HM Land Registry: Optimising project discovery
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. As part of its change programme, HM Land Registry wished to review, standardise and optimise its delivery processes in order to address variations in practice.
To begin this initiative, HM Land Registry commissioned Scott Logic to undertake a review of the current Discovery practices across its Digital Data and Transformation (DDaT) portfolio. The aim was to produce a Discovery playbook for HM Land Registry, supported by guidance on moving into Alpha and recommendations on agile ways of working.
Discovery of the Discoveries
We began by mapping out the key stakeholders for initial fact-finding discussions on the as-is processes, from idea to Discovery, to delivery; what was and wasn’t working well, the constraints, the tools used, and the documentation produced. We also observed and actively participated in Discovery phases that were already underway.
From the beginning, and throughout, we provided weekly reports to key stakeholders to play back findings and enable HM Land Registry to help steer the research.
Moving from observation to engagement, we facilitated workshops with individual practices and key stakeholder groups across HM Land Registry. These workshops employed the Liberating Structures methodology which encourages an inclusive approach to shaping ways of working towards a common purpose. Part of this method is to encourage ‘creative destruction’ by asking participants to imagine the worst possible way to reach an organisational goal, and then to identify overlaps with current ways of working so that bad practices can be halted. Working with HM Land Registry’s teams in this way, we started to discern what the future could look like.
Shaping and demonstrating best practices
We distilled the research and workshop outputs into a report detailing their analysis of the Discoveries and providing four categories of recommendations: playbook content; short-term; medium-term; and long-term. The recommendations were presented to senior leaders overseeing the DDaT portfolio for prioritisation and implementation, and they asked for support in embedding the new approach. We accordingly put the new playbook into practice in a three-day Discovery kick-off, and through participation in several further Discoveries.
These practical implementations provided the opportunity not only to demonstrate the benefits of the new approach but also to refine in real-time the draft playbook, fine-tuning it to the HM Land Registry context.
At Scott Logic, we always endeavour to leave our clients fully equipped to continue the work we have helped them initiate. To this end, we socialised the outputs of the Discovery review with stakeholders across the wider organisation in sessions entitled ‘The Story So Far’, communicating the new approach that the participants had helped to shape. In addition, we produced a final report that included a full implementation plan. This set out practical steps through which HM Land Registry could further implement the Discovery analysis recommendations, evolve the Discovery playbook, and optimise its end-to-end agile delivery processes and ways of working.
By implementing this plan, HM Land Registry can build out its delivery processes iteratively, in a truly agile way – complemented by the outputs of another project that Scott Logic managed in parallel on agile project management.