Defra
De-risking a £300 million portfolio with strategic design
Context
Client: The UK's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra), managing a portfolio of over 200 concurrent digital projects worth £300 million.
The challenge: An established project portfolio faced significant delivery risk due to inefficient, legacy assurance systems and a lack of strategic, data-driven oversight.
Our solution: The complete redesign of Defra's digital assurance function, transforming it from a static spreadsheet into a proactive, champion of the Service Standard.
Key results
-%
Reduction in projects flagged as at risk.
+
Projects with increased delivery confidence.
Data-driven
Digital service delivered for senior leadership.
The challenge: reimagining digital oversight
Defra oversaw one of the UK government’s largest digital portfolios. Yet senior leaders lacked a clear, data-driven view of service quality.
The existing oversight function was seen as valuable but relied on static spreadsheets. These were inaccessible, hard to use, and left multimillion-pound projects at risk of failing user needs or GDS assessments.
The challenge was to rebuild trust and transform assurance from a checkbox exercise into a strategic enabler of success.
Our approach: user-driven development
We treated the oversight process as a service in its own right, with Defra’s internal teams as the users.
Through in-depth discovery with senior stakeholders, we designed a complete service blueprint of the assurance journey. This mapped every interaction and highlighted opportunities to improve experience, reduce risk, and support delivery confidence.
Visualising the approach
Selected artefacts from the redesign. User research, alpha conccepts, user journeys and the live service itself.
Aligned leadership on the real problem in one presentation.
Visualised a new assurance service based on user needs.
Deployed a live service used to track digital deliveries.
The solution: bringing the design to life
We replaced static spreadsheets with a live, GDS-aligned assurance service. It brings qualitative insight from research and assurance reviews together with delivery data in one place, so senior leaders get a clear, shared view of project health and the reasons behind it. Status, risks and evidence are visible and traceable, creating a single source of truth across the portfolio.
We iterated the service with project teams and leadership through rounds of usability testing. Language, navigation and reporting were refined to match how people actually work, making preparation for assessments faster and decision-making more confident. Post-launch sessions created a prioritised UX backlog to keep improvements moving without disrupting delivery.
My impact on the project
As the research and strategy lead, I translated user needs into a clear, actionable plan that aligned stakeholders and de-risked delivery.
Set the north star: a single, evidence-based vision for the assurance service.
Established the assurance charter: clear roles and decision rights.
Made oversight outcome-led: mapped user needs to delivery data.
Created the service blueprint: a data-driven design used as the core of the redesign.
Shipped high-confidence alphas: rapid co-design and testing with delivery teams.
Enabled iteration: a prioritised UX backlog post-launch.
The results: a measurable shift
The redesign created a measurable shift in delivery confidence across Defra’s £300 million portfolio.
By helping projects prepare for assessments and understand their health, the new service became a central tool for managing risk and improving outcomes.
200+
Projects with increased delivery confidence