A Journey into Cloud Computing

The Challenge:

A Government Agency embarked on a journey into cloud computing through an existing third-party and needed a new supplier to complement the new w technology with new ways of working. The aim was to help move the department from legacy technology and waterfall ways of working to a modern, more collaborative department that would allow the free flow of change in a secure and agile way.

The department had selected Microsoft Azure as the target cloud platform, with the implementation being delivered by a third-party provider.

The current department’s way of working was a traditional waterfall methodology, with a strictly gated process which the leadership team felt did not align well with the introduction of new cloud technologies and the improvement benefits this could bring. Broadlight were engaged to examine the current ways of working and approach with the aim of providing an appropriate roadmap suitable to support business change aligned to more Agile and DecSecOps approaches.

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What we did:

To achieve the client's outcomes, we carried out the following activities:

Worked with the leadership to create a cohesive message to the department relating a translation of their vision and the roles individuals would play within in this. This also outlined the method for how the assessment would be carried out, to prepare the department for our engagement. This scene setting was an important foundation to build upon with the departments.

Carried out 1-2-1 interviews and team sessions, creating safe environments for individuals to put across their views across a number of aspects relating to the current ways of working and end to end delivery.

Assessed teams' levels of leadership ,collaboration, communication, gratification, feedback loops and safety.

Reviewed documentation and team approaches relating to requirements capture, code quality, deployment and user feedback.

Reviewed current technology and tooling covering task management, development, testing, deployment, security and monitoring taking into account current level of automation.

Provided weekly update to the key sponsors aligned in Jira to create a backlog for change

Provided a final report and presentation including roadmap for quick wins, medium term initiates and long-term goals.

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Benefits:

The outputs provided confidence to the key stakeholders and issues were addressed in a revised order of priority, with flow based on the persona or wider challenges that needed to be met.

Enabled Broadlight to deploy a senior DevOps coach to a key programme, acting as scrum master and coach to the team. This provided an evidence-based method of inviting wider teams and stakeholders to see improvements against both the quality and velocity of output and the team engagement and enjoyment.

Implemented first automated pipelines including guardrails to the agency, improving deployments and releases against the defined governance model.

Introduced microservices concepts to the development team backlog to support move to CI/CD

The up lift in efficiency in the first team that roadmap of improvements was trialled on, created enough confidence to expand the team size by 100% and create a second Scrum team, to improve velocity of delivery.

Enabled coaching and creation of Product Management, aligning application direction closer to user and citizen needs, improving outcomes and team gratification.

The improvements led to wider adoption aligned to the roadmap and work continues internally with no need for our involvement, due to the quality of outputs and coaching.