But every now and then you’ll hit a wall and might be tempted to say “it just can’t be done”. Many delivery managers and clients will say that blending Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) and agile is one of those examples, but I’m here to tell you that’s not true! Don’t believe what you’ve been told, you can have it all. 

First, let’s make sure we’re all on the same page. What do I mean when I say ITSM and agile?

ITSM

ITSM = Information Technology Service Management. 

ITSM is a set of activities and processes that organisations use to manage the services they offer to users. ITSM is also a profession filled with experts and specialists in multiple ITSM processes.

We see ITSM most commonly in production application support: live services that need to be maintained so users get continuity and quality services.

Agile

Agile is an umbrella term that applies to many methodologies, all of which are based on and refer back to the Agile Manifesto:

individuals and interactions > processes and tools

working software > comprehensive documentation

customer collaboration > contract negotiation

responding to change > following a plan

Agile supports rapid input from users and stakeholders as well as an early return on investment.

The conflict

The conflict between ITSM and agile lies in how each measures success. 

Core to ITSM is the measure of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) which include targets around response time and uptime. These SLAs are contracted for, measured strictly and often result in penalties if they’re not met. This approach doesn’t align well with the Agile Manifesto that customer collaboration comes over contract negotiation.

ITSM also follows a strict set of processes. These include things like using tiers of support – where service desk responders receive and categorise issues which are then handed over to a resolver group, who may then hand it over to another resolver group or engineering team, who even then may hand it over to an external party. These handovers are strictly defined and the bounds of responsibility for each group are inflexible, leaving little room for collaboration. These processes and tools are the priority rather than the individuals and interactions we focus on when following the Agile Manifesto.

An alternative

It’s important to note here that the conflicts with ITSM and agile that seem overwhelming are not conflicts with ITSM at all. They’re conflicts with how ITSM is traditionally implemented. The good news is, things don’t have to be this way.

By implementing a swarmed ITSM approach, services can be supported by smaller teams of specialists that embed agile ways of working without compromising on the quality of the service.

A swarm model removes the strict rules between tiers and instead groups the expertise of responders in tier 1, the resolvers in tier 2 and engineers in tier 3. The team can then introduce an agile approach that works for them. 

It’s at this point they can agree success measures with their client that prioritises user needs and user experience over response time. The great thing is that these teams can also be flexible to include skills you don’t typically see in production application support, such as user research and business analysis. And wonderful news – this helps you embed continuous improvement into your service on top of the ongoing maintenance expectations you already have.

This alternative approach allows you to get the best of ITSM (continuity and quality of service) while also getting the best of agile (user focus and rapid return on investment).

Tried and tested

“That all sounds great in theory, but it isn’t all that practical” I hear you say. Well we practise what we preach here at Made Tech and have been using this swarm approach with a number of clients.

One example is a team of engineers, analysts and researchers supporting a critical application on behalf of a government department. This support model has no distinction between level 2 and level 3 team members, and uses a swarm approach to resolve issues and incidents. The team has demonstrated that rigid ownership and guidelines are not needed to provide quality incident management. And bonus – their swarms are now joined by other suppliers who’ve been convinced of the benefits!

By using a swarm approach the team have made sure that this critical service has had 100% availability (excluding planned maintenance) and that all user impacting incidents have been fully resolved, not just responded to, within 48 hours. They’ve deployed improvements to the service that automate common service requests, cutting the cost of supporting the service by over 75% when compared with the previous supplier.

A tiered approach may be right sometimes

Having said all that, a tiered approach may still be the right approach for your organisation. It’s not one size fits all. For example:

• if you’re supporting 50 products each with 5,000 users, then it helps to have a tier 1 who can receive issues, screen them for importance and make sure it’s sent to the right people to fix. You can then set up a two tier approach that passes issues down to resolve. 
• if you’re an organisation that outsources its IT services and has a multi-supplier environment then a traditional tiered model could be your friend as it helps balance service management with supplier management.

We recognise that traditional ITSM processes have their value, but shouldn’t be the default. Increasing efficiency through this alternative approach allows public funds to be focused on improving services rather than simply “keeping the lights on” and will ultimately help us reduce the build up of legacy technology.

