Transforming Service Management

Challenge

Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) is an executive agency of the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) with around 17,000 staff operating from over 500 locations. Within HMCTS, Digital and Technology Services (DTS) acts as a key enabler of HMCTS’ future as a digital organisation, supporting multiple transformation programmes to improve our court and tribunal services. 

DTS initiated the Future Services (FUSE) Programme to drive their ambition to mature operational support to ensure it is targeted to meet end user needs, standardised to be more efficient, and optimised to reduce resource consumption and cost.

Solution

Methods began a period of handover, inheriting 8 Service Desk Analysts and a call routing system, supporting 18 services within a single portfolio. At the time, various escalations in place from Senior Judges threatened the continued use of the DTS IT Service Desk within the judiciary, exacerbated by a requirement to reduce the incident backlog by ~90%”.

Alongside this, there were various challenges that Methods were required to address as part of the takeover.

Impact

Over two iterations - FUSE I and FUSE II - the programme has spanned a range of projects, with more to come. To date, these have included:

• Enhancements to service reporting to drive improved decision-making for Senior Leadership, such as the introduction of a 'DTS Balanced Scorecard' and improved 'Availability and Infrastructure Performance' reporting. 

Default service levels  

• Analysis of existing service levels to clarify how performance is measured, and the design and implementation of new default service levels to augment Service Level Management.  

DTS annual digital support survey

• Conducting targeted business engagement activities to better understand end user needs. This included the launch of the inaugural 'DTS annual digital support survey' facilitating quantitative and qualitative analysis of users’ perceptions of support, which obtained over 5,000 responses.

DTS standardised support offerings

• The design and definition of DTS standardised support offerings, which for the first time categorised support models into three wraps of support facilitating the ability to design, communicate, and cost ongoing support. 

End user support aids 

• Development of end user support aids to assist end users with better understanding of the support that is available and set expectations appropriately.

• Discussion, agreement, and documentation of ways of working in close collaboration with the MoJ.