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Strategic design for government: enhancing HMRC’s Making Tax Digital programme

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Strategic design offers government departments a user-centred approach that considers the entire service ecosystem, balancing user needs with organisational and business priorities to create more cohesive and effective public services. Opencast Senior Service Designer Juliet Kampasi shares her experience applying strategic design on a key HMRC project. 

Government departments are increasingly leveraging ‘user-centred strategic design’ to tackle complex, cross-departmental challenges in areas like healthcare, education and digital transformation. Strategic design is user-centred when it incorporates user research and empathy-driven decision-making as part of the strategy, enabling an approach that considers the whole service ecosystem to drive more cohesive and effective public services.  

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is integrating strategic design to untangle complex service delivery challenges and connect internal processes with the needs of its customers. I joined HMRC’s Making Tax Digital (MTD) for Income Tax programme, embedded within the Strategic Design Service Design team. MTD for income tax requires sole traders and landlords with qualifying income to maintain digital records and update HMRC every quarter, using compatible software. 

For seven months, I worked as part of HMRC’s strategic service design team on mapping the end-to-end journey to streamline processes, reduce overlap and establish a foundation for effective cross-programme collaboration. 

Work on MTD for Income Tax will impact more than 1.8 million users, and our approach has set a blueprint for a more efficient, user-centred service delivery. In this blog I share the approach, from understanding HMRC’s evolving needs to delivering lasting impact for internal and external users. 

A woman with long wavy auburn hair smiles at the camera in front of a white wall, she is wearing blue jeans and a black patterened shirt, she has her hands in her front jean pockets
A woman with long wavy auburn hair smiles at the camera in front of a white wall, she is wearing blue jeans and a black patterened shirt, she has her hands in her front jean pockets

Understanding our client’s needs

We have been able to help government departments use strategic design to balance business and user needs, drive collaboration across programmes and mitigate risks.  

Key challenges we seek to avoid by addressing through strategic design include: 

  • Fragmented service delivery: traditional frameworks can fail to capture the interconnected nature of services, leading to disjointed user experiences. 

  • Risks in delivery: lack of early planning can increase risks to delivery. 

  • Misalignment of business and user needs: without a balance between business goals and user needs, services may fall short of delivering effective solutions. 

  • Stakeholder misalignment: conflicting priorities among stakeholders can slow down decision-making, leading to fragmented execution. 

  • Inefficient integration: ensuring and supporting inter-departmental co-operation helps maximise benefits and use resource efficiently. 

Starting by embedding myself within the client team, I focused on engaging with stakeholders to understand their perspectives, interdependencies and priorities. This approach allowed me to bridge gaps in the programme, offering stakeholders a comprehensive view of the end-to-end user journey and facilitating better alignment. 

How Opencast delivered value through strategic design

Leading the co-creation of the programme’s end-to-end blueprinting with key stakeholders across business and digital, we mapped the main and supporting services, access points and handovers, offering clarity to delivery teams on critical dependencies across the end-to-end journey. This now aids MTD delivery teams in scoping discussions and ensuring relevant stakeholders are involved early to align on goals and risks. 

I contributed to analysis spikes (pre-discovery for complex multi-faceted services that run across multiple delivery teams) to ensure user needs were embedded alongside business requirements from the very start. There are now plans to incorporate user research capabilities in pre-discovery and discovery phases as part of the strategic design team’s ongoing work. 

As part of my work, I also led a series of mapping workshops with senior stakeholders from the customer support group, customer compliance group and the programme management office, providing a shared understanding of the customer support and compliance journeys.  

This work was critical as MTD prepares for the service’s ‘mandation’ year – the year the service will become mandatory for its users – ensuring that each phase, from testing to live, addresses both immediate needs and longer-term operational goals, bringing together a range of stakeholders to document scenarios, dependencies and risks, and enabled smoother alignment across MTD’s business teams.  

This work has raised the profile of the strategic design team within the programme, directly informing readiness and change management strategies for the mandation/live phase. 

The team worked closely with the digital service designers to establish a user journey management strategy to equip delivery teams across digital and business with a consistent mapping methodology.  

A photo of the side profile of a man with a beard and glasses, he is looking at yellow boards covered in colourful post it notes

Lessons learned and future applications for government

While the strategic design team continues to integrate early-stage design thinking and evidence-based decision-making into the programme, strategic user-centred design initiatives have proven essential to addressing complex challenges and building adaptable services that evolve with user and organisational needs.  

Reflecting on this experience, I’m incredibly proud of what we achieved together with the strategic design team and the path we paved for ongoing transformation. It’s a privilege to work alongside people who bring creativity, empathy and vision to every challenge.  

Opencast’s approach is rooted in our values – making a difference, building trust, enabling people, working together and doing the right thing. As a sole consultant embedded in the client team, I brought these values into each interaction, demonstrating how a user-centred design approach can connect organisational goals with the realities of public service. 

A photo of a woman wearing glasses with her brown hair tied up wearing a white jumper sits in front of a laptop and is smiling at something out of frame, in the background a man in a blue shirt is also smiling at the same focus point

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