Government

A DevOps-led journey to elevate DWP’s service to its teams and the public

Backlog

reduced from 600 to 200 stories with just two engineers

Time

and resources freed up to focus on future strategy

Automated

cost-efficient DevOps- powered workflows across FED’s programmes

Challenges

The Department of Work and Pension’s (DWP) FED (Fraud Error and Debt) workstream 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 FED’s programmes. These act separately and make the data within them unavailable to both DWP and other government departments.

DWP 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, DWP turned to Tecknuovo for help.

Our solution

We engaged with DWP 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 DWP

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

Ramping up at speed

Our experts:

Infused DWP’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 DWP’s in-house teams on agile in tandem with delivering on the backlog

This has led to:

Time and resources being freed up to focus on future strategy
Huge cost 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 DWP’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
Send messages between services, including Debt Management and the Universal Credit Full Service

Working towards Zero Dependency

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

Creating reusable designs and patterns for cloud-based services

Upskilling DWP’s in-house teams on DevOps in tandem with supporting on BAU
Creating a custom-made JIRA framework to ensure sustained efficiency across DWP’s teams
Hands-on upskilling DWP’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 FED’s programmes

Ready to deliver what’s next?

Whether you’re tackling a complex digital challenge or scaling a national-level transformation, we’ll help you get there.

“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