MCA Awards 2004
Bronze Award: Change Management Category
PA Consulting Group; client - Department for Work and Pensions
Over the past few years, PA Consulting Group has been helping the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) modernise the payment of benefits and pensions to 13 million people - and saving the taxpayer a projected £0.5bn per annum.
Currently, more than half of benefits and pensions have to be collected via paper-based transactions at the Post Office - expensive and open to abuse. At just 1p each, electronic payments are 50 times cheaper to process than their paper-based equivalents. So the government has set a target to increase the proportion of benefits paid electronically into bank accounts from 43% to at least 85% over a two-year period.
That goal is being pursued through two programmes: a payment modernisation programme to convert customers’ payments to electronic methods, and the universal banking programme, where customers can, if they choose, continue to collect benefits at the Post Office, but bank them there too in a basic account, either with a bank or with the Post Office itself. This new facility required the cooperation not only of the DWP and Post Office, but also of the Inland Revenue, Northern Ireland Social Security Agency and high street banks.
PA has been supporting both programmes - the customer conversion process began in autumn 2002 and universal banking became available in April 2003. According to PA, this is the largest conversion project of its kind in the world, affecting hundreds of thousands of staff in government departments, Post Office branches and banks, and dramatically increasing the volumes of transactions passing through the UK’s financial infrastructure.
Universal banking activities are having to harmonise with other government initiatives, including the Inland Revenue’s New Tax Credits programme that offers universal banking options amongst its payment methods.
And as with many high-profile public sector projects, PA found it has had to work with a large number of stakeholder groups, from politicians and trade unions to financial institutions and government departments.
Bringing together specialists in programme delivery, strategy, IT, modelling and contact centre design, PA formed a multidisciplinary team to help the DWP develop its conversion strategy.
PA worked with stakeholders to create an integrated 'critical milestone plan' providing visibility of key tasks and dependencies. This plan balanced the programme’s requirements against the DWP’s other commitments - a capability that was particularly valuable when it came to allocating scarce IT resources. The DWP has 17 legacy benefit systems, whose limited ability to communicate with each other meant that they were not well suited to tracking customer conversion. Instead, PA devised a method of tracking conversion by extracting data from the legacy systems into a separate package.
PA also played an integral part in the implementation, launch and early operation of universal banking, working closely with stakeholders including the Northern Ireland Social Security Agency, the Inland Revenue, the Treasury, the Department of Trade and Industry, the Post Office, UK banks and various private sector suppliers.
At the outset, the PA team helped to establish a monitoring framework to gather information continually from all players, together with a reporting structure to keep stakeholders informed of progress on both programmes.
Conversion went live on schedule, and in April 2003, the Post Office and banks flicked the switch on universal banking.
