Our approach
The youth justice system is made up of organisations which need to inter-operate across many networks. Traditional approaches to ICT-enabled information-sharing across many different networks represent too high a risk of failure. They are often also unaffordable, take too long to implement and do not allow for crucial facilitation of business change processes to make the benefits fully available to practitioners, children and young people.
Our radically different approach to programme management can be summarised into five main areas:
- Programme management
Smaller projects are naturally much less risky than large ones and can be delivered by small focused teams often within a calendar year. The programme set up a number of very small projects, loosely joined and designed with a minimum of inter-project dependencies. This has been the essence of risk reduction and speed to market for the programme.
- Stakeholder engagement
Over 50% of the team are seconded from youth justice practitioner teams, the National Offender Management Service [link opens in new window] and the Police. These practitioners lead the way on priority setting, they test the ICT solutions for fitness for purpose, and they lead the benefits realisation roll-outs before returning to their parent organisations to champion the new tools and techniques.
- Procurement
UK government locally and nationally, and private sector service delivery partners have already made very significant investments in information systems. The programme successfully exploits existing ICT capabilities and framework contracts and uses these capabilities as a key technique to accelerate deployment, reduce risks, and take-out costs. This has had a hugely positive impact on achievability and time-to-market.
- Data, technology and interfaces
Success has been achieved through practices such as one national standard data catalogue, formal agreements for information sharing, low complexity integrations, widespread use of shared services, significant technology re-use and exploitation of the Internet. Keeping the technical aspects of the programme simple, with low complexity integrations and with significant technology re-use, has been instrumental in delivering fast and cheap information sharing.
- Roll-out and Benefits Realisation
Youth justice practitioners seconded to the programme roll-out the services and help every local team to embed their own Benefits Realisation Plan (BRP) which is signed by each service manager. These BRPs are owned locally but monitored and reported on nationally.
Click here to see what we have already achieved on behalf of the youth justice system.