Citizens Advice — Case Management System
Maintained and improved Casebook, the internal case management system for one of the UK's largest charities — with a focus on user privacy, accessibility, and system reliability at scale.
The Challenge
Citizens Advice operates Casebook — an internal case management platform used by 20k advisers across the entire network to support clients with legal, financial, and welfare issues. The system is business-critical: advisers depend on it daily, and any disruption has direct impact on some of the UK’s most vulnerable people.
The platform had grown over many years into a complex, heavily-used monolith system requiring ongoing maintenance, performance improvements, and careful accessibility work. Changes had to be made without disrupting live operations, and the user base — advisers who aren’t technical — depended on the system being intuitive and reliable.
The Approach
We worked as part of the engineering team maintaining and improving Casebook across multiple workstreams. Key contributions included:
- Maintaining and improving the Ruby on Rails application handling case management workflows across the full Citizens Advice network
- Accessibility improvements to ensure WCAG compliance — critical for a public service platform
- User privacy enhancements to meet evolving data protection requirements
- CI/CD work via Jenkins to improve deployment confidence and reduce release risk
- AWS infrastructure work to support system reliability at the scale of a national charity
The work required careful judgement about risk — changes to a system used by thousands of advisers daily had to be tested thoroughly and rolled out incrementally.
The Outcome
- Ongoing system reliability maintained for a national-scale case management platform
- Accessibility improvements implemented, ensuring WCAG compliance across key adviser journeys
- Privacy enhancements delivered in line with data protection requirements
- Performance improvements on critical database queries reducing adviser wait times
- Deployment pipeline improvements reducing release risk
Technologies & Methods
Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, AWS (EC2, RDS, S3), JavaScript, Jenkins CI/CD, WCAG accessibility testing, data privacy engineering.
About this engagement
This was a Transform engagement: maintaining and improving a live, mission-critical system for a major charity. The technical work was inseparable from the human impact — every improvement to reliability and accessibility directly supported advisers helping vulnerable people across the UK.