Local gov care case management - a perfect storm of cost, coordination and vendor lock-in
Social care is the beating heart of how adults and children across the UK receive essential health and well-being support every day. But without fixing case management tooling — which is widely hindered by an unholy trinity of cost, complexity and vendor lock-in — local authorities could struggle to improve services.
Currently three suppliers dominate the social care case management tooling in the UK, and state intervention is likely to be necessary to break this hold. Encouraging councils to pool their procurement or technical expertise, incentivising re-use and sharing patterns would hopefully open up the market.
Given that the state provides caring services and social care, it should not be controversial for public digital infrastructure to be made public. This blog post will explore how change could be possible.
It will look at:
- The unholy trinity of cost, coordination and vendor lock-in
- Could fostering be a manageable introduction to the bigger social care tooling vendor lock-in problem?
When risk, cost and tech collide
Local government resources are more stretched than they have been in decades. A 2024 report by the Financial Times showed that central government funding for even affluent Hampshire council had dropped by 46 per cent since 2011, while the cost of adult social care had soared to eat up 83 per cent of its budget.
Tight budgets and complex requirements mean that the only way to run a local authority is with a small number of large technology suppliers.
Local councils tend to use Access Mosaic or Liquid Logic, which comply with the Department for Education (DfE) reporting requirements. Both have mature integrations with centralised IT/ERP platforms from third parties like Oracle or SAP. These systems are familiar, procurable, and safe. They are also expensive to run and inflexible.
With little financial headroom to try new things, the majority of service experimentation happens in social care practice, rather than in tech that supports them.
Outliers include Beam.org’s magic notes app, which uses AI to create detailed assessments from audio recordings of social care consultations, freeing up practitioners to get on with the job at hand without the distraction of note-taking. But there is limited or no integration with the overall major case management systems.
This leaves well-meaning leaders striking a balance between experimenting with tooling while running the risk of compliance failures and making reliable choices, but changing nothing of substance.
Councils incrementally improve existing systems rather than attempt more radical approaches to procurement, tool building or technology.
As the the influential systems thinker Donella Meadows wrote in her 1999 essay Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System:
“Putting different hands on the faucets may change the rate at which the faucets turn, but if they’re the same old faucets, plumbed into the same old system, turned according to the same old information, goals and rules, the system isn’t going to change much,”
Breaking free of this stasis takes courage and skill. Digital planning has a wonderful case study and blueprint of how to attempt change. You should read it, it’s fantastic.
Can local authority service provision benefit from central government tooling support?
Local authorities are responsible for providing fostering services—and many are very good at it (we worked with Essex Council’s fostering service in 2023, the year their children’s services received an Ofsted Outstanding rating).
The DfE, the main legislative body responsible for fostering, remains involved. We heard of a national marketing campaign for general awareness-raising, which would sit alongside local campaigns that resonate in a local context. However, the DfE does not appear to be involved in some of the other crunchy national opportunities, like case management tools.
Fostering, for example, is too small a service at each authority level to justify the investment of locally bespoke systems, leaving difficult issues around case management and market provision unresolved.
This must be tackled nationally, with solid commitments from ministers in the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) alongside the DfE.
We think three things are worth trying together:
Enforcing usability standards and open data standards for technology providers at a local level.
Facilitating new suppliers’ entry into the market. Grant funding experimentation and trial reducing compliance burdens on local authorities using new approaches and tools.
Building tools to disrupt the market. Could a government department or local authority build tools rather than buy them alongside driving standards?
A recent open-source collaboration between the French and German governments is an excellent example of what could happen when the government takes ownership of building infrastructure.
Using the Fostering service as a test to break vendor lock-in
As part of our work with Essex council, we ran a short discovery on what service transformation opportunities there were - we worked with technology, digital and the fostering service team.
Caring for a child is not a linear ‘service journey’ - but nonetheless, the fact remains that the overall digital user experience for foster carers is disjointed and time-consuming, with many forced to use a disparate range of low-quality digital systems and processes. Poor usability places an unnecessary burden on carers, distracting them from their key responsibility of caring.
Employees across the fostering infrastructure are also let down by technology and experience constraints. Examples include:
- Expense claims spread over multiple systems that don’t talk to one another, which means carers can’t easily find out how much they are owed. It also complicates remittance and reporting for the care service.
- Communication between foster carers and fostering employees is not conducted via a centralised system, so processes are more open to inconsistency and can take longer than necessary.
- Learning and development systems are not bespoke to fostering, making it harder for foster carers to have a holistic view of their training options.
The above will likely be the norm rather than the exception in many local authorities. But with sector leaders, designers, technologists and practitioners empowered to make ambitious choices, much more can be achieved — with procurement and commercial teams on board.
What does this have to do with social care?
