What was harder was ensuring all of that activity translated into better services for citizens.

Made Tech’s Product Management expertise helped shift the emphasis. Over the course of the work, the citizen-facing teams moved from a model dominated by fixed deliverables towards one built around clearer outcomes, stronger evidence and a more joined-up product strategy. Product Managers became more influential in deciding where effort should go because stakeholders had greater confidence in how those decisions were being made.

The difference could be seen in the quality of the work reaching citizens and, crucially, in the team’s ability to respond when a major new app launch put that approach under pressure.

Creating room for genuine Product Management

Historically, agreements could be very specific about the solution the digital teams were expected to deliver. With a roadmap filled with predefined commitments and deadlines, Product Managers had limited scope to ask where the services needed to go next, which citizen needs mattered most or how different opportunities should be prioritised.

Made Tech worked alongside the Met Office’s Product Managers to strengthen their strategic role. The team developed a clearer strategy for the citizen services, considered where the biggest gaps lay and introduced more deliberate ways of deciding what deserved attention next.

Data and insight became central to that change. Bringing the data and insights capability much closer to Product Management meant evidence could shape the roadmap rather than simply describe performance afterwards.

Quarterly planning and prioritisation became more thoughtful as a result. Product Managers could bring together strategy, user needs, available evidence and measures of success, then use those factors to make choices between competing demands. As one of the team put it, they felt they were now working on more valuable things than they had before.

Shifting the conversation towards outcomes

One of the most significant changes came in the relationship with the internal customer groups responsible for agreeing what the citizen services should achieve.

Instead of commitments being framed primarily around specific features, the conversation increasingly moved towards outcomes. Objectives could focus on reaching more people through the app or improving its ratings, while leaving the product team to determine how best to get there.

That gave Product Managers more freedom, but also more responsibility to show why one decision was stronger than another and demonstrate that citizen evidence was driving the roadmap.

Made Tech helped build that confidence through much closer engagement. A good example is with the communications team around the launch of the Met Office digital app.  Conversations that had previously happened only occasionally became far more regular, with the team sharing the data behind its decisions and bringing relevant teams into the thinking earlier.

As those relationships developed, Product Management became better understood. Those involved could still challenge priorities and remain closely involved, but they no longer needed to prescribe the answer in order to feel confident that progress was being made.

For citizen-facing products, where there will always be competing views about what should happen next, that gave the organisation a stronger way of working through those views without losing sight of the people using the service.

Joining up around the citizen experience

The citizen experience depended on far more than the digital product team alone.

Changes to the app and website involved specialist teams providing the underlying information, alongside communications and marketing colleagues helping citizens understand what was changing. Those groups had not always worked closely together, and in some cases were pursuing different commitments or operating to very different delivery rhythms.

Made Tech’s Product Management approach brought those relationships closer to the product process. Teams were involved earlier, with kick-offs and ongoing conversations helping everyone understand the user need, the intended journey and the constraints that could affect delivery.

It did not make every part of the Met Office work in the same way. Some specialist teams continued to operate on much longer release cycles than the digital teams. What changed was that those differences were understood earlier and could be factored into decisions.

Communications and marketing colleagues were also brought much closer to delivery, understanding why changes were being made rather than simply being asked to explain a finished product. Over time, colleagues outside the digital teams became increasingly comfortable with the language and rhythm of agile delivery themselves.

Product Management gave those different disciplines a clearer point around which to align, connecting what citizens needed with the technical and organisational work required to provide it.

Product Management when the pressure arrived

The value of those changes became particularly visible during the launch of a major new version of the app.

As the new service reached citizens, negative feedback increased sharply. Given the profile of the product, concern quickly travelled through the organisation and at one stage there was pressure to roll the release back.

The team now had a much stronger basis on which to respond. Product Managers worked with the data and insights team to understand what citizens were actually struggling with and translated those findings quickly into delivery priorities.

The established stakeholder relationships mattered too. The team could explain what it was seeing and why continued improvement was the right response. Senior leaders could see the evidence, the decisions being made from it and the speed with which citizen feedback was being addressed.

The team continued releasing improvements, the peaks in negative feedback reduced and the service moved towards a much more stable position.

