Now that DWP has defined what business and digital transformation means for the department, we’re fully focused on developing some of the things we need to make it happen. One of the important building blocks is a business design, made up of an operating model for the department and a transformation roadmap that tells us what needs to happen when. We’re not starting from a blank sheet of paper. There are design decisions being taken every day across the department in our programmes and elsewhere, a range of operating models, an existing business architecture model and a number of separate transformation roadmaps. So our first priority has been to harness all the expertise we have, creating a business design and transformation community to work together to transform delivery across the whole department. The community crosses strategy, change, IT, operations, estates, HR, analysis and more. Our first tool for doing this was to create a "rich picture", a one-page sketch of where we are as a department, where we think we might be by 2020 and the changing environment and challenges along the way. It’s intended to be a tool to help us make the right design choices and stimulate debate. Our business design and transformation community co-created this picture through a couple of workshops, with the help of an artist who used the discussion on the day and the outputs to draw and then iterate and refine the picture. Rich picture, a one-page sketch of where we are as a department, where we think we might be by 2020 and the changing environment and challenges along the way We’re using a tried-and-tested business design methodology, which is helping us to pull off the art and the science of business design. As this approach is different from what we’ve done before, we created a Business Design Academy to explain the method to our community. We all spent a day learning about the approach, and we now have a shared understanding of business design and the methodology, and we’re starting to populate the model with knowledge from around the department. Learning at the Business Design Academy And we’ve been working across the department to develop the business design in an agile way, with a weekly sprint cycle, collaboration and iteration built in to everything we do and regular show and tells to make sure it’s all visible and delivered incrementally. We’d love now to learn about what others are doing in business design, so we can extend our community across government. We’re also planning to build our team as our need for business design expertise increases. Please feel free to get in touch.

Callum Davies - HR Fast Stream Graduate Back in December, I blogged about my first experience of an agile Discovery. We were discovering how we can improve the way we attract people to apply for digital and technology roles in DWP. Since then, we’ve launched a public beta - made up of a campaign microsite with some social media (@digitalDWPjobs, blogs and jobs posted in relevant online communities). It was my first experience of agile and very different from other projects I’ve worked on. The one thing that stood out was the way we designed the service around the users’ needs. Agile (even with a small ‘a’) is a state of mind What struck me most is that agile isn’t just a methodology or way of working - it’s about attitude and behaviours too. Sometimes it’s about being the ‘user in the room’, and standing firm in the face of differing opinions about content and design. Agile is also about being brave, being prepared to test and learn and put a product out there for users to critique and test. Working in an agile way needs a lot of collaboration and teamwork - we had that in spades, and it helped when the world around us had different views about the product. We found this happened more and more as the product started to emerge. I think that the more we ‘showed the thing’, the easier it was for people to have an opinion about it. Have we built a service that meets users’ needs? We had a lot of discussions around ‘when we say ‘user’, who do we mean’? The truth is that we mean a person who’s going to actually use the thing. The reality is that people within any organisation have an opinion about what users want, or what they want to present to users, and it’s difficult to overturn this without good evidence from real users. So, we want you to test it. Well, we want you to test it if: You’ve looked or applied for a job outside Government in the last 12 months You’ve been working in the private sector and you’ve looked or applied for a job in Government in the last 12 months You’ve a proven track record of designing services around user needs. If you’re not one of the above and you’ve just got a burning need to put your stamp on the product or what you want users to experience - then, well, we’ve heard loads of those opinions. Nice to hear but not, well, representing the users. I’m excited that we’re trying something different - it’s not revolutionary (and who has the energy for that?), but it’s a different approach to recruitment. Users will tell us whether it works for them. Let us know what you think - have a look at the campaign microsite and follow us on twitter.

When we brought the Digital Academy together in February this year, we did some user centred design of the future Academy schedules. The Digital Academy is growing, and the ambition is to run 9 Academies at the same time over several locations. To do this, we need to test whether a shorter Academy schedule will still deliver the right learning. Our aim is to reduce the time of the Academy from 5 weeks to 3 weeks or even less. That’s quite an ask isn’t it? We asked previous graduates of the Academy to design a shorter schedule, by posing these questions to the group: What is a ‘must do’ in the schedule? What can be removed? What is a ‘nice to have’? The feedback provided us with heaps of insight and extremely valuable recommendations on how we can do this, such as: Time to work on a project is a ‘must do’ and it would be better if there was more of it - we’ve almost doubled the project time for the Discovery session The session on social media can be removed - so we have! Real input from projects is a ‘nice to have’ - we’ve commissioned videos from digital programmes. So what did we do next? Well, we sifted through all the post it notes using affinity diagramming, which painted a great picture for us. From this, we were able to come up with a proposal of a structure for a 10-day Academy schedule. We’re testing this proposal with users right now. We’ve carried out A/B testing of the new Academy schedule with two different cohorts in March - one Academy is for people from the same division and the other is a cross-DWP Academy. We’ll evaluate the course and make a decision on future schedules based on the user needs.

