Food Standard Agency
Enabling a Government department to adapt to EU Exit and new ways of working.
We deployed a truly user-centred change management approach to support the FSA’s Executive Team, leaders, and staff in transforming their ways of working.
Starting first by running a series of Clarity of Purpose workshops with the Executive team, focused on their strategic ambitions, concerns, how people needed to work and Digital’s role in enabling that.
1,500
Staff are enabled and empowered to work remotely.
40%
Reduction in the cost of IT delivery.
03
New core capabilities were created internally.
01 The challenge we faced
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is an independent Government department working to protect public health and consumers’ wider interests in food. It has 1,500 technology users across a range of different personae, including both office and field-based staff.
The FSA was in the process of changing to become more location agnostic, allowing staff to work more flexibly and remotely, whilst needing to create more flexible IT to help deal with the unknown consequences of EU Exit. Current IT provision was under a single-supplier agreement, which was overly-static and had led to the existence of technical debt.
Furthermore the current cost profile was no longer competitive. The FSA came to the conclusion that it required a fundamental redesign of their technology strategy to meet the business’ needs.
02 Tacking the problem
As FSA’s digital transformation partner we worked collaboratively with key stakeholders to conduct user research, uncovering the user needs that were not met by current IT delivery.
Insights into user needs were able to determine where current IT provision was failing the business, and determined how FSA should approach the market to re-procure services.
Collectively, we successfully ran a series of procurements for 8 lots through Government frameworks to identify the new suppliers of services that were logically structured according to market provision and user need. This enabled us to bring control of ICT back in-house and up skill the new internal team to manage suppliers and be self-sufficient.
The disaggregation of IT delivery enabled FSA to undertake more innovative projects that contribute to the organisation’s success, including an digital workplace to support the organisation’s drive to become more location agnostic and digitally inclusive.
“I haven't seen anything like this before. This is the standard that all of government should be working to.”
Executive Director of Communications
Civil Service
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