Offshore Industries Advice (OIA) - Casework management system

The offshore marine environment extends from the edge of territorial waters to the UK Continental Shelf. The offshore marine environment continues to see extensive growth in offshore industry activity, which can have impacts, both individually and cumulatively, on marine biodiversity, ecosystems and services.

JNCC have responsibility for the provision of nature conservation advice in the offshore area, to support management of activities to ensure the overall sustainability of use of the marine environment. Our experts have extensive knowledge of offshore biodiversity, including seabirds, marine mammals, and seabed ecology, and a thorough understanding of evidence sources and emerging research, which ensures our advice is based on the best-available scientific evidence.

We advise on the impacts of offshore industries, including oil and gas, marine aggregate extraction, renewable energy, cable laying, and Ministry of Defence military activities, as well as fisheries and other human activities.

At present, the OIA teams work in fulfilling these requests is dealt with by several systems and processes. The number of systems involved leads to a vast quantity of information duplication between the various platforms and when any information is updated, the changes need to be cascaded manually through the various platforms.

With the highly manual process at present and the problems and frustrations it causes, the team need a new system. Another pressure for a new system is from the regulators who pay for the service, who are looking for increasing levels of audit detail about the work completed and justification of the costs/charges.

The JNCC Digital and Data Solutions (DDS) team have engaged with the OIA team to scope and specify a new casework management system to totally replace their current process.

This involved conducting a two-day scoping workshop, delivered in Aberdeen, with the whole OIA team. This was followed by desk-based work to documentation the requirements and build this tender document.

The detailed outputs of this scoping work were: project vision, project objectives, current process workflow, identified user roles, user stories related to stages in the process workflow, a feature map, proposed site map, non-functional requirements

Given the difficulty the current system causes, the team were very enthusiastic and actively engaged in the scoping process but pragmatic in prioritising non-essential features into phase two. The team are also positively looking forward to being involved in the development process of a new system.