Find a solution for your employment dispute alpha assessment report
The report for Find a solution for your employment dispute alpha assessment on 10 February 2022.
Service Standard assessment report
Find a solution to your employment dispute
| From: | Central Digital & Data Office (CDDO) |
| Assessment date: | 10/02/2022 |
| Stage: | Alpha |
| Result: | Met |
| Service provider: | ACAS |
Service description
This service allows claimants or their representatives to notify ACAS of a workplace dispute and choose whether they want early conciliation or to get a certificate to the employment tribunal for a judge to decide. It is a statutory service, and claimants cannot access the employment tribunal without first making a notification to ACAS. ACAS receives around 120,000 notifications a year.
Early conciliation is a largely telephone-based service that involves speaking with individuals and organisations in the dispute. Highly-trained conciliators help parties understand relevant legal principles and assist them to reach a resolution.
If a resolution cannot be found, or the claimant does not want conciliation, then ACAS provides a certificate that allows parties to take their dispute to the employment tribunal.
Service users
- '’Claimants’’ – individuals with a workplace dispute
- '’Representative’’ – solicitors, legal advisors, trades’ union representatives or family members/friends who speak to Acas on behalf of a claimant
High level user needs this service aims to meet
- As a claimant I need to tell ACAS about my workplace dispute so that I can take my employer to an employment tribunal or reach a settlement through early conciliation
- As a representative I need to tell ACAS about a workplace dispute so that a claimant can take their employer to an employment tribunal or reach a settlement through early conciliation.
1. Understand users and their needs
Decision
The service met point 1 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of ways that emotional distress could impact the users’ ability to interact with the service. Specifically how the information capacity of a user can change depending on the nature of their dispute. They also highlighted how users have reacted to specific questions that were removed to remove any risk that the user felt they may have to confront those who they were aggrieved against
- despite the difficult challenges of conducting user research in the midst of the Pandemic, the team conducted a commendable series of Usability Testing sessions (30) and ensured they had broad representation from users who have Accessibility needs
- the Team showed a great understanding of the mindset of a user and highlighted that they were mindful of the Users propensity to drop out, or ‘give themselves away’ to their employer. This has directly impacted the phraseology of questions, and how they have reinforced what elements are optional to avoid dropouts
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- engage users who are not familiar with the ACAS tribunal certificate process. There is an assumption that users who have reached the start point of the service have an understanding of what they need and what the outcomes could and should be. It is risky to assume users will have gone through an understanding funnel before reaching the certification process
- explore how users might gain an understanding of what the service can do
- explore what supplemental information about the service users might need
- identify how to support and where necessary divert users at the start of the process if they have arrived here without an understanding of outcomes
2. Solve a whole problem for users
Decision
The service met point 2 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the service aims to join up and rethink 2 existing services that form part of a wider end-to-end service for users. It was reassuring to see the team working across organisations involved as a service community to map out and align steps in their non-linear journey
- they identified and prioritised the most common causes of dispute
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- test a user journey that starts with understanding the service and who it is right for, before moving into testing the service. This will give an understanding of the process users go through when transitioning between information finding and requesting a certificate. It will also highlight any gaps, or areas that the service could support further
3. Provide a joined-up experience across all channels
Decision
The service met point 3 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the end-to-end journey for users crosses channels and organisations, the team have done well to understand and consider these points including shadowing conciliators
- the team found that giving information about other channels for accessing the service early on was reassuring to users
4. Make the service simple to use
Decision
The service met point 4 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- many users need guidance upfront however the team have provided in-service guidance so everyone gets the information they need at the right time for them.