Social care involves a broad collection of services and technologies working in concert. Technology alone is never the answer. But working to improve digital user experience for both foster carers and employees should inform a wider conversation about a universal social care platform.
The fundamental problem with making service improvement is the need to integrate with a council’s ERP system and social care case management systems. This structural issue is why “a new social care platform” has never materialised.
This preliminary work is essential for achieving an elegant online experience for foster carers; no digital service will succeed without exploring the needs and pains of foster carers and the constraints of the existing systems.
Progress on a functioning, secure, and easy-to-use social care platform will take industry and local authority-wide coordination, which is why a network-based approach such as that demonstrated by LocalGov Drupal, a community of developers, content designers and digital leaders from local councils across the UK using a cooperative model to drive digital transformation, could be beneficial.
The fostering service demonstrates that ambition to improve processes, tooling and the user experience is a way to engage with this technical, commercial and usability problem in a way that balances risk and reward. As a way into a wider sectoral collaboration, it feels both manageable and, most importantly, hopeful.
Learning and being inspired by other projects
It’s worth noting some projects that inspire and guide us in considering how fostering could be a test-case for evolving social care tooling.
LocalGov Drupal has driven digital transformation using a network-based approach.
LocalGov Drupal is a community of developers, content designers and digital leaders from local councils across the UK
Now Foster is a social enterprise that abstracts the recruitement service away from the council. They partner with local authorities who want to recruit more foster carers by improving that service experience.
We are super interested in seeing where they get to and hope they succeed. At the same time we feel that local authorities still need to run and improve their own services and technology. All boats rise.
Now Foster - Our mission is to mainstream foster care so more amazing people will empower and inspire young people in care.
Hackney Council’s Social Care Frontend allows social care practitioners to edit case and resident information; it was part of their wider Social Care System Architecture.
It was a pretty radical attempt to build social care case management from the ground up. It is heartbreaking that the codebase sits dormant.
Hackney Council’s Social Care Front-End git hub account
MHCLG (in their Levelling Up era) has done some great work on thinking about the future council (Paul Maltby and team at the time achieved a lot!).
But we know problems like these span multiple departments, so it needs cooperation (and leadership) from the DHSC.
MHCLG’s Future Council pilot report
So, what shall we do?
As is so brilliantly demonstrated by the Digital Planning work, councils and the wider community need to stop trying to fix this solely with procurement and a one-size-fits-all platform.
Instead they should consider the long term, understanding what’s possible with the systems in place. Councils should identify the most common and most painful user experiences for foster carers, and prototype how to improve those.
This will require a wide range of expertise, including finance, tech architects, tech system support teams, service transformation and service practitioners.
Building easy-to-use tools on top of existing systems using underlying data or APIs would also help drive change. Priorities should include developing a consistent user experience that hides a system architecture’s constraints.
Co-op Shifts clear and simple user experience
Co-op’s Shifts product allows Food store employees to see their hours and holidays. It was effectively a front-end built on top of Co-op’s existing system
The idea of fostering as a relatively low-volume service for local authorities that is not worth the attention needs to be reframed. Instead, councils should view fostering as a prototype for how to trial and de-risk a tech and platform strategy, and for exploring wider applications.
Vendor lock-in is the single most considerable strategic risk
Learning how to diversify options and learn as a whole community is a well-tested way to avoid being held hostage by platforms that don’t meet foster carers’ needs, or the needs of children in care.
Councils could do this by:
- Testing the limits of what can be achieved with existing systems like Power BI and Power Automate in the Microsoft stack, a low-cost, low-effort measure. Those not on the Microsoft stack are likely to already be innovating - power to you.
- Rationalising service journeys in lock-step with rationalising components of the underlying system rather than doing it all in one go.
- Reassessing market options to see if new tooling or components have become available, as well as evaluating tools and components with a team of service, user experience and technology experts to ensure a range of expert opinions are captured.
- Prototyping and testing what a “logged-in state” for (foster) carers needs to do in order to help them complete the most annoying or expensive tasks.
- Working backwards from these into back office services and understanding what’s going on. Councils should then make something that manipulates APIs in the background and hides this complexity from the user.
- Using this incremental approach to learn the limits of the systems currently in place. Once those limits are known, it will be easier to assess value-for-money and other benefits of pursuing different systems.
This can only be achieved at a sectoral level
We find it improbable that any single council or local authority will be in a position to take this work on. This unit cost for each local authority just doesn’t stack up, meaning a collective, sectoral approach will be needed.
Options could include:
- Convening councils that are active in this space and want to try something different, The open digital co-op is a shining example of what is possible.
- Visiting companies, local authorities and public sector bodies that have delivered exemplary user and service-centred technology.
- Explicitly connecting this work to MHCLG’s future council agenda.
