Case Study: Legal Deeds Digitisation

The Situation

The organisation needed to digitise its legal deeds as part of a wider efficiency programme. It was running on paper files, some dating back to the 1800s, and there was a real risk of documents being lost, defaced, or the whole room going up in flames.

Finding a detail meant hours with a magnifying glass once the right document had been located among 900,000 pages. Locating it at all relied on a legacy system, three generations removed, that acted as a library of which shelf each document sat on, with descriptions that were badly out of date. When an external party needed to see a document, it went through an archaic process of scanning and redacting before it could be sent.

It had never been attempted before because of the sheer volume, and because these were live documents in daily use, not an archive.

What Elisabeth Did

Elisabeth was brought in as the project manager to source the right supplier, one that could not only scan the documents but host them in a way that made sense to a nervous client with zero faith in IT after several versions of their existing database.

She structured the programme around user value rather than technology procurement, making sure the scanned copies faithfully reflected each document and were logged in a way that made sense to the people who would use them.

She set up a governance framework that brought everyone together under a single Project and Investment Board with shared objectives and transparent reporting. She managed the vendor relationships for the digital platform, the scanning and the decommissioning of the legacy system, coordinating those suppliers under one delivery plan.

Change management was a core workstream from day one. Elisabeth worked with each directorate to identify change champions, develop training tailored to different user groups, and build feedback routes that let the programme adapt to real user experience during the rollout.

The Results

• 1.2km of deeds packets fully digitised
• Legacy systems decommissioned
• Staff adoption of 94 percent within three months of go live
• Assurance that no document will be lost
• Secure, limited and timed access for third parties who need to assess the contents
• Searchable text, so users find relevant words in seconds rather than hours
• Staff can now work from home, which opened up recruitment nationally
• Delivered on time and within the approved budget

Related service: change management