Helping DWP to streamline new staff onboarding

Aligning technology needs with outcomes

Project Background

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.

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.

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 DWP 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.

3 results of the project

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.

"Helping our customers navigate really challenging situations is just what we do. DWP came to us needing a fast and effective response to manage a developing resource issue. We put our heads together and found a technical solution that was achievable and scaleable."

Paul Zimmerman

Invdev COO

Meet the rest of the intranet project team

Invotra

Invotra is a leading SaaS provider of enterprise intranet and portal solutions. Every day, hundreds of thousands of people around the globe rely upon our secure software services. Invotra provides you with an enterprise-ready intranet that will give you both control and flexibility in a highly secure and accessible way.

DWP

The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) is a United Kingdom government department of His Majesty’s Government responsible for welfare, pensions and child maintenance policy. As the UK’s biggest public service department it administers the State Pension and a range of working age, disability and ill health benefits to around 20 million claimants and customers.

Let's talk about streamlining onboarding with tech

Invdev’s technical team onboarding solutions are your gateway to redefining digital experiences in the public sector. Contact us today, and let’s embark on a journey that transforms how you connect, communicate, and serve your community through technology.

Alternatively email us at hello@invdev.com