The UK’s tax, payments and customs authority, HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC), is receiving the UK public sector award for moving fast in Slack to help design, implement and deliver a number of digital services that allowed more than 12 million affected businesses and citizens to apply for financial support during the pandemic.
A project that would usually take several months was completed in less than five weeks. Slack helped enable more than 2,000 people across 60 teams, mostly working from home, to collaborate at record speed. Communicating in Slack channels, HMRC’s digital teams saved time with custom Slack apps and integrations like PagerDuty and Jira. Stakeholders could easily see status and progress, with the right people – HMRC staff, contractors and IT partners – added at the right time to the right channels. This facilitated collaboration and helped the teams identify and resolve issues critical to the success of the high-profile programme. In spite of late nights and early mornings, they kept morale high by building camaraderie in Slack and other channels.
Up and running since April 2020, the first grants were paid within weeks of becoming operational, offering crucial relief for those furloughed due to the pandemic. The HMRC’s solutions have had record high satisfaction ratings from customers and the Self-Employed Income Support Scheme (SEISS) was recognised by the UK’s BCS Chartered Institute of IT as the ‘Best Public Sector IT Project.’
