Client
A UK central government department
Sector
Public Sector
Engagement
Strategy, delivery and embedded engineering - multi-quarter programme.
What the client needed
The department’s flagship online service handled millions of citizen interactions a year, but ran on a back end that had been in place for over two decades. Outages were increasing, accessibility audits were finding repeat issues, and the department faced a hard regulatory deadline to introduce new policy capabilities that the existing platform could not support. A previous transformation attempt had over-run significantly.
How we worked
- Reframed the work around the GOV.UK Service Standard, with an explicit focus on user research, accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA) and incremental delivery.
- Used a strangler-fig approach to peel functionality off the legacy back end one user journey at a time, with parallel running and continuous reconciliation against legacy outputs.
- Built a cloud-first platform on a G-Cloud-aligned hyperscaler, with all infrastructure defined as code and a paved-road service template adopted by every new microservice.
- Established a joint product, design and engineering team blended across Halfteck and the department, with explicit handover gates at each phase.
- Embedded operational resilience and security controls - including incident response playbooks and quarterly game days - from the first release.
Measured results
All figures verified with the client. Specific identifiers withheld in line with our standard confidentiality terms.
- Citizen-facing service uptime improved from 98.9% to 99.97% over the first 12 months on the new platform.
- Average service completion time for users reduced by 41%, with notable improvements for assistive-technology users following targeted accessibility work.
- The new policy capabilities required by legislation were delivered four weeks ahead of the regulatory deadline.
- Annual operating cost of the citizen-facing service reduced by approximately 30% once the legacy back end was decommissioned.
- Internal department teams took full ownership of the platform on schedule, with Halfteck transitioning into an advisory role within 14 months.
“What stood out was how seriously Halfteck took the Service Standard. They treated accessibility, user research and incremental delivery as non-negotiables - exactly as we needed them to.”
Working on something similar?
If this engagement looks like the kind of problem you are facing, we would be glad to compare notes by email.