- Lobbying MHCLG, DfE and DHSC to expand their Local Digital remit beyond their core policy areas.
- Engaging publicly with academia, the LGA and LOTI on this issue.
At a sectoral level this work creates connections between councils, and a way into a wider “social care platform” conversation which every council is facing but cannot achieve alone. We would love to get involved with this kind of work, so please contact us at hello@ff.studio if you are
Test and learn how to make a national agenda real
There is a clear desire for digital innovation across Government. In January 2025, Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Science, Innovation & Technology, set out the government’s policy for modern digital government alongside a review into the state of digital government.
Pat McFaddon, Secretary of State for the Cabinet Office, has spoken eloquently about “test and learn” as a way of experimenting our way forward.
Enthusiastic support from Darren Jones, the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, demonstrates the issue remains a key priority for Government despite challenging economic circumstances. “This Government is determined that digital transformation of the state and our public services will deliver better outcomes for people, and ensure every pound of taxpayers money is spent well,” Jones said in a March announcement detailing how AI and Digital Projects could save taxpayer money and boost public services.
This was later followed up by a more substantive Performance Review of Digital Spend, which talks of Pathfinder projects in the build up towards the 2027 Spending Review.
The government wants this to happen.
The timing is right to go from these directionally correct ideas into the specifics of building new tools fit for the 21st century. To quote a recent Public Digital townhall of the great and good of the local digital era, we must focus on:
“A blocker that’s almost so big we are not talking about it. Which is, that the software market is broken in local government, and therefore without fixing that, shaping it, or doing something about that, we are not going to be able to achieve any of the things we are talking about, in the room.”
Why bother?
We are confident that the market is not serving the needs of social care services well enough and that industry-level and local authority-level coordination is required to address the problem of 21st century social care tooling.
This work gives local authorities a foothold in that space. They can act as leaders and collaborate closely with other councils attempting to achieve the same goals. A collaborative, generative, whole-system approach could potentially deliver transformative benefits for people in care.
The market alone will not provide the answer. Despite budgetary constraints, local authorities need to step in and take a lead on what future social care provision will look like from a technological and user experience perspective.
Communities are aging, care needs are increasing, care teams are stretched, and council budgets remain constrained. Workarounds only work for so long, and running the same procurement repeatedly will get the same results.
So let’s change. There are ways forward. Social care technology is worth radically committing to. Pessimism is not a plan, but being hopeful, putting people first and building new public infrastructure is a good start.
Post was edited on the 2nd of April 2025 to clarify Now Foster is not an IFA.
Helping Essex Fostering Service
The first step towards more transformational changes is working with experts, trusting them and taking a direct approach to making improvements.
On the first day of our project with Essex Council and their fostering team, Ben Unsworth and Nic Ward in the Essex Service Transformation team forwarded us an email from the fostering service manager saying, “our website is now hugely outdated and very likely impacting on our ability to attract and ultimately recruit new foster carers to foster for Essex”.
That sentence was the guiding principle for all of the work we did.
We learned pretty quickly that fostering is one of the many parts of the public sector where provision runs across both public and private sectors. Local authorities are responsible for finding foster carers for children. They can place them with foster carers registered with the local authority, or they can place them with foster carers registered via independent fostering agencies (IFAs). When there aren’t enough carers registered with the local authority, they have to use IFAs. So councils and IFAs are effectively in competition for foster carers to register with them.
Local authorities prefer to place children with foster carers who are fostering via the local authority because it’s better for children, foster carers and local authorities. Essex is rated an Outstanding care provider by Ofsted, and provides local training and local support for people fostering in Essex. But some IFAs make snazzy websites and promise the moon on a stick to foster carers - who are then sometimes let down. (You know when you search for ‘plumber south London’ and you find one actually in Manchester but with an SEO hacked footer full of postcodes nationwide? Some IFA websites are a bit like that.) Recent government research gives the statistical background on this increasing privatisation of children’s care.
Enough backstory. Onto the project.
Change a life by fostering
Essex wanted more foster carers registered with Essex Council - for all of the reasons outlined above. The website was one of the pieces of the puzzle.
Their old website was not great - it wasn’t responsive to work on mobile phones, content was poorly structured and accrued over many years of updates, and it wasn’t clear whether it was really for prospective foster carers or existing ones. We knew from conversations with the fostering service team that every week that went by with their old site in place potentially meant a lost opportunity to register more foster carers.
In our industry it’s now natural to start a new project with the words “we should do a discovery”. But we didn’t feel that this bit of work needed one. Instead we thought: publishing on the web in local government is a solved problem, so let’s run at it.