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Not only is the demand for online public services increasing, but the expectations citizens have for the quality of those services is higher than ever. The UK falls far behind countries like Estonia and South Korea, where 80% of government interactions happen online, compared to just 50% here in the UK. This low engagement level leaves us ranked 11th by the United Nations (down from 7th last year) when it comes to government digital services.

So why is the UK lagging behind and what can we do about it?

The need for quality digital services

There are 2 key reasons for this. Currently a lot of services are not digitalised, and those that are often don’t meet the standards citizens expect. 

Services are not digitalised

Last year, over a third of citizens couldn’t complete digital journeys solely online. Despite accessing services online, they were at some point required to complete a paper form, make a phone call or attend an in-person meeting to receive the support they needed.  

Services considered fully digitalised are, in some cases, not digitalised at all. Inaccessible designs lead to a high drop-out rate and the need for people to try again – or via a non-digital channel. Surprisingly up to 90% of England’s biggest councils struggle to meet accessibility regulations, meaning digitalised journeys are often not digitalised for all.

Services don’t meet standards

A trend we see again and again is that despite certain services being digitalised, citizens are often not interested in using them. Users compare government digital services to their best last digital experience. The problem with this is that it often means comparisons with the consumer services from the private sector, where some big names have set an incredibly high bar. 

What can we do?

Fortunately for us as members of the public, the government is working to improve online government services. By 2025, the plan is to transform the UK government to be a “more efficient digital government that provides better outcomes for everyone” and government departments have been guided to “remediate what already exists”.

Whilst maintenance might seem less radical than replacement, it marks a huge shift in government strategy. This approach will significantly reduce the government’s current annual bill of over £2 billion (and growing) that’s spent on keeping the lights on for poor quality legacy services.

This shift in strategy must be met with a shift in equivalent methodology that focuses on users, reduces the burdens associated with Legacy IT and unlocks the potential for transformation.

Support, maintain and continuously improve

The government spends 50% of its annual digital budget on supporting and maintaining services. That number was £2.3 billion in 2019 and is expected to reach £4.4 billion by 2024 without intervention. 

This £2 billion maintenance operation needs continuous improvement to deliver the methodology shift required. Continuous improvement in this context is the idea that changing and improving a service doesn’t have to be a dedicated project. Instead, it’s part of the operating model for supporting that service. This approach involves continually monitoring the service, speaking to users to understand how their needs are changing over time, and making changes to keep the quality high. 

As it stands, a large proportion of government services are supported by teams that work in isolation. This means the responsibility to keep the service up and running is handed over to a team removed from digital strategy and departmental policy making. This support team is measured using service level agreements (SLAs) such as uptime or incident response time. However, the Government Digital Services (GDS) has identified that 88% of online services are essentially unmonitored and these crucial metrics are not well measured or reported.

By pivoting to an embedded delivery model, government departments can build strategy and policy directly into the support structures for live online services. All this makes continuous improvement an essential and measurable expectation of support service providers through the use of experience level agreements (XLAs). Government departments can also implement the government’s recommendation of not trading away short-term savings and meet CDDOs goals of a digital government that provides better outcomes for everyone.

How we can help

Made Tech is responsible for a wide range of government digital services. From the newly-created Maritime and Coastguard Agency’s (MCA) beacon service, to critical national infrastructure such as the Bichard 7 portal that was originally built in 2011. What these very different services have in common is that they’re supported using Made Tech’s transparent and user-led approach, meaning they’re not only maintained but continuously improved. 

By working closely with service owners and even more closely with users themselves, this iterative support model has removed the need for expensive replacement services to be built. It’s also led to users giving their thanks to the service support team rather than the frustration seen across so many other digital public services.

As we get the opportunity to shift more government services into a new way of doing support, the quality of the digital services provided to UK citizens can be improved rapidly. By doing things in this new and cost-effective way we can positively impact the experience of all UK citizens. Bringing a user-led approach to a space typically led by contractual response times will push engagement in online public services up from its current level of 50% and establish the UK as a global leader in online government services.

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We’d now like to share some of the insights we’ve drawn from conversations with various GOV.UK PaaS users and other stakeholders over recent weeks and also from our own research.

PaaS or passé?

