Registers of Scotland · 2016–2022
Getting underneath the question.
I joined to investigate one proposed approach to land registration. The work grew into service analysis and modelling across the transformation programme, before returning to hands-on digital delivery.
Could a lighter approach complete the register?
Completing Scotland’s Land Register through property transactions alone would take too long. Proactive registration was also demanding: skilled staff had to interpret historic deeds and translate their rights and burdens into a modern title.
One proposed approach to Keeper-Induced Registration retained deed images within a title rather than requiring every right to be extracted and reconstructed. My initial brief was to investigate whether this was viable and useful for solicitors and others using the register.
The customer questions led into operational, legal, policy, data and technical questions. An approach that looked efficient in one part of the organisation could create work or uncertainty elsewhere.
- Follow the implications.
I combined solicitor interviews, groups, surveys and prototypes with investigation of registration operations, existing data, system constraints and resource requirements.
This made it possible to examine the proposal as a service change with consequences across the organisation.
- Make a decision possible.
I synthesised the evidence into options, trade-offs and a business-case presentation. Senior decision-makers concluded that the proposed approach should not proceed in that form.
The CTO then brought me into the programme team alongside the business and enterprise architects. The investigation had demonstrated a contribution beyond the original UX assignment.
Throughput was only part of the picture.
Different types of registration required different amounts of work. Comparing raw case counts could conceal the decisions that mattered.
Two places to concentrate improvement
High-volume, simpler work
For activities such as Dealings of Whole, a small improvement could be multiplied across many cases.
Question: what would a modest gain mean at this scale?
Lower-volume, complex work
First Registrations and KIR offered larger opportunities per case, but depended on scarce specialist expertise.
Question: what change would release or make better use of that expertise?
Compare the consequences: case mix, staffing, productivity, process changes and progress towards completion.
I developed models bringing together activity volumes, team throughput, staffing and relative complexity. Stakeholders could vary assumptions and examine the consequences of different interventions.
The purpose was to make choices explicit enough to discuss and test. The model supported judgement about where effort could matter most.
Helping people see how the programme fitted together.
Alongside the architects, I helped investigate, quantify and communicate emerging strategy. The work included operational models, maps, options, workshops and narratives connecting projects to programme objectives.
For a transformation town hall, I developed a visual model and narrative showing how the different initiatives contributed to the wider direction.
I also worked with teams directly: explaining the purpose of their initiatives, gathering evidence, and making dependencies across customers, registration, policy, people, data and technology visible.
The architects held the principal architecture and strategy responsibilities. My contribution was the research, analysis, modelling and communication that helped specialists and decision-makers reason across those boundaries.
Bringing that understanding back into delivery.
Later, I moved into a Business Analyst role in a customer-facing multidisciplinary team. The work involved replacing ageing registration services and forms, with my accumulated domain knowledge informing requirements and customer validation.
COVID made digital registration urgent. I contributed to the team’s work enabling land-register applications to operate digitally while colleagues worked remotely.
Across the engagement, I also represented UX in Scottish Government Digital Standards assessments and worked with senior conveyancing practitioners. These responsibilities depended on understanding the organisation and maintaining useful relationships across it.
What the engagement demonstrates
A small initial brief can contain a much larger organisational question. My role was to investigate enough of that system to make decisions clearer, then carry the understanding into practical delivery.
About this account and reconstruction
This account draws on my Registers of Scotland experience synthesis and CV records. The overall engagement was 2016–2022; the role progression describes changing scope without assigning unsupported dates to each internal transition.
The modelling illustration is a present-day explanation of the trade-off. It does not reproduce a confidential document, original numbers or an independently measured programme outcome.