Build once, benefit many: driving business case transformation across government, one (agile) step at a time

A business case is a framework used by government to get approval to spend public money and ensure the delivery of public benefits. Our user research with people across several government departments showed that teams face similar challenges with business cases writing and approval. They are regarded as disproportionate, long-winded, unclear and difficult to both write and approve. Each department is investing time and resources into solving these same problems.

We in the Digital Process Improvement team at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) like solving problems, and it doesn’t get more knotty than business cases (so far!). We’re a friendly bunch from across different backgrounds and disciplines, driven by a common goal of helping people do their jobs better, at MHCLG and across government.

Why reinvent the wheel when you can share the blueprint and the service? We have a huge opportunity here for proper, cross-government collaboration.

"The goal was never to build something that only works for MHCLG. We wanted to create a foundation that others could reuse."

Sharing is caring

From the start of the project to improve the business case process, in partnership with our Approvals and Assurance team, our goal was to build something based on our guiding principles of putting people first, joining the dots and understanding data. Something robust, that could be 'plug and play' for any department who wanted help with their business case process.

We started with the triage service: a way for people to self-serve business case templates and guidance. People struggle to find the correct template, understand approvals and who to speak to, according to our discovery insights. In triage, people answer a few questions to find the template they need. They are also encouraged to partner with Finance and Commercial early on, fostering the idea that collaboration is key to a successful business case.

The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade (BIST) showed an interest in the work we were doing; there were many similarities with challenges but ultimately an appetite for change and exploration was welcome and we were able to share with policy and digital teams our triage service to 'steal with pride'.

What’s under the hood of the business case triage service?

• The triage service is configurable by design, so it needs limited developer input for most content changes. Additionally, question flows can be handled by changing configuration, not code.

• You can spin it up out of the box and have a local version running straight away.

• You can start using your own authentication layer or disable this if it is not needed initially.

• Cloud Infrastructure is in Terraform as Infrastructure as Code (IaC) – this is also modular and can be deployed with only config changes needed, rather than changing any difficult architecture – you plug in a few values and off you go.

• We've used reusable patterns and the GOV.UK Design System so it’s instantly familiar to teams who have used this before – the Jinja templates are an extension of the Nunjucks ones used in the GOV.UK tutorials/component library.

Upshot

Sharing our journey so far with BIST has reinforced the value of collaboration across departments, particularly when tackling common challenges. By sharing approaches, lessons learned and reusable components, we can speed up delivery, focus resources where they add the greatest value and save time and money. Not just for MHCLG but across the entire government. Our work to transform the business case process continues as we build out the end-to-end service, and we’ll aim to share more about our progress. Who next? Arm's-length bodies? Let’s go!

Want your own triage service or want to learn more?

Get in touch! Find us at businesscaseproject@communities.gov.uk.