• Energy & Utilities

DESNZ: Helping UK businesses beat the energy crisis and freeing the department from supplier dependency

Four weeks

to MVP instead of six months

9000

energy grants processed in four weeks

Zero

bugs on launch

Synopsis

Tecknuovo helped the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) deliver a critical energy payments scheme for UK businesses in record time. We also set DESNZ up for future success by making the solution repeatable across the department, saving resource and freeing it from dependence on suppliers.

DESNZ’s solution and new technical ability are the product of Tecknuovo’s unique offering as a technology delivery partner: a blend between consulting and capability building that draws on the best of both.

Our methodology helped DESNZ solve its ‘today’ challenge by quickly mobilising a team and building a high performance MVP. We also helped DESNZ eliminate the potential ‘tomorrow’ problem of becoming reliant on us as a supplier.

This is how we helped DESNZ solve today, build tomorrow, and keep businesses afloat at a critical time for the UK’s economy.

The Challenge

DESNZ creates and implements policies that promote business growth, tackle climate change, and support the UK’s energy and industrial sectors. An urgent, ministerially administered policy change meant that DESNZ needed an MVP for a platform that would let businesses apply for grants for energy bills. This would be essential for helping UK businesses survive through the approaching winter.

Solving Today

We mobilise teams of high-quality technologists at record speeds by using our ‘associate model’. This is the way we work with a benchless, tech-agnostic community of consultants (associates) to solve our customers’ challenges. The associate model underpins how we rapidly mobilised DESNZ’s team and delivered its solution.

Mobilising an outstanding team

We started by mobilising a delivery team in just 14 days by using one of our homegrown methodologies: the TeckExperience® Mobilisation Pattern. This seven step process creates teams of exceptional people at exceptional speeds, from analysing our customer’s request, to evaluating candidates through our TeckBar® process, through to onboarding and kicking off the project.

But our service goes far beyond merely shipping in a team with the necessary skills. We also fully manage those teams throughout the project. As an integral part of this, we also upskill and transfer knowledge to our customers’ permanent teams.

For DESNZ, this meant that we started hands on coaching its teams from day one, preparing them to take over the reins at the end of the engagement. This set DESNZ up to free itself from dependency on two factors: recruitment for IP and skills, and consultancy for setting strategy and managing teams.

Building a high-performing MVP

Sourcing and managing DESNZ’s team let us build an MVP for the energy grants portal that exceeded expectations on both quality and time. We built a highly functioning MVP for DESNZ’s grants application portal in four weeks — five months faster than estimated by GDS. It had a zero-bugs launch, and processed over 9000 applications in its first four weeks.

The quality of the people who led and delivered the project are what made these achievements possible. And that quality is down to the people-focused methodologies that make up our associate model.

Eliminating dependence on IP and skills

In parallel, our people — permanent team members and consultants — upskilled our customers’ teams on how to build and reconfigure the solutions we’re building for them. This is part of our Zero Dependency® framework, which helps our customers build their own technical in house capability through delivery, ultimately eliminating dependence on suppliers.

Our Zero Dependency approach ensured from day one that DESNZ wouldn’t become dependent on the skills and IP that our people brought to the project.

Building Tomorrow

To free DESNZ from depending on our services after the initial build, we designed the MVP with replicability front of mind. Like traditional consulting, our approach helps our customers to deliver a solution. The difference is that we do more than just working towards a fixed outcome. We do that by helping our customers build up their own technical in house capability throughout our delivery.

In DESNZ’s case, this meant upskilling its teams on the technologies we used to build the MVP. It also meant that we built a library of reusable patterns — created from a set of standardised GDS approved Salesforce components — that DESNZ can lightly reconfigure and redeploy across divisions of the department.

Results

Our approach delivered on DESNZ’s today and tomorrow challenges on four fronts:

  • DESNZ got its MVP in four weeks instead of six months.

  • DESNZ processed 9000 energy grants applications from UK businesses in four weeks.

  • DESNZ enjoyed a launch with zero bugs.

  • DESNZ is already tweaking and re-using our MVP across other divisions of the department.

The immediate operational benefits and the DESNZ’s future capability are both thanks Tecknuovo’s approach as a technology delivery partner.

Blending the best of consultancy and recruitment helped DESNZ deliver its solution, and it helped it eliminate dependency on any supplier.

Ultimately, the approach delivered an MVP that’s helping DESNZ save resource internally, use taxpayers’ money more efficiently, and safeguard the department’s future by building its technical capability in-house.

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“The team have been fantastic again, I can’t express how much value you all add. I honestly feel as a group it is the best working collaboration I’ve seen in a long time and long may it continue.”

Supplier Manager, Central Gov