Its great to look back at all the work we have achieved. Each project has had new discoveries and old friends.

Client: HMRC

There was a need to ensure that government departments and royal households could submit their VAT returns online. Much like the VAT site for businesses, the solution would create VAT periods and perform calculation on the data submitted in each return. There were a number of challenges that we had to face in this project, not least that we only had 3 months to complete the project.

Working with the Government Accounting and Budgeting System team was a great experience. They were a dedicated team that had very old MS Access based data tools for entering the VAT submissions by hand. At first there were concerns that the team would have to learn yet another new system. We often find that teams are using tools that don't effectively encapsulate their working practices, resulting in them creating new practices to accommodate the tools. We knew from the outset that there was a great deal of expertise within the team that we could encapsulate into the solution. We set about having a number of meetings in which we asked questions and understood the points of pain with current systems. Then we made a rough working prototype within a week so that everyone could sit in front of it and give feedback. The teams were then able to give feedback on the solution on a weekly basis, this has the added benefit of enabling people to become familiar with the operation of the solution and avoid lengthy documentation and user guides.