Analytics and Management Information
Enhancing Ministerial Dashboards
The Client
The Cabinet Office ensures the efficient and successful delivery of the government’s policy, working to help government departments in achieving their objectives.
When delivering critical policy within government, ministerial decision making needs to be informed by up-to-date, comprehensive data.
The Vision
To support the delivery of government priorities, 10 Downing Street needed to introduce intuitive dashboards that would allow them to present visually engaging evidence for senior decision makers.
As the project was driven by Ministerial commitments, the dashboards needed to be online within 6 months from project kick-off.
The Challenge
- High volumes of structured and unstructured data. This needed to be collected and brought together to inform ministerial reports, which was time consuming and inefficient.
- Previously collected data was largely inaccessible, making it challenging for Ministers to use when creating new policies.
- Data science reporting tools did not meet the user needs or support search capability.
- Due to Ministerial commitments, the deadline for the project was brought forward.
The Solution
As part of our agile delivery we took a user centred design approach, with a focus on upskilling in-house capabilities. Key steps and milestones included:
- Dashboards tested and iterated with Ministers to understand and refine the solution around the user needs.
- Custom data pipelines built to capture dozens of data feeds and produce meaningful insightful summaries, roll-ups and aggregates.
- The creation of interactive, ‘drillableʼ visualisations that could be used live in Ministerial-level meetings.
The Benefits
As a result of the project, we delivered an automated, accessible, secure management information portal. This included customisable graphical interfaces, leveraging existing data sources and schemas with enhanced insights and trends.
The key benefits from this included:
- The deployment of a state of the art, dynamic dashboard in Python using standard libraries for ease of maintenance and hand-over to the Cabinet Office team.
- Benefit
- Responsive and reliable dashboards that are able to utilise multiple data sources.
The Benefits
- Upskilled in-house team members within the Cabinet Office who can now make updates and enhancements internally.
- Benefit
- Improved front end maintainability to allow easier management.
- Benefit
- Enhanced and simplified view of data to support policy setting.
- Benefit
- Ministerial commitments met as the rapidly developed system ran ahead of schedule.
- Benefit
- Delivered the core project requirements under budget which allowed for further enhancements beyond the project scope.