- the team have designed the service to support the wide range of digital and legal abilities within their user-base
- they reduced questions to 1 thing per page, adding support text to the types of dispute making it easy for users to know what to choose and using branching and progressive disclosure to reduce the cognitive load for users
- they are not simply building the paper process
- the team are working within tight legal constraints but have been able to use their work to change 2 laws, making the service simpler
5. Make sure everyone can use the service
Decision
The service met point 5 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- there will be support for accessing the service over the phone and by paper which is legislated
- the team tested prototypes with users with a wide range of needs and abilities, cognitive and physical
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- recruit users who have visual impairments, specifically those who use a screen magnifier and/or screen reader in order to interact with a digital service
6. Have a multidisciplinary team
Decision
The service met point 6 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team is a good size with the key roles we would expect to see in place
- the Service Owner is clearly involved and confident working with the team to make decisions
- the team have a strong plan to grow in Beta and bring in the appropriate roles to support their work
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- continue to review whether a full time product manager would benefit the team. It might not be required but should be regularly reviewed
7. Use agile ways of working
Decision
The service met point 7 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team are using a range of tools and ceremonies to support their work and help them make decisions
- the ceremonies that the team use are regularly reviewed to ensure that they are providing value
- the team approach to user research as a team and ensures that the findings from this research are fed back into the service
- the team have a strong approach to sharing knowledge with key stakeholders
8. Iterate and improve frequently
Decision
The service met point 8 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team were feeding research findings into the design, iterating and even removing elements that supported from an admin perspective but created anxiety and possible drop-offs with users
- they iterated the start page considerably which led to unexpected design outcomes
- they experimented with 1 question per page formats and improved the journey by introducing branching
- identified and iterated problems through research, for example, they discovered people were submitting multiple times because it was unclear when a form was sent
9. Create a secure service which protects users’ privacy
Decision
The service met point 9 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team have outlined their existing infrastructure along with their proposed infrastructure for technical components of their Employment Tribunal Claim processes and service components. Their proposed infrastructure takes into consideration various authentication and authorisation factors to ensure the service is able to cater various security and privacy requirements
- have outlined that their older legacy system had been found to be lower in performance standards which led them to migrate from a Drupal based system to Symfony
- have established KPIs for performance testing and enduring of how claims are being completed, of how their customers had their expectation met and how their online system (digital accessibility) has met the requirements of GDS standards
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- explore consent based approval for a claim being submitted on behalf of someone else
- ensure that standards surrounding data privacy, data protection and particularly an evaluation of their claims process around fraudulent claims would need to be reassessed
- explore compliance around GDPR (UK) regulations particularly around article 5 the right to be forgotten within their claims and submissions process
10. Define what success looks like and publish performance data
Decision
The service met point 10 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team have a plan to measure the four key KPIs and report these on data.gov.uk
- they are planning to look at other ways of measuring the service’s success and are already thinking about other KPIs for the service
- the team have learned from their previous service and used this to inform their approach to performance
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- continue to explore performance in relation to their service and think about how they should iterate their KPIs to provide the best possible value to the service team and their users
11. Choose the right tools and technology
Decision
The service met point 11 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the team have made a good choice of tools and technologies in using an interactive tool to capture various insights, comments made by their customers and how have they used varied voting criteria for not only evaluating their claims process but also how are they performing overall for a customer who is under considerable psychological pressure (overload) whilst submitting a claim
- the team made a conscious decision to evolve their claims process system (existing case management service) from Drupal CMS system to Symfony a more comprehensive scalable, load balanced forms service using open standards of Kubernetes which uses the same CRM backend storage for data retention purposes
- the team has efficiently transitioned their legacy integration service based on AWS Mulesoft to scale and become more performance effective through their API management service in Azure
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- implement and automate their data resilience and redundancy and not be reliant on AWS EC2 availability zone services in event of outages
- the above point of recommendation is based on the remit that GDPR (UK) regulations stipulate that data (especially employment tribunal claims which have PII data) does not leave the UK. This violates data sovereignty
- explore and assess the total cost of ownership of the tech components when transitioning from their existing infrastructure to proposed infrastructure, especially their usage around multi-cloud approach (as they are using AWS and Azure)
12. Make new source code open
Decision
The service met point 12 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the ACAS tribunal claim forms system is built using open source code development methodology but this is on the presumption that their “herokuapp” (link here) adheres to GOV.UK standards and hence built on open source standards
- the link to ACAS GitHub repository was provided at time of pre-assessment tech call. Also, post assessment presentation day in response to the tech assessors query asking to provide additional information about their GitHub repositories related to Alpha assessment, the team have outlined their various stages through listing their GitHub repositories.
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- as a recommendation provide details of their GitHub repository prior or during the assessment day
13. Use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns
Decision
The service met point 13 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- ACAS Employment tribunal claims system and the process utilises open standards and common system design principles and patterns as governed within the GOV.UK Service Toolkit. Their system uses the GOV.UK PaaS Service Toolkit both on AWS and Azure to host their services and their infrastructure
- the team are implementing patterns from the GOV.UK design system which users have found reassuring
- their infrastructure and other tech components, inclusive of data stores, have been built-on 99.9% availability and therefore been deemed by the tech assessor to be resilient and secure
What the team needs to explore
Before their next assessment, the team needs to:
- as ACAS Tribunal Claims service progresses into their private beta phase, it is recommended by the tech assessor that this ACAS service evaluates some of the data sovereignty and GDPR (UK) regulatory considerations surrounding the claimants processes and their data
14. Operate a reliable service
Decision
The service met point 14 of the Standard.
What the team has done well
The panel was impressed that:
- the tech assessor has taken on board inputs and comments from the Lead assessor and awaits further update feedback from the interaction designer 1-to-1 conversation on how ACAS is going to operate a further reliable service. The tech assessor is reasonably confident on ACAS tribunal form service to operate reliably based on their existing infrastructure (resiliency & availability ) and how the service is going to scale further up based on Kubernetes and other performance factors