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Cutting through complexity

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for welfare, pensions and child maintenance policy. As the UK’s biggest public service department, it administers the state pension, working age benefits (such as Jobseeker’s allowance), as well as disability and ill health benefits, to over 22 million claimants and customers.

Over five hundred change projects were underway within the department with many pockets of good work, however, there was no coherent or consistent view of strategic change. Despite their best efforts, many DWP teams were working in silos with no radical move away from monolithic systems towards the consumption of commoditised technology capabilities.

Methods deployed a small multi-skilled team across the department’s multiple sites to begin a discovery and understand how DWP was using technology to deliver services to its customers, to create a joint roadmap to achieve the organisations’ target state for 2020.