DWP Business Transformation - Guiding Principles About a year ago DWP established a set of Guiding Principles to drive our business transformation. More recently, we shared our vision of how DWP will operate in 2020. We are now working through the details and putting some of the building blocks in place. I'm Richard Barton in the Business Design team in DWP and I'm reflecting on the impact that digital technology will have on DWP’s products and services. From internet engagement to digital delivery No doubt you will be aware that the modern way to serve customers and citizens is 'digital'. If you believe many of the articles written about the subject, digital seems to involve delivering applications on smart watches, attracting 'Likes' on Facebook and dealing with complaints on Twitter. Fortunes are about to be won and lost on the back of this transformation whilst, in the executive suite, arguments rage between Marketing, IT  and the new, all-powerful, Chief Digital Officer (CDO). These articles may be entertaining but they don't reflect reality. Clearly, digital technologies do help to make all sorts of customer-facing interactions more flexible and useful. Why wait in a high street store or a telephone queueing system to talk to someone when you can raise your request or get answers to your questions whenever you want and wherever you happen to be? In addition, smart organisations are cleverly structuring their customer communications to uncover new information and improve their services. However, as Matthew Hancock explained recently, real transformation comes through using digital foundations to deliver goods and services. Digital delivery Digital delivery started in industries which were already information rich, such as Financial Services. After all, a business which can deliver by changing the balance of an account does not have to undergo a great deal of change to become digital. Entertainment, including music and television, has been on a digital transformation journey since compact discs (CDs) and NICAM broadcasts became common 25 years ago. What is really exciting now is the way that other products are becoming infused with information or being enhanced with information - creating new candidates for digital disruption. Currently, Tesla Motors and Uber provide differing, but equally high-profile, examples of how information can enrich transport. There is a lot of interest in exposing and exploiting the information hidden away in the operations of the energy sector. Less attention is going into things like food at the moment but there are already signs of what may come later - fancy a bite of my 3D-printed, personalised chocolates? The common factor in all of these examples is a shift of focus from the tangible to the intangible creating opportunities which can be unlocked with digital technology. This shift has already started for our public services. Our understanding of health and wellbeing used to be dominated by the physical aspects - think of surgery and mass-produced pharmaceuticals. Our attention is now being drawn to personal lifestyle choices (and even more personally to our unique DNA). Opportunities are also being created in welfare as the focus shifts from top-down, centralised provision to an approach based on empowering people to make well informed choices for themselves. The shift is uncovering useful information which was previously hidden and giving us ways to enrich welfare services with new information. Benefits at internet speed At DWP, we are already using these opportunities. Tailoring services to people's needs can produce better outcomes and we can save time and money through automation. As an example, we use Real-Time Information about earnings collected by HMRC to make adjustments to benefits payments. This makes it easier for people, avoids a heap of administrative work from our busy staff, eliminates costly mistakes and reduces the opportunity for benefit fraud. There is still plenty of work to be done to deal with some complex legacy systems and we also need to build new tools and develop new ways of working. This work is not always as glamorous and high-profile as launching a new digital service but it is just as demanding, exciting and important. The results will be public services which are more satisfying and better value for everyone - taxpayers, our customers and delivery teams.

The Cross Government Design meeting took place recently, with more than 60 people gathering at Digital DWP. This was the 9th gathering of designers from across government, along with designers from the Government Digital Service (GDS). It was also the first time the meeting had been organised outside London so we were really happy to host the event and welcome everyone to visit our transformation hub in Leeds. Ben Terrett, Director of Design, GDS  Ben Terrett, Director of Design at GDS, opened the meeting, reflecting on how far the Design Community had come in a few years, and how designing services around users’ needs is now at the forefront of every department’s approach. In a series of updates from the Heads of Design, several departments talked about their challenges and the need to embed design in how their department delivers services and policy. The common themes were: the need to build design capability, grow the skills in the Civil Service and recruit new designers into departments embedding design into early conversations about service delivery, and the role of design in improving services the importance of working in the open and sharing design patterns, standards, and ways of working across Government departments. Ben Holliday, Head of UX, DWP In the afternoon, we heard about design in HMRC and MOJ. First up, Pietro Desiato, Guy Tristram, and Katy Beale from the HMRC payments team showed us the service design improvements that have made it much simpler, clearer, and faster to make payments for self assessment - during a question and answer session Caroline Jarrett went as far as to say this is now her favourite form of all time. Next up, Kell Matheson and Ana Cecilia Santos from MOJ Digital talked through their work on ‘Help with Fees’ - you can read more in Ana’s blog post Helping people with court fees. To finish the day we had a guest speaker, Adrian McEwen, co-founder of DoESLiverpool, a community of makers, entrepreneurs and change makers. The feeling was that this was the best Cross Government Design meeting yet. I hope to welcome everyone back to Leeds at some point next year. It was also great that our Director General, Kevin Cunnington, was able to spend some time with us during the afternoon - as Ben said, it’s great to see this senior support for the design community in Government. Get involved  If you’re a designer already working in Government, get involved. Your design community really does need you. Cross Government Design meetings happen every 6 weeks, while our DWP Design community and User Experience team meets every month. Contact me to find out more.

