Department For Work and Pensions
Customer success case study
Helping DWP to streamline new staff onboarding procedures during the COVID-19 pandemic
The largest British governmental department with 79,000+ employees, the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is responsible for welfare and pension policy. DWP have been an INV Group customer since 2015.
During its COVID peak, The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) saw a 10-fold increase of people claiming Universal Credit. This increase required additional remotely working staff to be rapidly upskilled and aligned to all key policies and guidelines.
Project plan
In partnership with Invotra, Invdev devised an agile development plan to:
- Onboard other UK Government departments to the existing Invotra Extranet Portal.
- Provide secure and controlled access to essential training resources and continue to support front line staff.
- Streamline how other UK Government departments securely accessed the latest DWP news, guidance and policies.
Project results
- DWP, Invotra and Invdev successfully onboarded 10 additional UK Government departments.
- DWP were able to successfully onboard over 3,000 government colleagues to the DWP Extranet and provide access to its training and documentation resources to ensure everyone has the tools they needed.
- DWP were able to successfully process an unprecedented demand of new claimants and were able to continue serving the public as efficiently as possible.
How we streamlined the onboarding of 10 UK Government departments
In order to onboard up to 10 other UK Goverment departments and backed by Cognito, – an Amazon Web Service (AWS) – Invdev utlitised Invotra Auth, a secure and scalable user authentication solution configuring optional SMS multi-factor authentication and built the integrations with a number of third party social and enterprise identity providers to enable Single Sign-On.
The Invdev development team also implemented a number of system and content enhancements to the existing Invotra Extranet portal to better meet the needs of DWP.
These enhancements included:
- Customisable homepage for external users.
- Targeted information architecture based on external users’ permissions.
- Controlled access to areas and sections.
- Control over which apps (Groups, Message Wall, Ideas, etc.) external users can access.
- Control over whether or not external users can access the people, teams or locations directories.
- A multi-device experience, improving communication and increasing productivity.
Over the course of the project the Invdev team had three challenges to overcome:
- At its peak DWP received over 1.8 million Universal Credit (a 10 fold increase) and needed to respond swiftly to meet this demand.
- All technical solutions needed to be robustly tested in order to scale with demand.
- The rapid redeployment of existing DWP staff and colleagues from other Government departments meant different levels of understanding and experience would need to be closely management and support customized to different groups.