How did Registers of Scotland find the right formula to kick-start and then continue its digital transformation?
Transforming large-scale digital development work by reshaping the culture, capabilities, and customer focus at Registers of Scotland.
The challenge
Registers of Scotland is a cornerstone of the Scottish economy. It oversees 21 public registers. Most notably as the guardian for land and property registers, which underpin the Scottish property market. The people of Scotland rely on these registers to make important decisions about land and property, buy and sell their homes, and settle estates.
Registers of Scotland (RoS) had bold ambitions to digitize its entire operation, maximizing its agility and innovation potential in service of the citizens of Scotland. To do so, it needed to reduce its reliance on third parties and pivot to a product and service-centric delivery model. In other words, RoS had to move away from its outsourced IT model and establish an in-house digital powerhouse.
Despite aiming high, RoS faced significant challenges. It needed to implement changes safely to avoid any incidents or outages. It also needed to steer clear of doing anything that would draw negative attention from regulators and the Scottish Government.
There were internal issues that needed to be addressed too. Like an outdated project management approach, technical debt and a disjointed method for managing demand. As Head of IT Enablement, Paul Christie, explains, “We didn’t have the concept of release pipelines embedded within the business. We didn’t have the skills, the technology, the structure, the practices or the culture to underpin the ambition the organization had.”
Approach
Registers of Scotland’s multidisciplinary team led the work and brought in experts from Emergn to quickly establish new ways of working. This included adopting Emergn’s principles of VFQ – deliver value early and often, optimize the flow of work end to end, and discover quality with fast feedback – as well as Emergn’s IT Service Management practices.
Doing so allowed the newly established IT Enablement Team to deliver a robust framework for managing issues, resolving incidents, and restoring services faster and more easily. Using organizational and technical expertise from Emergn helped RoS quickly upgrade its technology stack too. Including containerization to improve resilience and support regular, seamless deployments.
Emergn also introduced industry-leading product discovery and delivery techniques. These enabled RoS to reshape its teams by product domains. Senior leaders across the organization – from Product to Business Operations – were able to focus on business priorities rather than functional silos. Teams were realigned to outcomes. And work was prioritized according to what was most valuable to the customer.
The team introduced feedback mechanisms to monitor any uncertainties around product launches as well as the value those products might add. This approach enabled agile decision-making and encouraged the organization to adopt a culture of discovery and experimentation. As Paul Christie describes it, “We embraced a fail-fast culture, enabling RoS to ensure that true value realization was embedded within our initiatives.”
Our impact
RoS released its award-winning Scotland Land Information Service (ScotLIS) – a digital one-stop shop for accessing information about land and property, helping fulfil the ambition of delivering quality digital services at scale and pace.
As Paul Christie concludes, “It was the first digital product we released that harmonized good technology with product-centricity and multidisciplinary teams, founded on core principles around agile ways of working that Emergn enabled. From the success of that, we scaled out quite rapidly.”
The transformation of RoS – through collaboration, agile methodologies, and customer-centricity – demonstrates how traditional institutions can quickly evolve to meet the needs of the digital age.
It’s not just about the technology either. RoS recognized that digital transformations like this are as much about organizational culture as they are about platforms or structure. Leaders acknowledged that only by creating enduring product-oriented teams could RoS become the digital organization that they wanted it to be. Sustaining these teams and the new culture is critical for meeting its digital aspirations. Thanks to Emergn’s support, RoS was able to quickly initiate and then continue on this journey.
Related client stories
How do you start to make a difference when faced with such a large and complex organization?
How do you stay true to your customer mission while completely changing the way your company works?
How do you make urgent and critical changes without breaking an enterprise in the process?
Let’s have a conversation
"*" indicates required fields