One of our initial avenues of investigation was to assess the feasibility of continuing to run the existing platform (or something that looks a lot like it) by taking advantage of its open source lineage. We evaluated this approach with two specific outcomes in mind:

1. As a short term mitigation…

Reuse of open source GDS code would have the immediate benefit of backward compatibility, enabling existing services to be migrated relatively easily and retaining familiarity for maintainers. It would also buy additional time for those organisations that don’t have the budget or resources to migrate services elsewhere within the stated decommissioning timeline.

The existing GOV.UK PaaS platform is largely built on Cloud Foundry. We were able to spin up a test environment relatively quickly based on the code shared by the GDS team on GitHub to evaluate how straightforward this approach would be in practice.

Our conclusion is that the complexity of Cloud Foundry would make this approach more difficult than we’d like, although it remains an option if an inability to migrate elsewhere within the 18 month decommissioning timeline becomes a reality for our clients.

2. As a strategic way forward…

We wanted to understand better the viability of the platform as a long term proposition and particularly the potential impact of moving custodianship of a public sector-oriented PaaS from public to private hands. The blog post from GDS already hints at some of the reasons for backing away from the platform in its current form. We talked to the GOV.UK PaaS product team and a variety of users of the platform to glean more insight into current pain points and obstacles which may limit the feasibility of this approach.

While Cloud Foundry made sense as a foundation platform for GOV.UK PaaS back in 2015 when it was originally conceived, the technology landscape has since moved on significantly and it’s likely that it wouldn’t be the first choice today. The massive growth of containerisation technologies – particularly Kubernetes – and their widespread adoption across the industry is hugely significant. Cloud vendors have also upped their respective games and introduced more features and levels of service abstraction in recent years, which means prospective GOV.UK PaaS users now have many more options to choose from in comparison to 2015.

The increasing demand for access to more sophisticated data analysis tooling is also a limiting factor, with the current GOV.UK PaaS feature set missing advanced data processing capabilities.

It’s apparent that the charging model currently used results in significant hidden costs: for example, AWS data transfer fees are not passed on to users and are instead covered by GDS. Compute infrastructure is not shared, which often makes it uneconomic when compared to an analogous serverless implementation. All of this makes the platform much less attractive by comparison on a true cost basis, especially when compared to a potential equivalent based on more recent best practice architecture.

One final consideration is trust. GDS are a public body who have also built a reputation for reliability and high quality engineering over many years. New entrants offering PaaS solutions will have a challenge to build a similar level of trust in a relatively short time if they want to offer a migration path to existing GOV.UK PaaS users within 18 months.

Our conclusion here is that, on balance, given the constraints and downsides listed above, it doesn’t feel this is likely to be the best way forward for the majority of our clients. Other organisations, with differing needs and priorities, may think differently.

PaaStures new?

While considering the future of public sector PaaS, we also invested significant time in exploring other options for our clients and the wider GOV.UK PaaS user base.

Where we’re actively involved in delivering services on GOV.UK PaaS, we took the opportunity to assess realistic and specific ways forward for each of those assets. We also reached out via our networks to speak to as many teams using the platform as possible. As a final step, we trawled GitHub for the many public repositories behind GOV.UK PaaS services and analysed them to identify patterns and potential opportunities to optimise and ease migration to alternative platforms.

So what options are there? We can consider the standard six approaches to cloud migration:

And finally, for those teams who maintain their own infrastructure, bringing services back in house is also an option, although one that would go against policy and best practice for most public sector organisations.

While there is still more work to do, our research so far leads us to a few conclusions:

We have observed that most of the organisations using PaaS that we’ve talked to fall into three broad categories:

• Digitally mature – these tend to be larger organisations that successfully run their own internal development and support functions.
• Build only – organisations that have a development capability and can build their own services but do not have the resources or inclination to run and support them.
• Outsourcers – these organisations have minimal internal digital capability and instead outsource development and operation of services to external partners.

The majority of services running on the platform share similar architectures and characteristics. This is most likely a result of the deliberately constrained range of services on offer within the platform. We anticipate this leading towards the development of one or more migration playbooks, where common strategies, tools and assets can be reused and adapted relatively easily to meet the needs of the majority of current service architectures hosted on the platform. This approach may sit somewhere between the Rearchitect and Replatform strategies described above, or could result in independent playbooks for each of those options.

Many of the current user base are also running IaaS services on other cloud platforms directly. This implies a higher degree of digital maturity amongst that segment of users and perhaps indicates that rearchitecting their PaaS services onto IaaS would be a good strategy.

