When your shiny new passport arrives in the mail, you probably don’t think about the thousands of people involved in creating it. And you likely don’t picture a large government office filled with scanners, printers, millions of paper documents and even a conveyor belt carrying your application from one part of the office to the other.
For decades, that was exactly what His Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO), the issuer of passports to British citizens worldwide, looked like. The government agency followed a paper-based, linear workflow to process more than 6 million applications every year.
Passport examiners would have to complete a task before moving on to the next step of the application process. Even during “normal” times delays occurred often; say, if a photo wasn’t sized correctly or if someone’s details needed to be verified.
Everything changed in March 2020 when the pandemic forced employees to work from home. Suddenly, HMPO was faced with a logistics and security challenge: How could they keep up with urgent requests?
Supported by Slack, HMPO securely streamlined its entire application process within weeks and as a result, was able to start quickly processing passports again. Although workers are back in the office, the accelerated shift to a digital-first work environment has completely modernized the culture and experience of passport-application processing for over 4,000 staff and, more importantly, British citizens everywhere.
Making faster decisions when it matters most
Before the pandemic, the software development team was the only group at HMPO using Slack to ship software and manage IT requests.
But when the office ground to a halt in March 2020, Philippa Manley, the director of digital services and projects at HMPO, and her team saw an opportunity to expand Slack usage, empowering the entire department to work from home securely. They created a working group and used Slack to project-manage the rollout.
The working group was able to move at an unprecedented pace, by opting for asynchronous conversations in Slack channels, jumping onto calls directly from Slack for live check-ins, empowering users to get up to speed through archived content, and using reacji for quick decision-making.
With one-click emoji reactions, you can quickly react to a message when you hover over it with suggested emoji.
“Crucially, Slack gave us the tools to help make decisions at speed,” Manley says. In fact, without Slack, she thinks HMPO wouldn’t have been able to process passports remotely.
“We simply wouldn’t have attempted to run a piece of work at that speed if we couldn’t have had that collaboration tool, because to try and do that by email or conference calls alone would’ve been too slow,” says Manley.
Thanks to Slack we can do a better job of all the stuff we care about—keeping people safe and providing people with their full entitlement of rights. We’re able to maintain a more consistent level of quality as well.
Deploying Slack across the department was far easier than expected. Slack had previously been used by software developers, but many non-IT users were using the web version; they were only familiar with the basics. Usage deepened when HMPO hosted an internal virtual conference that was managed in part by Slack.
Manley’s team also provides 1:1 help and best practices for Slack, but they have been pleasantly surprised to find that most teams adopted their own Slack rituals organically.
“In the public sector, there’s often an assumption that staff will need specialist training to use new tools,” she says. “That wasn’t the case for Slack. We didn’t put people through traditional training courses. They were mostly able to sort out the rules for their Slack channels themselves.”
The benefits were evident in a recent value survey. Manley says Slack got “off-the-chart numbers in terms of positive feedback.”
Streamlining day-to-day operations with automation and channels
With Slack on board to support distributed work, Manley also saw an opportunity to use Slack to improve collaboration between development teams and business managers.
When someone applies for a passport, HMPO’s passport processing tools break down the person’s information into discrete tasks and automatically coordinate actions to the responsible team. For instance, while one team conducts a background check, another team might look up a marriage certificate, and another team can check if the individual’s photo meets requirements.
Slack has supported teams in providing the right project management channels by which to share and collaborate at scale during this time. The knock-on effect of this reduced overall time spent processing an application.
HMPO has since expanded its Slack usage to its entire staff and uses it for a wide range of projects. The office set up five workspaces, or “families” as they’re called internally, for each product group. Each family included channels for daily updates, incident management, key alerts, releases and more. Leadership and management were able to jump in and review progress and capacity dashboards.
HMPO uses the PagerDuty app to monitor incidents and streamline a response. When an incident is declared, a temporary channel is automatically spun up with the naming convention #tmp-[incident number] that pulls in on-call responders and relevant stakeholders. All collaboration, from investigation to deploying the fix, happens in this channel.
For agency-wide communication, HMPO uses #announcements and #help channels, including a Slack-specific help channel where employees can ask internal Slack champions (like Manley) for usage tips. Manley’s all-time favorite channel? The #yay channel, where people post celebrations and wins.
“It gives you a little bit of a serotonin boost to read that something has gone well,” Manley says. “I really like it because normally we’d share good news through a newsletter, but that process takes time to compile and distribute—Slack is more immediate and relevant.”
Automating repetitive tasks is a novel but growing motion at HMPO. With Workflow Builder, employees can save precious minutes throughout their day by automating routine and repetitive tasks. For instance, the facilities management team uses it to standardize the many requests coming in each day, whereby anyone can fill out a form and have the request fired into the facilities management team channel for triaging. Other teams use workflows to assign standup leaders or show-and-tell presenters.
HMPO also provides passport verification for all U.K. government departments, and uses Slack Connect to securely speed up coordinating this work. This has drastically reduced the number of meetings and emails required to collaborate with external agencies, which include the U.K. Border Agency, the Ministry of Justice, and the National Health Service.
Slack has been at the heart of HMPO’s digital transformation. Not only does the agency now have fewer tasks for its citizens at the outset of a passport-related process, it has saved costs while improving the efficiency of its process and quality of the output.
“Slack remains a backbone of how we’ll deliver digital services in the future,” says Manley.
