Summary
The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) works with hundreds of volunteers who serve as Independent Monitoring Board (IMB) members and Lay Observers (LOs), providing vital independent scrutiny across the UK’s detention and court systems. The Secretariat team plays a central role in supporting these volunteers through recruitment, onboarding, and ongoing coordination – ensuring processes remain fair, transparent, and accessible.
Business Challenge
With growing volunteer numbers and an increasing need for streamlined digital processes, the Secretariat team saw an opportunity to modernise and enhance the systems used to support IMB and Lay Observer recruitment and onboarding. Existing tools while reliable over many years, had reached their functional limits, requiring significant manual effort and duplicated workflows across two separate systems. The team wanted a more scalable, resilient and unified solution that would further improve the experience for both volunteers and administrators and support the long-term evolution of the service.
Solution
The Secretariat team demonstrated a clear vision for how modern digital capabilities could improve accessibility, efficiency, and service experience. Working collaboratively with ElysianIT, they helped shape a unified, secure, and future-ready platform based on Microsoft Power Platform components.
The new system consolidates all recruitment and onboarding activity into a single, unified platform that serves both IMB and Lay Observer campaigns.
Key components include:
- Power Pages to allow volunteers to register, create accounts, and apply for roles in their region
- Power Apps to give MOJ administrators full control of campaign creation, role assignment and status tracking
- Power Automate for business rule automation, including tenure notifications and approval workflows
- Dataverse for secure, scalable data management and role-based access control (RBAC)
- Power BI to deliver interactive dashboards and intelligent reporting
The solution supports external applicant self-service, regional board-specific applications, and internal administrative processes – all within a single view. Role-based permissions are managed using Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), ensuring the right access for the right users at all times.
Results
The Ministry of Justice now has a modern, end-to-end volunteer management platform that reflects its commitment to high-quality public service, accessibility, and continuous improvement.
By consolidating processes into one intuitive system, the Secretariat team has elevated the volunteer onboarding experience while improving internal efficiency and reporting. The platform also supports strict compliance, audit, and data governance requirements, helping the MOJ maintain transparency and trust in line with Cabinet Office standards.
Client Quote
“The project has been viewed internally as a strong example of successful collaboration and delivery. Working with ElysianIT developing a new application service and database for an ALB within MoJ we found them to be a brilliant company who were honest, transparent and delivered within budget and timescale. Given the opportunity, would definitely work with them again.”
Kieran Polley – Senior Project Manager, MOJ
