Historically, PPPT, Discoveries were fragmented across PPPT Portfolios, each utilising different approaches and tools leading to varying outputs and usefulness. DaaS is innovative because:

• Our methodology embeds best practise (processes and artefacts) over a portfolio delivery function of 500 FTE that has previously used inconsistent approaches. The service also provides quality assurance, uniformity, and performance metrics to track success.
• The approach ensures users’ needs are at the heart of future system development and a “corporate knowledgebase” is created.
• The methodology applies Mission Model Thinking, considering value created for specific customers, key activities, resources, and partners required to deliver it, as well as the cost-benefit balance.
• Evidence based recommendations are at the core of the DaaS Service.
• Our methodology uses Agile approaches to deliver in time-boxed sprints enabling us to pivot quickly and build value incrementally.

DaaS has been operating since July 2021. During which, we have defined our initial minimum viable service levels, defined and iterated our operating model, scaled to running 3 complex simultaneous discoveries at any one time, created and matured our playbook templates, processes and methodology and are now ready to upskill other delivery professionals within our portfolio through knowledge transfer.

Our Discovery methodology has already been socialised (via Show & Tells) and is being adopted department wide. Further, we have a mature performance management framework which enables us to measure how effective our service provision is (and how its improved over the past year). This enabled us to plan further capability enhancements including decentralised services, e.g. Discovery Triage Support (CUT) and Discovery Acceleration.

• NTT DATA: Our DaaS Delivery partner bringing subject matter expertise in ideation, agile delivery, technical design, innovation, and partner frameworks (NTTD’s IDEA Model, Knowledge Transfer and Core and Flex Resourcing) helped us embed best practise.
• Centre for Digital Design: Helped embed user centricity, service design and product centricity into our methodology
• Policing Business Design Authority: Senior business sponsorship to transform our delivery approach for national police systems.

DaaS has positively impacted many organisations including:

• Police Digital Service
• HMICFRS
• CPS
• NPIRMT
• IOPC
• Serious Fraud Office
• ACRO
• DVLA
• HM Revenue and Customs
• EUROJUST
• NPCC
• NPTC
• National Crime Agency
• NPOCC
• Home Office Internal Teams
• NCA
• 43 Police Forces

All of these organisations provide a public service to safeguard from harm, so indirectly we have made a positive influence on all UK nationals.

DaaS to date has delivered 9 Discoveries, interviewing over 336 stakeholders in 168 interviews:

• Digitising of the UK Extradition / Mutual Legal Aid processes by designing a replacement Case Working System used by over 600 FTE. This enabled more effective handling of oversea arrest requests reducing months to weeks.
• Designing new capability to enable Policing to access EU Vehicle Registration Data (Prum). This removes the need to follow a slow and manual process (5+ weeks to 10 seconds).
• Designing an integrated audit capability for all UK policing systems enabling up to £8m cost saving per annum.

DaaS uses both qualitative and quantitative performance measures from our customers (surveys).

Going forward we expect to design an enhanced financial asset recovery capability to seize illicit financial assets, improve penalty notice acceptance by the general public in the UK and more! We also ensure all upcoming IT changes align to Police Digital Strategies.

DaaS was a new concept. Historically all Discoveries were conducted by the delivery teams in a disjointed way often leading to failure.

• The delivery areas have displayed resistance to adopt citing lack of control as their primary reason. We have overcome this by demonstrating improved KPIs, frequently communicating our core values (see further information) and creating DaaS advocates to further reinforce benefits across the organisation.
• As DaaS uses blended teams, it is perceived as an expensive service as there is still scepticism to invest in early de-risking. We have built up metrics showing the level of investment for these phases is still only around 1 – 5% of total budget (comparable to delivery teams delivering the same outcomes over a much longer period of time to lesser quality).
• Senior stakeholders initially had no confidence in our offering as we had no evidence to underpin our approach. Metrics have been key to changing stakeholders’ perceptions of DaaS.

There were 6 conditions for success to drive forward DaaS:

• Vision and Guiding Principles: DaaS leadership set an ambitious vision and guiding principles to drive our strategic journey and ensure we understand where we want to reach and how we would maintain our key differentiators and culture along the way.
• Curiosity: DaaS was an untested approach within our organisation. Senior leaders and our teams kept having to challenge themselves to stay true to our vision.
• Solid work ethic: The team had to work hard – pushing themselves to drive quality outputs to build our credibility.
• Persistence: We suffered many setbacks along our journey notably around stakeholder interest, we kept persevering and now we have more demand than supply!
• Camaraderie: No one achieves large goals by themselves. A shared sense of spirit makes success enjoyable.
• Fun: It’s no good working teams hard on goals unless there’s enjoyment. This was key to driving our teams to succeed!

The operating model could be replicated in any delivery portfolio delivering large and complex national systems in both private and public sector organisations.

The methodology is a culmination of evidence-based learnings, best practise from wider industry, GDS guidance and innovation frameworks so it could be universally employed.
The service has defined various knowledge transfer approaches to help upskill public sector workers. A key to this was recognising employee mindset is just as important as measurable skills in recruiting and documenting our methodology, templates, and processes in DaaS Playbook.

We are already looking to scale wider than our department by offering show and tells to wider digital, data and technology portfolios and these are planned for the near future.

The key lessons learnt are:

• The customer isn't always right! Sometimes they need help in shaping what the Discovery problem statement is through our structured triage process, so they actually ask for the right commission scope!
• There is reluctance to spend to de-risk early on in programme delivery. Customers don’t like committing to Discovery work as it makes the problem “real” and is seen as jumping past the point of no return.
• It’s not a failure to not proceed after Discovery if the evidence supports that viewpoint.
• Be prescriptive about what’s required next! If we don’t provide clear recommendations, delivery teams struggle to take appropriate action and drive forward delivery.
• Be ambitious! We commit to delivery via outcomes – so even our discovery output has clear benefit to our customers.

DaaS Guiding Principles form the heart of our service and underpin our actions to ensure we drive forward this innovative service and approach:

• We make evidence-based recommendations whilst avoiding analysis paralysis.
• We work differently and challenge the traditional perspectives.
• We ensure that our effort is effective to deliver outcomes iteratively.
• We are realistic about the scope we commit to deliver.
• We provide strategically aligned recommendations.
• We continuously build corporate knowledge and make it easily accessible.
• We engage and collaborate proactively with the right key stakeholders from the outset.
• We apply continuous feedback loop, reflect on, and learn from past lessons quickly.