Government: A DevOps journey to elevate public services

The challenge

Our customer, a major UK government department, runs a workstream that tackles fraudulent crime, minimises human error within the department, and ensures that citizens receive the debts they’re owed as efficiently as possible.

These services all rely heavily on data. However, this data is siloed in on-prem locations within each of our customer's programmes. These act separately, and make the data within them unavailable to both our customer and other government departments.

Our customer knew it had to free up its data, maximise its value through automation, and make intelligent decisions to improve its service to citizens and streamline internal resourcing. With these challenges at hand, the government department turned to Tecknuovo for help.

Tecknuovo’s solution

We engaged with our customer’s stakeholders to understand the challenges, and proposed to address them with a dual DevOps approach:

• Providing DevOps-as-Service to help clear a hefty backlog and set up efficient mechanisms for future delivery
• Upskilling the in-house teams on the methodology — letting them take ownership of the work and making significant savings for the organisation

Within two weeks of defining requirements with the stakeholders, we had mobilised a service team with the niche DevOps skills needed to fulfil our customer’s objectives.

Ramping up at speed

Our experts:

• Infused our customer’s teams with technical leadership to set the direction for change
• Quickly delivered on the lengthy backlog they inherited — from 600 stories to 200 — using best practice agile methodology
• Started upskilling the in-house teams on agile in tandem with delivering on the backlog.

This has let our customer:

• Free up time and resources to focus on future strategy
• Make huge financial savings thanks to our teams’ efficient delivery by (initially) just two DevOps engineers

Delivering high-quality modernisation and automation work

Our teams are:

• Transforming and migrating legacy IT systems to modern web-based applications
• Migrating data to the new services
• Developing new products and portals for both citizens (external) and agents (internal) using modern cloud technologies
• Bringing in DevOps expertise to automate testing and minimise error throughout the applications

This has enabled our customer’s teams to:

• Improve their internal processes, culture, productivity, and cost efficiency for the medium and long-term
• Rid themselves completely of their previous resource-draining supplier
• Improve services and applications for both internal and external users
• Significantly reduce time spent on and errors stemming from manual testing
• Ensure long-term quality of delivery using DevOps best practice
• Significantly improve their services’ reliability
• Efficiently send messages between services within the government organisation

Working towards Zero Dependency

To work towards our customer’s independence from us and other suppliers in future, our teams are:

• Creating reusable designs and patterns for cloud-based services
• Upskilling the organisation’s in-house teams on DevOps in tandem with supporting on BAU
• Creating a custom-made JIRA framework to ensure sustained efficiency across the teams
• Hands-on upskilling our customer’s staff on how to use the framework

This is paving the way for:

• Replicating patterns and work practices to future-proof productivity and cost-cutting across the organisation
• Automated, cost-efficient, DevOps-powered workflows across the department’s programmes