There were a few reasons why we felt it was a straightforward enough bit of work to avoid discovery:
- Other local authorities have improved their fostering sites before. Essex isn’t trying to compete with foster carers in Reading, Bradford, Kent or Portsmouth, because councils try to place children in care that is local. So we can learn from what other councils and regions do. We could build on some great work by other people to quickly get something better than the current site out there. On top of that, our collective experience of working on GOV.UK meant that we were comfortable recommending and building out content using patterns like the (D&AD award winning) Step-by-step.
- We had direct access to the fostering service team every week - people that work day in, day out with prospective and existing foster carers. They knew the answers we might have been looking for in a discovery.
- Any technology decisions were also solved pretty much from the off too, because lots of people have put the hard CMS work in too: Essex was halfway to rolling out LocalGov Drupal across the council. It made immediate sense to work with that rather than against it. LocalGov Drupal, decision made.
Of course, over time we learned about the things that weren’t solved problems. Publishing informational services in local government might well be a solved problem, but fostering isn’t exclusively an informational service.
It’s an area where the public sector is in a marketplace alongside private sector suppliers, where cost-per-acquisition matters, where competition is real and marketing campaigns are a crucial part of getting new foster carers into Essex’s orbit.
Russell’s now-decade-old blog post about what word to use for the people we’re designing for says: “But, fundamentally it comes down to choice, or lack of it. If people have no choice but to use your service they’re not a customer.” People deciding to foster with Essex have a choice whether to use the service or not. Government digital tooling largely assumes users don’t have a choice. Fostering is one of those provisions that falls into both camps.
Showing what’s at stake in fostering more clearly
We took screenshots of every page on the current site to get a view of the navigation structure and get to grips with the content. Using those screenshots we made a map of the current site structure. We copied every bit of existing content into a Google Doc. Then we prototyped a new structure, using a mix of professional instinct and other fostering site inspiration.
We knew that a lot of the content used language known by specialists but not by a general audience. So whenever we didn’t understand a word, we replaced it with something in plainer English. We wrote and designed content that was a lot clearer, more emotive about what’s at stake in foster care, and used less jargon. In week 4, we tested a prototype with the top two levels of site content updated.
The Essex team helped us find research participants from their Facebook community of people who were interested in fostering, but not committed. Testing confirmed to us that fostering needed to talk more directly to potential carers. The site needed to show the reality of fostering, how Essex could help new foster carers, and show them information relevant to them.
Fostering is about carers working together to support children and young people. It’s hard work. It’s also somewhat “invisible” - it’s hard for a potential foster carer to get a sense of it from the outside. We learned in research that it feels like the very first steps are scary, that taking the first step into enquiring means you’ll be committing there and then. So we made the call to action even more prominent - pick up the phone. And we made it clear that the first step is just a chat, nothing more.
Screenshot of the homepage we designed for Essex Fostering
Closing the gap between design and production
This project was all about moving from the first meeting to something in production as quickly as possible. We wanted to go straight to prototyping in code, and got access to Essex’s pre-production environment, so instead of running local versions of the site, we could play with the staging site to get an idea of the templates that existed in Drupal.
The project was, in many ways, a Trojan horse for LocalGov Drupal across Essex. We chose a subsite structure, knowing that attracting new foster carers was more of a campaign than the kind of transactional service that many of us with government backgrounds are used to.
But subsites hadn’t been used before at Essex, and some subsite components weren’t quite ready for production. Putting the effort into making those components ready for production meant that other Essex council services could benefit from subsites in the future, too.
Once we knew what kind of templates existed and what state they were in, we went back to Figma to build prototypes for testing. We wanted to show people content looking as close to the final result as possible, so we built page templates in Figma that reflected the changes we were suggesting to subsite templates.
Finally, with our first round of research findings under our belts, we went back to LocalGov Drupal to build out the pages and do further content iteration, as well as build out a set of recommendations to Essex’s CMS agency partner for how subsite navigation could be improved. Later, a team at Essex worked with people at Hammersmith & Fulham and Dumfries and Galloway councils to build those changes and put them back into the LocalGov Drupal core project. This is great: councils have enough of a funding crisis, and enough unit cost problems. Sharing is caring.
What if you said what you really think?
Throughout we worked with the fostering team with weekly meetings to show them what we’d done and to fact-check, hear their concerns and their stories. Sometimes we pushed them to stay true to what they knew and what they believed. It’s better for children, for local authorities and for foster carers to foster through local councils - so let’s say so. If you’re investing time, energy, effort and attention into making a new website, stand tall and say what you really think. We’re really proud that the site went live with these lines:
Your local council’s interest is perfectly aligned with yours: the child must always come first.
As privately-owned agencies, IFAs have shareholders and must balance service provision and the need to make a profit. But councils have no profit motive.
We stay utterly focused on children and carers.
Potential foster carers deserve to see the reality of what they’re getting into, and know how to find out more about what it might be like. And fostering teams in local authorities deserve the opportunity to talk to potential foster carers, rather than be passed over for an IFA because the IFA’s website is better.