In DWP we regularly ask our customers about their experience of dealing with us and whether they are satisfied with the service they received. This feedback is one way we can identify whether the services we offer can be improved. However, simply asking whether people are satisfied is not enough. As the Head of Digital and Customer Analytics, I wanted to share a bit about how DWP measures satisfaction and uses this to improve customer service. But first, let's briefly talk about cat food. 8 out of 10 cats are less important than the other 2 It’s well known that 8 out of 10 cats prefer a certain market-leading cat food. Let’s call it Catisfaction. This is obviously great news for the makers of Catisfaction. They are officially the tastiest purveyor (no pun intended) of cat food and that statistic proves it. However, when faced with the challenge of improving an already successful product, knowing that 8 of 10 cats prefer their product is a pretty useless statistic for the board of Catisfaction Inc. Instead it is far more important to know about the 20% of cats that would rather dine on Catisfaction’s rivals. The same is true for DWP. We recently released our latest Customer Satisfaction score. In 2014/15, 82% of DWP customers were very satisfied or fairly satisfied with the service they received. This is really good news and a result we are pleased with; but DWP isn’t in the business of standing still, we are always striving for ways to improve our customer service. DWP’s Claimant Service and Experience Survey Satisfaction is a really blunt tool and on its own it doesn’t tell us anything about how we can improve our services, but if you know how to dig a little deeper and collect the right data you can uncover some priceless customer insight. That's why DWP conducts a Claimant Service and Experience Survey; last year we conducted almost 15,000 interviews with claimants who had contact with the Department. Instead of just focussing on the 82% who are satisfied, we use the results to: understand people’s views and experiences of DWP’s services detect variations between recipients of different benefits identify which aspects are viewed most favourably and which need improvement This information lets us analyse things such as the ease of contacting DWP, the extent to which people were kept informed on the progress of their transactions, whether payments and communication were helpful and accurate, and the treatment they experienced from DWP staff. The findings from the survey help to identify areas where service can be improved and helps to reduce unnecessary costs across the Department and provide a more efficient service. Lessons from Europe Measuring satisfaction doesn’t just make good sense, it is also now a requirement placed on Member States by the European Parliament. I recently represented DWP at a European Commission event looking at how Member States measure satisfaction within Public Employment Services - and more importantly how findings are used to drive service delivery improvements. The methodology behind DWP’s Claimant Service and Experience Survey and how we use the results to improve our services is one of the best in Europe. A number of Member States will be visiting the UK next month to learn more from the success of DWP’s approach. But measuring satisfaction isn’t easy and a number of important themes emerged from the workshop; these affect the Member States who have measured satisfaction for a long time, such as the UK, as well as those Member States who are just starting to measure satisfaction for the first time. The themes are: everybody needs a measurement mechanism but there is not one perfect methodology keep it simple at first - collecting some useful data is a great place to start. Detailed dashboards and sophisticated reporting mechanisms can come later measure things that you are able to change and improve - there is no point focussing on things that can’t be changed you need to know what you will do with the data and how you are going to communicate the findings interpreting the results can be subjective; a strong link between the analytical teams and operations staff is invaluable for developing worthwhile recommendations senior management buy-in is critical as you have to take action on the results. You need to know whose responsibility it is to respond to the recommendations It was great to share DWP’s expertise with other Member States and to learn from some innovative examples of satisfaction measurement in Europe. Transforming DWP As DWP transforms it business we’ll need to consider how to best measure satisfaction and the experiences people have using our services. The lessons we've learned from the Claimant Service and Experience Survey and the opportunities presented by collecting good data will be vital for measuring satisfaction with digital services in a transformed DWP. And just like the makers of Catisfaction, DWP will need to focus on all our service users, not just the satisfied ones. This way, satisfaction with services should increase. And by using satisfaction data intelligently and listening to the views of real users we can make more improvements to ensure we deliver our services effectively and efficiently.

