Working in partnership to protect vulnerable and exploited workers

The Gangmaster and Labour Abuse Authority (GLAA) are a relatively small agency within the Home Office who are gathering greater powers to license and stop abuse happening to those in vulnerable working situations. Workers who may not speak English well or are having pay deducted without their knowledge, imagine a modern day slave.

Problem

The GLAA are currently going through a big change from DEFRA to the Home Office. This move means that the IT systems would need to be moved along with the customer facing platform. Therefore the team decided to tackle both at the same time, especially as the licensing system was outdated and running low on it’s servicing agreement.

Process

Studying the current user flows with the in house BA to identify areas of improvement before presenting this information to internal stakeholders and testing with external users across the country to ascertain the correct path.

GDS Discovery Phase

During the discovery phase of this project I conducted various methods of research ranging from interviews to surveys and remote site meetings with workers. As this was running through the GDS I made sure to cover the correct amount of quantitative and qualitative research to gain the greatest vision as I could for the GLAA.

  • Created a set of questions for recorded interviews with clients at their work places

  • Created a variety of surveys to capture the greatest knowledge from a wide spectrum of users

  • Gathered information from site visits and collated them to find trends and popular feelings around the application

  • Produced a pdf of findings and key pull outs for the team to present to the GDS

Alpha Phase

Knowledge sharing

The GLAA brought digital experts in to not only assist them in the transformation project but also to share our extensive digital knowledge with them. We held multiple meetings to share our thoughts with the internal teams

  • Helped define user personas established from discovery research

  • Interviewed all potentional 3rd party development partners and highlighted the benefits and potential issues for the team

  • Gave honest opinion and constructive criticism on all queries asked of me

Outcome

The project successfully launched and is currently live protecting the most vulnerable within the working environment and help to the hard work within the GLAA, the number of cases of slavery has declined by 10% a year after release and continues to drop.