One of the key motivators for organisations choosing to use the platform was the integrated support. While many users will have the capabilities needed to maintain and support services themselves, plenty of others will not. The latter will either need to build those skills in house or will need to find outsourcing partners to fulfil that role.

Next steps

As we mentioned in our previous post, we believe that an inclusive and aligned community effort will be critical to finding an optimal way forward following the decommissioning of GOV.UK PaaS. We’ve had an incredible response from the stakeholders we’ve talked to so far and we’re hoping to find more people who’d like to get involved.

The post GOV.UK PaaS – an update… appeared first on Made Tech.

We’re big fans of GOV.UK PaaS at Made Tech, and have been impressed with the good work the team has done to build a simple service allowing teams to avoid operating their own platform if they don’t need to.

So you might have been as surprised as us to hear this week’s announcement that GOV.UK PaaS is being decommissioned. This has naturally been a shock for all of us who have been using the service for many years and has left many wondering what comes next.

GOV.UK PaaS is popular for several reasons. But, put simply, it’s because it allows teams to quickly deploy their applications to an easy-to-use, fully-managed platform that needs minimal operational oversight and support. 

It provides a feature-rich ecosystem that meets the majority of user needs while managing to remain a simple platform to set up and deploy services to. This is no mean feat – especially when you consider those requirements! 

Being a government platform, it’s vital it’s a secure and accredited service. GOV.UK PaaS follows security best practice and is able to support handling data up to the “OFFICIAL” data classification, making it suitable for most use cases. It provides robust logging and monitoring capabilities, support for numerous coding languages, and has had an active development team keeping things up to date and adding new features all the time.

Most important for several departments is the fact that it provides a fully-managed service. This means departments without the in-house skillset or desire to provision and support their own infrastructure can easily use GOV.UK PaaS to get their services live. And they know there are experts at GDS handling their infrastructure and support needs. This is one of the key factors that contributed to the success of GOV.UK PaaS – so whatever replaces it will need to follow a similar model.

What’s next? We have options…

So that brings us onto the big question: what comes next? Obviously, this is not something we can answer alone and any potential replacement needs the input of the many teams who have been using GOV.UK PaaS and now need to figure out a way forward. 

We believe forming a community around this will allow us all to share our experience and ideas so whatever comes next works for as many services as possible, and taking the approach of working in the open will avoid any duplication of effort and enable a collaborative future to all of our hosting needs.

With 18 months until GOV.UK PaaS is turned off, we want to begin this discussion now and get as many teams as possible involved. We’ve already begun investigating what options there are out there to support our clients who will need to migrate from the platform so that we can bring our ideas and experience to the table.

Fortunately, we’ve already been working with clients to migrate out of GOV.UK PaaS as their needs and capabilities have changed. We’re now looking to accelerate our migration offerings to provide this to more clients who want to move their services into other cloud platforms such as AWS or Azure.

Our close partnership with AWS and Azure puts us in a good place to investigate options and bring their expertise and input into the wider community. Alongside this we’re beginning talks with GDS about their future hosting plans and needs.

We’re also building a prototype hosting platform here at Made Tech to replace GOV.UK PaaS with our own fully-managed service. This will build on the great work that the GOV.UK PaaS team has done over the years and provide the same level of support and ease of use for clients while offering an easy migration of services between the platforms.

We’re in a good position to do this due to our extensive experience with GOV.UK PaaS and other Cloud Foundry platforms, our deep understanding of our clients needs, and our track record to quickly turn around new services that support the needs of our clients.

While only in the early stages of this journey, we’re looking for early feedback and conducting user research to validate our assumptions and make sure we’re building something that meets the needs of our clients. We plan to begin onboarding our first round of clients within the next 6 months and keep the community updated with our findings and progress throughout.

To aid us on this journey, we need your help. If you’re currently using GOV.UK PaaS, we want to understand how the decommissioning decision has affected you and what would help you going forward. What are your fears? What threats and opportunities will this provide you? How does this impact your existing roadmaps?

We plan to build out the community of support made up of civil servants, suppliers, and cloud vendors to get a group discussion going. We’ll be continuing to blog about this and holding webinars and other focus groups going forward. We’ll have a prototype of our own hosting platform to trial in due course, too. If you want to provide your thoughts or join in with the community please get in touch below.

If you’d like to talk

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