HM Land Registry: Optimising agile delivery
HM Land Registry is a non-ministerial department that safeguards land and property ownership valued at £8 trillion, ensuring that land and property rights in England and Wales are guaranteed and protected. It aims to become the world’s leading land registry for speed and simplicity, with an open approach to data.
With its ambitious digital transformation programme underway, HM Land Registry engaged Scott Logic as a high-quality, UK-based delivery partner. We were commissioned to share responsibility for the planning and delivery of a range of projects, complementing and extending the HM Land Registry’s capabilities by providing multidisciplinary teams of consultants.
As part of its change programme,HM Land Registry wished to improve its delivery capacity and practices, including staff capabilities, project reporting, and release train planning. HM Land Registry’s delivery approach had developed organically over time, and the transformation programme offered the opportunity to optimise ways of working across the organisation. Scott Logic supported HM Land Registry’s Head of Delivery in leading this work stream.
Honing delivery capabilities
We began by meeting with all of the key stakeholders, including the Delivery Senior Leadership Team, to gain an understanding of as-is practices and pain points. Through being embedded in HM Land Registry’s delivery teams, we also gathered on-the-ground insights. The primary conclusion drawn from this engagement was that there was a need to harmonise delivery capabilities across the organisation.
Scott Logic recommended two principal activities to address this issue. The first was supporting the development of a Delivery Capability Plan, including a skills matrix that could be used to assess the varying skill sets across delivery teams.
Based on this assessment, it was possible to target investment in training at particular teams and areas of need. As part of the implementation of this Delivery Capability Plan, we facilitated a two-day delivery event at HM Land Registry’s headquarters.
The second initiative complemented and sustained this professional development. We established a Delivery Community of Practice which continues to this day. The group brings together delivery practitioners from across HM Land Registry for regular meetings at which they discuss the topics and themes from the Delivery Capability Plan. Subject matter experts, including Scott Logic consultants, are also invited to give talks and lead workshop sessions.
The community of practice addressed a key pain point by providing a forum for communication between delivery teams, allowing them to agree on what best practice looks like at HM Land Registry. This played an important role in the harmonisation of capabilities.
Streamlining reporting processes
Another pain point identified by HM Land Registry stakeholders related to reporting on delivery. Again, there was variability between teams. This made organisation-wide reporting on delivery more challenging and added to onboarding requirements when people moved between teams. We addressed this by first recommending a standardised workflow on Jira, the agile project management tool used by the delivery and product teams.
The new approach to Jira also fed into the second initiative we undertook to tackle the reporting challenges. This was to simplify the reporting process and create a combined delivery dashboard. The standardised Jira workflow allowed real-time, quantitative data on sprint health to be displayed on individual team dashboards and to be fed into the combined dashboard. Automating the reporting of quantitative data freed up time for the teams to report on qualitative metrics, including team morale, the value of what they had delivered in the sprint, and whether they were encountering any friction or blockers.
Embedding the new approach
With streamlined processes and strengthened capabilities in place, we reinforced the optimised delivery approach in a couple of important ways. The first was to replatform and update the delivery practice handbook. By moving it across from a visual collaboration tool into a content management system, the handbook became quicker to maintain and easier for practitioners to search. In addition, a directory of the delivery practice was introduced to the handbook. This provided an index of professional profiles, including people’s skill sets, making it simple for people to seek and share capabilities across the delivery practice.
The other means by which we reinforced the optimised approach was through the delivery of ad hoc workshops tailored to the specific needs of HM Land Registry’s delivery practitioners. Examples of these included a workshop on the Definition of Done, allowing teams across the practice to reach a consensus on this important topic through a facilitated discussion; and a workshop to shape the process by which new features progress from ideation through to delivery. The handbook was updated with the outputs of these workshops, demonstrating to the practitioners how they were actively defining best practice delivery at HM Land Registry.
Through all of these structured interventions, we supported HM Land Registry to optimise its delivery practice. With harmonised capabilities, consolidated processes, and improved lines of communication, this engagement helped to foster a strengthened sense of collective identity.
Meanwhile, the streamlined reporting process, with its shift in focus to qualitative insights, enabled more meaningful governance discussions centred on sustaining high-performing teams and high-value delivery at HM Land Registry.
