Understandingthe challenge
Industry
- Public sector
- Justice
- Charity
Platform
- Web application
- Cloud infrastructure
Services
- Product & BA
- Full-stack development
- UX & UI design
- QA & accessibility
- Cloud migration
- Maintenance & support
WitnessBox is the case management platform behind a national service that supports witnesses through the court process. It is the kind of system people rarely see but rely on completely: caseworkers managing referrals, hearings and support, day in and day out, for people going through something difficult.
Komodo has developed and maintained WitnessBox for more than seven years, building complex technology for the Ministry of Justice and the partners contracted to run the service. Software this important is never finished. It has to keep working, keep meeting new requirements, and keep being safe in the hands of the people who depend on it, year after year. The sharpest test of that came when the service passed from one partner, Citizens Advice, to another, Victim Support. The team with the deepest knowledge of the platform could have been lost in the move, and the people relying on it could have felt the gap. What everyone wanted was continuity.
Our job had two halves. Keep building and running WitnessBox to the standard a national service needs, and manage the handover so nothing was lost in the move.
On the platform, we have spent years designing and building the product: the case and hearing management, the referral flows, the search, the accessibility work, and the interface caseworkers use every day. On the transition, we ran joint working sessions across Citizens Advice, Victim Support and our own team, turned a large inherited backlog into a single triaged plan, and set up a retainer that put an enhanced team on hypercare for the first quarter before settling into a steady maintenance rhythm.
The technical heart of it was moving WitnessBox onto Victim Support’s own infrastructure while it stayed in live use, then cutting over on a fixed date. The switch happened on schedule, with no loss of service.
Some of the best work we do is the work nobody notices. WitnessBox has to be there every day for people going through court, so the whole job during the handover was to move it to a new home without anyone using it feeling a thing. We had built it for years and knew it inside out, which is exactly why continuity mattered so much. Getting it across cleanly is something the team is quietly proud of.
Built for the long term, and carried across without a gap
The part that matters here is not a feature or a launch. It is that a platform a national service depends on changed hands without the people using it ever feeling it. That takes deep knowledge of the system, an honest read of the risks, and a plan boring enough to actually work.
It is also the clearest example of what a long partnership buys you. Seven years in, we were the team who knew where every wire ran, which is exactly why keeping us on through the change was the low-risk choice for Victim Support. For software this important, being quiet and dependable is the whole point.
Seven years and counting
We have been WitnessBox's development partner for more than seven years, first for Citizens Advice and now for Victim Support.
A clean handover
We managed the transition between the two organisations and moved the platform onto Victim Support's infrastructure while it stayed live, cutting over on schedule with no loss of service.
Now hold and maintain
WitnessBox is in a steady maintenance rhythm, with the backlog burning down and room to scale up for larger funded work as Victim Support sets its roadmap.