Screenshot of the Why foster with Essex page of the site as it was originally launched
Over the last 10 years huge progress has been made on informational services in government, and through thousands of people’s hard work we have best practice to point at as well as common tooling, standards and playbooks. But there are services in the local community or local authority space that have a sales or campaigning need, not a transactional or informational one. There is definitely a need for new patterns and tooling to be developed and shared.
Fostering and other care services address real problems for real people every day. They’re also very complex because a lot is at stake: improving outcomes, duty of care, reporting and compliance, and doing it all with constrained budgets and in competition with the private sector. Fostering really matters.
We’re on GCloud 14
There’s a new GCloud framework open from 9 November and FF Studio is on it. For those as clueless as I was 18 months ago, that basically means there’s now a legal vehicle for public sector bodies to give us some money to do some work.
We knew frameworks were important, but we’d not applied for one before. I quickly recognised that the move of Digital Marketplace from GDS to CCS in 2019 is still having repercussions in terms of information and service design, which is to say: the volume of information displayed across multiple websites and in varying formats when applying for GCloud was initially intimidating. Engaging with a non-internet-era process is frustrating for those born in the 1980s. Nonetheless, once through the information overload (thanks to Liz Whitefield, Sarah Gold and Clare Young for pointing us in the right directions), applying was a good forcing function for us to write down what we do and the services that we offer. We made an Arc Easel of the rate cards of some other relevant companies, to inform our own, and were happy to find that the actual application process remains consistent with the Design System.
After applying we learned that if you’ve not yet filed your first year’s accounts, CCS think you’re pretty sketchy. Our accountants helped us file our year 1 accounts within a week, and we were able to grapple with a poorly-designed spreadsheet to prove our Economic and Financial Standing.
One page of the 14 tab spreadsheet required to prove our economic standing
GCloud likes to think of itself as suitable for small businesses, but it’s not so friendly to new ones. How do you stay alive in the meantime? You hack procurement as best you can, day rates and contracting and subcontracting. In our first year we learned that it was true what someone had told us, “hacking procurement is the most creative thing you’ll do in the first two years”.
So after all of that, I’m really glad we got the siren to say we’re on GCloud - we’re open to business in the public sector. But I’m not sure this is the silver bullet given the way the wind is going in public sector procurement. DXW recently wrote their response to Jeni Tennison’s call out for ideas around DSIT, and top of the list was procurement. Because “commercial teams procure digital and tech skills as commodities”, and “only larger suppliers can compete on price like this”.
There are squeezes on budgets everywhere, and looking at all those rate cards made us realise that some organisations are designing their business models for lower unit costs rather than prioritising “expert, agile delivery”. Procurement is a tiring process for civil servants as much as it is for suppliers (I remember this keenly from bringing in some extra brains to work on identity and accounts in GOV.UK), so there’s a smidgen of rationale to putting out “four contracts worth around £19 million each” as one department did in 2023. That stretched-for-time head of product whose morale has been battered by Brexit, COVID and Jacob Rees-Mogg just wants people in the door to do the work and not to have to bother with procurement every six to nine to twelve months.
Those who win that work though are the “companies with deeper pockets [who] can gain incumbency with a public sector organisation by offering low prices before rates inevitably rise”. It’s the same suppliers who can afford to employ specialists in procurement into their organisations. Again, all well and good if that’s your game - but it’s not the ‘friendly to SMEs’ story that GCloud, or DOS (closed as a framework since 2022) try to tell.
Anyway - market share and winning large, long, high contract values isn’t really our game. We’re trying to bring together good, smart, experienced people who can develop thoughtful, well crafted outcomes. We know that’s not a scale game, either in company size or the work we take on. Most of our work so far has been with great, smart buyers who for whatever circumstance are able to invest in the methodical and diligent act of making change happen. Long may that continue, and now with less procurement faff than ever before (I hope).
If you want to see our services on GCloud, here’s a link.
AG
Parental leave is a society-sized problem
Anna is about to become a parent, so in January we sat down and talked about what a supportive environment for new parents looks like. At FF Studio we reckon parental leave for directors whose partner is having a baby is 3 months at full pay. Ideally taken in two blocks.
Personal context
For context, we don’t currently have any employees; Anna and I are both directors, and we have a gang of highly skilled freelancers who weave in and out as projects need them. So rather than a policy for employees, we’ve started with what directors do in this scenario.
A present father and mother was my normal. I was quite young when my dad retired. My childhood memory is of domestic and caring work done by both of them. And tbh this family history has shaped my views on parenting and care.
I was working at the Ministry of Justice as a contractor when my first child was born. My contract basically meant no paternity pay - but that’s part of the contractor game - you save money for holidays, sick pay and parental leave. You look after yourself.
