STUDIES
Border Force
We worked at the Home Office to help introduce Agile into a large transformational, high security programme. This was started by laying out and then continually refining processes across multiple cross-functional development teams, identifying dependencies across them, their root causes and then working with the teams and senior management to reduce / resolve these issues. Over time we also transferred other projects into the programme, assessed their current state, provided guidance, training and mentoring to help them integrate into a more Agile approach.
Helping the teams to adopt to and buy into these patterns required an overall strategy but it was also key to allow the teams to define things for themselves, provided they were meeting certain agreed objectives (deliverables, release cadence, quality standards). It was vital to give teams this flexibility while also being prepared to provide guidance when required, which can be highlighted using delivery focused metrics (e.g. lead time, cycle time).
Across the teams we also worked to help define their short, medium and long-term road-maps, making sure that the backlogs are fit for purpose. We also oversaw the release management process, with dozens of software releases into production, and ensuring that the test and production systems were created and fit for purpose. We were also heavily involved with continually managing, reviewing, and refining numerous structures and governance processes, including team structures, resource management, supplier management (including personnel issues), external appraisal processes, the full recruitment process, as well as managing project budget and developing forecasts.
The training provided varied in scope and scale. From one-on-one technical training with development team members, advanced Scrum topics with Scrum Masters, introducing Agile concepts to Civil Servants, up to presentations for 50 people on complex Agile topics.
The Home Office
We worked for the Home Office as part of the Immigration IT Department, on the Digital Status project which is the future of all Home Office statuses that are issued - digital and available to view and share online.
We helped an existing team that were struggling with delivery and reliability of their service, that was soon due to be released for public use. We used several techniques (outlined in the blog) to steady the team and improve the quality of delivery, hitting the go live date for the service with all functional and NFR requirements met.
Continuing with these processes the team went from strength to strength, leading the programme in the areas of automated pipelines and delivery, as well as reporting and monitoring services and dashboards that were soon emulated throughout the department.
Debenhams
We were invited into Debenhams to help with delivery of their new strategic Digital Micro-services Platform programme. This will improve the performance, scalability, and reliability of the Debenhams web store.
The role was to oversee and run the three existing technical teams across development and platform engineering (DevOps) while also putting the measures and process in place to scale the number of teams up. This covered (but was not limited to) changing the team structures to a cross functional model - ensuring that test and DevOps were integrated within all teams - prioritisation, definition and scope of roadmap for upcoming work - how the teams created stories to be worked on and ensured quality and completeness - introducing XP software engineering practices along with a deep and example driven understanding of TDD - defining the test strategy across development, integration, and automation to ensure clear coverage from the bottom up and remove duplication of effort and reduce manual testing – reporting to give transparent visibility of the overall progress against the deliverables.
