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ATLAS – a software supplier’s perspective, by Jon Gibbs, product strategy manager, Civica

In March 2010, the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) Fraud and Error Strategy Division (FESD) was successful with a Spend to Save bid to create a system to automatically allow information such as change of address and circumstances to be fed from DWP and HMRC to local authority systems, by creating a common data format. This would significantly reduce Housing Benefit and Council Tax Benefit (HB/CTB) underpayments and overpayments.

Civica was one of a number of suppliers selected to work with local authorities in developing the resulting ATLAS system. The successful implementation of ATLAS holds valuable lessons for future and larger software roll-outs, including the upcoming Universal Benefits system.

The DWP’s high level business requirements laid out this vision and objectives for ATLAS:

• Implement the new process by April 2011, in line with HMT timescales 
• It is assumed that the solution may use the existing National Housing Benefit Schemas that exist, to populate local authority back-office processing systems, to enable automatic re-assessment of HB/CTB
• To deliver savings and efficiencies
• Existing electronic transfer of data (ETD) outputs are within ATLAS’ scope and the solution will look at how this data continues to be delivered while minimising any duplicate files

Phase 1: New Tax Credits from HMRC
DWP set up an ATLAS sub-group including all Benefits back office software suppliers and an invite to in-house providers. The suppliers went into this project with a simplified view of the information to be provided. In HB/CTB terms, all that was required was an income type, a start or termination date, or effective date of change and a weekly value. An element of the national benefits schema provided just that. However, HMRC and New Tax Credits do not operate that way. Both the DWP suppliers and the Benefits back office suppliers worked together for two months attempting to fit data formats together. Ultimately, a new schema had to be created; DWP Notifications.

The best decision made was for ATLAS phase 1 to go-live with a sub-set of early adopter authorities. At Civica, we invited our early adopters in to the offices to beta test software using DWP test files and the ATLAS’ phase 1 release to fit ‘real life’ operational requirements. Actual HMRC data was provided for the first time at the early adopter go-live.

As unpredicted data scenarios presented themselves, Civica produced a rapid series of patch releases. By the end of the six-week early adopter period, the software rolled out nationally with very positive feedback.

Phase 2: DWP Benefits
There were several “curate’s eggs” throughout phase 2: local authorities receive relationship records but they relate to an income and not a household, so most records are superfluous to their needs. Passported incomes are to be included in ATLAS, but will continue to be sent as ETD which means duplicated files. To compound matters, ETD files are received 24 hours before the corresponding ATLAS file.

As a failsafe, from the outset, Civica had designed a solution to handle both ETD and ATLAS files within the same process. Despite the very late final confirmation that ETDs would remain untouched, Civica provided some routines for ‘stripping out’ duplicate records and so reduce the amount of records hitting the back office.

The biggest issue of phase 2 was the different objectives of parties involved. The main objective for DWP and their software suppliers was to take a data file and generate the XML file to send to the local authority. The back office suppliers’ main concern was how to turn this data into useable information to enable as much automated processing as possible. Phase 1 already suggested that it would not be as simple as having an income, an effective date and a value.

At the start of phase 2 discussions, the back office software suppliers had requested that true to life data be used in the Joint Integration Testing with DWP because of the issues that occurred when Phase 1 went live. As the schema prompted clarification requests, it became apparent that different DWP incomes obeyed different business processing rules. If a pension age customer has an award of £0.01 or more of Guarantee Credit, for example, then the HB claimant is treated as being on the Passported income. For Jobseeker's Allowance (JSA) however, the claimant must have an award of Income Related component in excess of their Contribution Based component to be treated as Passported. All the software suppliers had made assumptions on how to deal with incomes and all of them had to rapidly revise several of these as more detail came to light, the latest of which was just 11 days before early adopters go-live. The level of co-operation across the three back office supplier companies with each other in determining these business rules was unprecedented.

The phase 2 early adopters had an interesting time. The first day’s files did not load because they did not conform to the schema. Once loaded, they presented a surplus of DLA/AA records with no award data, baffling relationship records and change of address records where there was no change. After a few days, DWP agreed with our findings and turned these three data feeds off. The second week identified the PCSC data feed not providing the correct income award amount for use in the HB/CTB claim, so DWP’s advice was for early adopters to check each record with CIS.

Credit needs to be given to all the early adopter sites including Doncaster and Calderdale running in-house systems, for undertaking an important testing role in this early adopter period. The regular DWP conference calls worked well in keeping everyone informed of the situation at all times.

Lessons learnt
The project slipped a number of times, from an April 2011 start date to a fully live date of January 23rd 2012. In comparison to Universal Credit this was a relatively simple project, yet still had a ten-month delay. However, there were two very smart decisions

• Split the project into Tax Credits and then the rest of the DWP benefits 
• Roll the project out to a limited number of early adopters, resulting in a smooth national rollout

The most significant lesson for the next project is to start with a clean sheet of paper, with no pre-conceived ideas and to agree on terminology up front. Some time was wasted in both phases on parties talking at cross purposes, owing to the different use of terminology and trying to fit the DWP data into pre-designed schemas. Everyone involved will inevitably need to gain better understanding of each other’s operations at the outset, to appreciate specific technical constraints and business process requirements.

Understandably, funding was an issue throughout. Whilst as software suppliers we welcome the decision to make payments to local authorities for software changes, there are two potential issues. First, software houses are required to submit development cost estimates at a very early date in the project when its true scope is still unknown. It’s a difficult balancing act to include a contingency element without appearing to go ‘over the top.’ The second payment for Phase 2 was an unexpected bonus, but in no way covered the full extent of additional development work: estimates had to be provided in early August before the specific requirements came to light between October and December.

Second, the duplication of ETD files with ATLAS records should not have been allowed to go ahead. As back office suppliers, we were adamant at the start of the project that this was not acceptable and it was very late in the project when we were informed that ETD would remain in full. It placed a considerable strain on all parties’ resources to deliver an appropriate solution that was not going to swamp local authorities with lots of duplicate records.

Despite the challenges, the project can be considered a success. Strong evidence exists that the Tax Credits phase has realised savings. Most Civica customers involved are processing Tax Credit information automatically, so saving back office processing time. In the future, there will be an extended use of ATLAS with the advent of local council tax benefit and Universal Credit ‒ potentially not just with DWP pushing data to authorities but allowing them to upload data to DWP as well.  By working smarter, public sector and software suppliers can realise these benefits at lower overall cost. That alone will make the lessons worthwhile.