Making guidance easier to find and trust
We are working with the Rural Payments Agency to make one area of guidance easier to find, trust and keep up to date.
This is an experiment. We are testing whether AI can help.
The problem
We started by building a check that reviews a document before it is published. It works.
But a check only makes one document better. It does nothing for how fast people find guidance, whether they trust it, or how it stays up to date.
What we are building
We are taking one area of guidance and proving it end to end. That means:
- fast search, so people find the right answer quickly
- content that gives the answer first, then the background
- version control, a named owner and a full audit trail
- an agreed quality check before anything is published
One area done properly tells us whether the idea works, and we scale up only if the numbers back it.
What it does not cover
How guidance gets written stays in today's process. The casework itself is untouched.
Where it has got to
We are sizing the problem in numbers and agreeing how to measure it.
Next we build and test with case workers, over and over. Then one area goes live in test. After that we review and decide whether to widen it.
Each round runs the same way: build, test with people, refine. The rounds overlap.
How we will know it works
We measure the same things before and after, so we can see what changed. We want guidance that helps people:
- take the right action first time, measured by how many quality checks pass
- trust what they read, measured by whether people use the latest version
- work faster, measured by the time it takes to find an answer
- ask fewer questions, measured by queries passed to managers and experts
A guidance designer at the Rural Payments Agency is taking the baseline numbers now. We agree the measures together before the build starts.
What comes later
We are proving one area first. These wait until it works:
- a search assistant across all guidance
- AI writing guidance as well as checking it
- rolling out to more areas
- handling whole cases automatically
Follow this project
Get in touch if your team has a large set of guidance that is hard to search or keep up to date.