With this freedom to make my own choices, I decided to stop working for one month initially directly after birth. Two weeks felt like a very short time given quite how transformative having a child is to life, norms and routines.
Seven months later in the summer, I decided to stop working for 2 months. (In reality, I quit the contract I was in and hoped to get another contract two months later.) Those two months were when my daughter was 8 months and was just starting to interact with me and the world around her.
This worked really well for me and my wife. Our household income took a hit, but the time with my daughter and my wife in those three months more than made up for it.
Experimenting our way forward
I’ve looked at government policies, and I’ve looked at what other companies do. Broadly I don’t think that there is enough support for non-birth parents to take time out from work to spend time with their new families.
As ever - all problems sit in their next bigger context - and so does this. Parental leave is a society-sized problem. Two weeks as a standard should be left in the 20th century. Where there are two parents, more equality of leave is more beneficial to the birth parent’s mental health, and it helps to spread the responsibility of care across both parents. That has repercussions for career progression and workplace equity across a lifetime, not just the first year of a child’s life.
We think it should be different. We want to model a compassionate and flexible approach that supports families while also acknowledging the economics of running a new business. I want to be able to point at things we have done, not ideas that we have.
So, there you have it. Having a child enter the family? Take a month off, then another two months off when the time is right.
We’ve only had to think about non-birth parents for now, in one very specific scenario. But we know that life brings loads of other scenarios too: being pregnant and giving birth, caring for older or disabled family members or friends, adopting, fostering and a million other nuanced scenarios as yet unlabelled. In an ideal world, I’d like us to head towards a broader ‘carers’ policy’; fingers crossed we grow enough to make that a reality.
So without writing policies for every possible scenario that could lie ahead, our broader position is this: new parents should be supported by their workplaces, their families, their communities. People who look after other people are great and should be supported. Caring is what life is for.
EF
Time is a design material, too
This is a post about patience: patience in the sales cycle, and patience in the work.
And it’s a post about pace layers - and how some of our standard industry practices force clients to work at a different pace than might actually be effective.
Slow down to see further
The long game is a long game.
But the dominant agency or consultancy industry model isn’t: it’s a quick close, a fixed day or weekly rate, set an engagement length, send an invoice at the end and off you go. If you’re working with a public sector organisation then maybe pass a service assessment at some point and chalk it up as success.
But trying to change the way humans behave, act, interact, and organise themselves… that doesn’t happen in the pre-defined time block of a discovery or an alpha. It happens in a different, slower layer of time.
So at FF Studio we attempt to work at the pace of our clients, with the grain rather than against it. Because while a lot of our work is about imagining, sharing and prototyping digital products, services, and futures, a lot of the rest of it is about how people working in organisations become more capable, resilient and confident doing those things themselves. You can only do one of those things quickly.
(Of course there’s another option for that standard operating procedure for consultancies: don’t move on. Land, expand and never leave. This might look like it’s a way of saying yes to a client’s natural pace - often it’s simply profit seeking, and taking advantage of any mix of the factors that often exist client-side: goodwill, the procurement headaches of bringing in a new supplier, cultural complacence, inexperience.)
Winning the work takes time
Often the first time we notice the pace of a client, it’s in the biz dev. When the bizdev is slow and needs a persistent, patient approach, this is often a sign that the actual work will also be. We try to accept that rather than work against it - we aren’t very good at hard sells anyway. Because we’re working alongside, not against a client. The time it takes to close on some work isn’t time lost, it’s time spent building up trust between us.
In fact it reminds me a little of getting a new job, in those circumstances where the salary negotiation happens right before accepting. It always felt to me like the last moment that I was in an adversarial relationship with the (potential) employer. From the moment we agree on a number, we’re working together, we’re on the same side. And yet right before we’re working in opposition. Our incentive structures differ and we want different things.
Treating the sales cycle as a generative rather than an extractive process, thinking of it as a phase to go through and build trust and stay on the same side, is an attempt to counter that feeling. We value the accrued trust over the ‘lost’ cashflow. We accept the pain of not needing to close urgently, and we believe that agencies that can’t accept the pain inherent in waiting to close don’t get to play the longer game later. And we have to trust that we can sniff out the bullshitters who will keep us talking, without any intention to give us any work - that if we turn up being honest and hopeful, the same will come back in our direction.
We can act in this way, by the way, because we made a decision to stay solvent for as long as possible instead of paying ourselves bigger dividends every month. We’ve broadly been quite conservative about the business choices we’ve made around where, what and how much money gets spent every month. Economically we’ve behaved like the last two years have been a bear market - because we are in a bear market. We have more choice about the work we take on and how quickly we do it because we have prioritised staying solvent enough to be around if it takes another six months to send an invoice.
