Guaranteed Minimum Pension - Alpha Assessment
The report from the alpha assessment of the HMRC’s Guaranteed Minimum Pension service on 27 October 2015.
Department / Agency:
HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC)
Date of Assessment:
27 October 2015
Assessment Stage:
Alpha
Result of Assessment:
Pass
Lead Assessor:
M. Knight
Service Manager:
N. Cranston
Digital Leader:
M. Dearnley
About the Service
The Guaranteed Minimum Pension service will allow Pension Scheme Administrators to calculate a member’s guaranteed minimum pension after contracting-out ends.
Summary
The panel consider the Guaranteed Minimum Pension (GMP) service to be on track to meet the Digital Service Standard at this early stage of development.
Detail
The panel was impressed by the work presented by the service team. There was evidence the team are prioritising user needs and working in an agile manner. The panel was pleased to hear the team has such a good balance of roles and skills at this stage of development.
The alpha presented was a front-end demo and the team had thought through their approach to the architecture of the service. As part of their approach the team are planning to use some existing services, such as Government Gateway and HMRC environments.
There is no requirement to make provision for assisted digital users for non-transactional services, such as this calculator. If the service expands to become transactional, the team must develop assisted digital support to meet user needs.
Recommendations
The team should use the private beta phase to continue to develop the service. In particular, the panel recommends the team:
- research the name for the service with users, considering a more self-descriptive name;
- continue to test pension specific terminology with users;
- as planned, monitor the potential demand for a bulk service during the private beta to provide evidence for a decision on whether to include this option in future iterations;
- develop an approach to handling errors (for example when a user enters correct details but the system can’t return a result) and to dealing with queries from users on the data the service provides;
- deliver and test messaging for times when the service is not available (e.g. between 3am and 5am or during planned outages);
- test and consider what other services or GOV.UK information users of this service may want to be directed to;
- clarify their deployment process;
- ensure that there are members of the team with WebOps skills in the next phase;
- consider the interim approach of a squid proxy, and its security implications, while the DES API is not available and confirm what the approach for this will be in public beta;
- ensure that they are evaluating code for sharing;
- implement Analytics and discuss (as already scheduled) a page for this service with the Performance Platform team;
- ensure that they are able to report the cost per transaction of the service;
- although the changes in 2016 will drive some users to this service, the team should use user research to develop a plan to actively promote the new service and increase digital take-up.
Digital by Default Service Standard Criteria
| Criteria | Result | Criteria | Result |
| 1 | Pass | 2 | Pass |
| 3 | Pass | 4 | Pass |
| 5 | Pass | 6 | Pass |
| 7 | Pass | 8 | Pass |
| 9 | Pass | 10 | Pass |
| 11 | Pass | 12 | Pass |
| 13 | Pass | 14 | Pass |
| 15 | Pass | 16 | Pass |
| 17 | Pass | 18 | Pass |