What is TRID compliance? The (TRID) TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule consolidates four existing disclosures required under TILA and RESPA for closed-end credit transactions secured by real property into two forms: a Loan Estimate that must be delivered or placed in the mail no later than the third business day after receiving the consumer’s application, and a Closing Disclosure that must be provided to the consumer at least three business days prior to consummation (TILA-RESPA Integrated Disclosure rule). What is the new rule? As per the new TRID compliance rules (with effect from October 3rd, 2015), the creditors/lenders are required to comply with newly integrated simplified forms - Loan Estimate and the Closure Disclosure forms. Failure to meet the new TRID compliance, lenders will be required to pay heavy fines which can go up to millions of dollars per day. Implementation of the new TRID rule goes well beyond switching forms on October 3rd, 2015. These changes require: Process Technology Operations Procedures Netwoven - one of the leading Microsoft partners recently partnered with one of the nation’s leading private mortgage banking firm to deliver accurate Closing Disclosures documents in a timely manner. The areas of consulting included design, implementation and integration of Microsoft Dynamics CRM to their internal disparate systems. Trailing documents still continue to be industry’s pain point. Lenders need to know where the documents are and what has happened to them after closing. That is where Netwoven’s technical expertise can help fully automate your TRID compliance process. Netwoven leverages Microsoft SharePoint, Dynamics CRM and xRM product capabilities to provide the solution. What did we deliver? Integrated the mortgage banking-firm document vendor systems to have newly integrated disclosure documents Built automation around mortgage fees and mortgage insurance calculation for retail, wholesale and correspondent channels. Integrated with financial analysis providers so that providers can make key business decisions in areas of how to sell loan to Ginnie Mae, Fannie Mae, and Freddie Mae What was the ROI? Prepared the  customer for TRID compliance Optimized over $400M of unfunded loans for wholesale channels Saved over $6M+ in OPEX for processing "Servicing" loans Saved 1000+ Man-hours per month in loan processing by integrating CRM with SmartGFE, Genworks and other vendors Optimized loan pipeline data management so that business decisions such as cost analysis can be done in minutes compared to days Netwoven can work with you as a strategic partner to help you refine your reporting capabilities and integrating your TRID compliance systems with Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Microsoft SharePoint. For additional information or to speak with one of our experts, please email us at info@netwoven.com or call (877) 638 9683.

This post originally appeared on the Huffington Post Business blog. Much like a doctor or an attorney, being the resident HR professional in my peer group lends itself to lots of questions. One of... Visit site for full story...

Second of a two-part series on ACA and the finance industry In Part I of our ACA series, we discussed the significant impact that firms with 51-100 full-time employees will experience when they are... Visit site for full story...

For Immediate Release September 17, 2015   Contact: Michael Cupps (972) 523-6690 mcupps@oc.com   CareFirst, OpenConnect to Discuss Improvement of Claims Auto-Adjudication CareFirst Vice President of Large Group Operations to serve as featured speaker at the Health Plan Claims & Service Operations Conference   Michael Cupps, OpenConnect Senior Vice President, and Sally Miller, CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield (CareFirst) Senior Vice President of Operations for Large Group Strategic Business Unit, will serve as featured speakers and panelists at this year’s Health Plan Claims & Service Operations Conference on October 26, 2015.   Cupps and Miller’s panel will focus on key areas in which analysis and automation can improve the claims process by reducing costs and decreasing pended claims. Miller will speak to CareFirst’s success in significantly improving operations through the identification and utilization of previously uncaptured data, and the capacity to deploy software robots to process work.   "The opportunity to improve operations first pass rates and to demonstrate significant savings for health plan claims is a prime target for RPA," said Cupps. "Utilizing analytics to target the most costly claims or edit codes, then automating them allows organizations - as CareFirst has demonstrated - to optimize human capital, improve customer service and lower administrative costs in an increasingly competitive market."   WHAT: Health Plan Claims & Service Operations Conference   WHO: Sally Miller, CareFirst Vice President of Operations, Large Group Strategic Business Unit and Michael Cupps, OpenConnect Senior Vice President.   WHERE: Westin Las Vegas Hotel, 160 E Flamingo Rd, Las Vegas, NV 89109.   WHEN: Monday, October 26 - Tuesday, October 27, 2015. Miller and Cupps will speak on October 26 at 1:10 p.m.   CONTACT: Michael Cupps at (972) 523-6690 or mcupps@oc.com. The post CareFirst and OpenConnect to present at Health Plan Claims Conference appeared first on WorkiQ Blog.