A slow sales cycle can also hint that the work might be bigger than it first seems. When we’re patient and take the time to get close to the client, we end up having better conversations, which leads to better outcomes for the work, which often leads to more work. That slower sales cycle allows us to be better suppliers, and to do better work. As an example: last year we did three days of work with a client who didn’t think they’d be able to pay us any more in the short term. We kept having coffees with them every couple of weeks, and trusted them to tell us if there wouldn’t ever be any more budget heading in our direction. They are now our biggest client.
Doing the work takes time
Then you get to the work itself. I’ve already talked about how discoveries and alphas are the right tool for the job if the outcome you’re seeking is an improved digital service. But we’ve seen them done in silos, or go at such a pelt that they don’t change the weather in an organisation that’s trying to change from within. So how do we allow patience to creep in? How do we design a project to be impactful in the context of an organisation’s natural tendencies?
We acknowledge the tension between working at their natural pace and ours, instead of denying it. Then we try to find ways to go slow while staying fast. We know that we can’t go slowly and lose momentum. And we can’t go fast and burn out. The work needs a pace that a client won’t reject out of hand, and that we and they can sustain.
One way is to keep our attention persistent but partial. We spread ourselves out, but in a way that doesn’t dilute the value or dissipate the momentum. This is hard because it requires balancing the energy and attention of humans across multiple things, as well as repeated context switching in a week.
Another way is to parcel or slice our work up into an on/off cadence of intense periods of work followed by breathers where the client carries it forward before we return. If the work needs a break, we take a break: we’ve paused projects for two or three weeks before. But this is hard too: we need to hand it back to them in a way that transfers the momentum neatly. And not every client will carry the work forward in those gaps. Other things creep in, as they always do.
So neither way is as easy - or financially lucrative - as putting in a full time team for a short burst. But we think it’s worth it.
All the problems are 20 year problems
If we zoom out a bit: Most of the important problems the industry takes on are 20 year problems, whether they’re about technology, justice or anything else. We’ll need to repeatedly make a dent in them and keep going because it will take a long time to get to the final destination.
That means our practices, incentive structures and expectations need to support playing the long game. And to build on what’s been done before, and to do that sustainably. So we optimise for patience.
Anna Goss
Future of Courts Panel talk 14 May 2024
I was invited by Professor Dame Genn to be a panel member at The Future of Courts: Expert Panel and Discussion at University College London on 14 May 2024.
The premise of my talk was that no matter what work is done, we need to work on the system that does the work—in this case, middle management.
Full context: I’m infuriated by the public sector and deeply in love with what it does and why it exists. I believe we should socialise more problems, not less. I’m also a fan of avoiding a cheems mindset - I’m an optimist.
I know that strides have been made in the years since I worked in the Ministry of Justice. Where technology skills and norms were previously lacking, they are now present. I’m happy about the improvements, and sad and angry at their speed of change in the last 5 years. I’m pleased with how things have moved on and sad that the technology incumbents of 10 years ago are still the technology incumbents. Having contradictory views makes me human.
But from afar, after almost 10 years, three things remain true. The £1.3bn courts transformation programme budget is mostly spent. The incumbent suppliers are the same. And the size and power of the technology and user-centred design (UCD) community remain - broadly - the same.
We must move away from what Dave Rogers, the previous Ministry of Justice Chief Technology Officer, referred to as Toxic Technology—a calcified set of technologies and behaviours that slow meaningful progress. If past behaviour is the best predictor of future behaviour, it is worth reflecting on that and designing new habits.
Lastly, this is also a political and economic problem. The design industry talks of “designing a chair in a room”, and HM Court & Tribunal Services’ activities similarly sit inside a matryoshka doll of other activities and contexts. I’m keenly aware that our GDP growth, an austerity budgetary model and an imminent general election make things difficult.
So we need to design within existing constraints at the same time as we design to change those constraints. It’s not one or the other, it’s both: power, vision and pragmatism is a continuous tussle, and intelligence is holding multiple positions in your head at the same time.
Being hopeful and driven is in short supply. So I want to supply it. I hope my recommendations do that.
This was what I said on the panel:
Future of Courts Panel talk 14 May 2024
Hi everyone, it’s a privilege to be here, and I appreciate Dame Professor Genn for organising this and extending the invite to me.
I have a long career making tricky technology projects happen. Normally when various disciplines need to work together in new ways. I now run a design and technology studio called FF Studio, which does that.
I was a member of the senior leadership for MoJ Digital a few years ago during the first wave of digital transformation projects.
I’d like to talk about middle management. It is where the work starts, ends, grows, succeeds or fails.
I will tell you 3 quick stories to illustrate this, and make 3 recommendations…
1st story. In 2014 I was the project lead for a very early digital project with Civil Claims.
We aimed to make a property claim understandable to litigants in person and allow them to do it online.
