work / The MoD

The MoD

Discover My Benefits: Helping service personnel discover what they’re worth, wherever they are.

What the MoD needed

All three Armed Forces are struggling to retain their people. As part of a strategy to combat this, the MoD wanted to make it easy for serving personnel to calculate the value of their total employee package and compare it to what they might be worth in civilian life.

A tool to do this already existed, but it was hard to pull information together and difficult to understand the results. The MoD wanted something more informative, easier to use, and that could be accessed from remote locations, including under the sea.

Anything we built also had to adhere to Government Digital Service (GDS) standards and be highly secure; we couldn’t store personal data centrally, for example.

What we did

We knew our work would be assessed by senior stakeholders from across the MoD, Royal Navy, Army and RAF before we could launch the Public Beta version. So our first step was to conduct almost 100 interviews with users, to make sure everything we did was answering genuine user needs. 

We then worked with a client team made up of HR experts, contract specialists and serving personnel, following an Agile methodology. One of the ambitions for the service was that, after launch, it would be managed and improved by internal MoD teams. As none of the client team were digital natives – and this was the first time working Agile – we set up comprehensive training for them in the Agile approach. We also trained the product owner, put collaboration tools and processes in place, and trained people in how to create digital content.

The outcome

The project exceed the expectations of all stakeholders. Discover My Benefits is now managed by an MoD team, and Great State continue to work with them, developing new features and content to meet user needs.

Get in touch

Contact us to see how we can help you develop new features for your customers.

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