research, design and build has been exceptional.”
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