When doing this, everyone’s response to almost everything was “that’s not legal”. In the world of middle management - that kind of response is a showstopper.
To navigate that, I would hang around the Royal Court of Justice during the Civil Procedure Rule Committee. Judicially influential people didn’t have enough time dedicated to this project and the nature of the work means you need 5 minutes here, 5 minutes there.
Me doing this gave us enough time to discuss things in detail with someone with enough legal authority. This gave me the confidence to respond to people with, “Yes, it is legal.” I had to have the technical skills, tenacity, and self-confidence to do that repeatedly.
2nd story. I was a keyholder on the Criminal Justice Exchange project in 2015.
That role meant I attended a fortnightly critique of the project and was a voice in its governance: I needed to report whether it was going well or poorly. One quarter, the project lead put together a report for the oversight board. I labelled it amber. But I was immediately inundated with calls to change my mind, as it would draw attention to the project.
Sometimes I would deputise for my boss and attend the court transformation programme board. The power relationships and lines of communication between senior and middle management often meant that it was safer to say that everything was proceeding well, even if it wasn’t. I knew what was being presented there was theatre, but to say so would have been career limiting heresy.
There is a joke in project management circles about “watermelon projects” which look green on the outside, but are red in the middle. Large institutions have a history of running them because senior individuals aren’t close enough to the details and lack the technical literacy to know what questions to ask and see when the whole truth isn’t being communicated.
3. Last story. In 2015, I was the accountable lead for the first project to move into delivery on the court reform programme. Fee Remission.
Starting a project requires documentation, but documenting the project also flattened nuances, codified false confidence, and heightened expectations. For cultural reasons, the wider environment was deeply averse to “we don’t know yet” as a documented answer in a plan. This is where organisational norms diverge from practical reality.
To avoid writing “we don’t know yet”, we secretly started the project 8-12 weeks before we were officially allowed to. We had to prototype in areas we lacked confidence or didn’t know the answer.
In the wider technology industry, this approach is test and learn. But really, it is failure and learning. But being allowed to fail takes trust and power. Converting a vision into practice takes trust and power. I realise this has ultimately been my professional obsession.
That’s 3 stories.
The environment in which middle management work is done is deeply hierarchical. Power rolls downhill, so you must ensure that a trusting environment between the doers and the power base is built early.
To that end, I have 3 recommendations.
1. Hire people who speak truth to power no matter how uncomfortable that will undoubtedly feel for all involved.
The power comes from the Minister or the Master of the Rolls. The individuals responsible need to manifest that power, and they need to be technically literate.
Getting the right people in is hard enough. Procurement and hiring are flawed processes in government, so I would focus there.
In my experience, once you have the right people, building this system of trust takes way more time, effort, and emotional energy than anyone expects.
2. Orchestrate the outcomes you want by understanding and using incentives.
Organisations and markets are islands of people with their own biases and personal incentives. Incentives drive behaviour and outcomes. Ask everyone involved, “What is your business model?” and very consciously align people, or place them in creative tension.
On a human level, I’m pretty certain I could achieve what I did because my skill set was not wholly reliant on conforming to civil service norms. I knew I could get a job and pay my bills based on my skills, not the social environment I was operating in.
I was in the role at a systemic level for well-orchestrated reasons too.
Major systems integrators and technology providers have essentially captured the public sector. With all the connotations that capture involves. I was explicitly in a role to try to stop that from happening. To generate a creative tension that drove quality.
This was very helpful, given that major sections of the civil justice system are built and run by some of the world’s largest IT and business consulting firms.
3. Avoid false confidence by prototyping as you go.
False confidence is an inherent and unavoidable human trait—so much so that it is part of the public sector green book on financial modelling. It is referred to as optimism bias. Know you have an optimism bias and incorporate it into your plan.
You never have perfect information so do not model your processes around having it. Don’t accept the myth that if you just think harder, design in more detail and document more brilliantly you can manage this risk up front. Nor should you simply outsource that risk at a cost. The practice never matches the theory.
Instead, accept that there is inherent uncertainty and risk, always. Explore and prototype to learn more about your largest uncertainties and risks.
- Which privileged litigants get to be early adopters, who can afford the costs of this new practices and what does meaningful consent look like?
- What legal firms are interested in doing this, will they conform to common data standards and what are the risks to them in not doing so?
- Which courts will trial this new practice first, what signals indicate wider roll out is worth the costs?
Plan, prototype, measure results, repeat. Because confidence and certainty can be built one prototype at a time.
In conclusion, the vision is a good one. But as I said to Professor Dame Genn when we spoke about this, we are not short on theories; we are short on practices.
My recommendations may seem obvious, or maybe even parochial. And frankly, they are. However, when taken together, they build and compound.
Eliot Fineberg