It was a practical demonstration of the Product Management capability Made Tech had helped develop. Strategy, data, stakeholder trust and multidisciplinary working came together to help the organisation make better decisions about a live public service at exactly the point when those decisions mattered most.

A stronger product capability

The citizen-facing teams now have a clearer sense of where their products are going and a stronger way of deciding how to get there. Outcomes increasingly shape the work instead of predetermined solutions; data and insight sit closer to prioritisation, and stakeholders have greater visibility of why product decisions are being made.

There is also a more joined-up relationship between the teams involved in delivering the citizen experience. Product Management has helped bring those different perspectives together without pretending every discipline has the same priorities or ways of working.

Made Tech helped create the conditions in which Product Managers could do more than administer a roadmap. They could understand what citizens were experiencing, make informed choices about where to act and bring the wider organisation with them.

For public sector organisations, that is where the value of strong Product Management becomes tangible: retaining enough strategy, evidence and flexibility to keep improving the

The post How Product Management improved citizen-facing digital services for a government organisation appeared first on Made Tech.

In July 2022, Government Digital Service announced the closure of GOV.UK Platform as a Service (PaaS). For the Department for Business and Trade (DBT), this presented a significant challenge: migrating 41 critical digital services to a new platform without disruption. These services all play a key role in supporting trade, regulation and international business – so downtime just wasn’t an option.

The challenge wasn’t just technical. It was operational and cultural. Service teams had existing delivery priorities and limited time to get involved in platform development and migration. On top of that, the new platform was being developed in parallel with the earliest migrations. This meant that early adopters were using a product that was still work-in-progress.

The migration needed to be secure, incident-free and efficient,  all while maintaining business as usual.

Made Tech worked in close partnership with DBT’s digital teams to design and deliver a secure, flexible platform and migrated services to the new platform seamlessly.

Our approach: Planning and delivering the migration

From the beginning, we knew that making the migration process smooth and reliable was key to gaining service teams’ trust in the new platform. To do this, we:

• worked with DBT to create a clear migration plan that helped teams understand the risks, prepare their services and move over safely.
• placed migration engineers directly in service teams to offer practical support and build in-house skills. Over 90% of the team were from Made Tech.
• built automated tools to speed up migrations, cut down on manual tasks, and make the process more consistent.
• set up real-time support during cutovers, including bridge calls and incident planning, to make sure everything ran smoothly with minimal disruption.

Lawrence Goldstien, Lead Engineer at Made Tech explained this in more detail.

“We began by migrating internal tools to reduce risk and safeguard public-facing services. Every migration was an opportunity to refine our approach for subsequent services. By iterating and learning throughout, we scaled up to more complex services successfully and we have not had to roll any service back to GOV.UK PaaS.”

Co-designing the platform with service teams

While we were migrating services, we also worked closely with DBT to build a new cloud platform. We didn’t just replace GOV.UK PaaS, we created a platform that makes it easier for teams to deliver quickly and safely.

By embedding our engineers into DBT’s delivery teams, we got a clear understanding of their day-to-day needs and pain points. Using their feedback we shaped the platform’s features, making sure it was secure and flexible enough to grow over time. 

We focused on:

We also automated the setup using Infrastructure as Code (IaC), which kept environments consistent and reduced errors. Every part of the platform was designed with developers in mind. To help them move faster without compromising on security or quality.

This isn’t just about replacing GOV.UK PaaS. It’s about creating a best-in-class platform that enables teams to build, innovate and deliver faster. Achieving this level of maturity takes collaboration, iteration and user input.”

James Colhoun, DBT Chief Architect

Source: Delivering-seamless-migrations-and-a-future-ready-platform 

The results: Successful migration of critical services

We’ve now successfully migrated the majority of services, with no rollbacks and no major incidents. This includes several critical systems essential to DBT’s ability to operate and serve users. Our structured, collaborative approach meant we could scale migrations quickly and safely, while continuously improving the process.

Key outcomes include:

• no service rollbacks during the migration, with smooth transitions for even the most complex, public-facing services.
• strong delivery pace, made possible through embedded support, automation, and real-time coordination.
• high team confidence, supported by dedicated migration engineers and clear, tested cutover processes.
• The platform provides service teams with greater autonomy. By enabling self-service tools, developers can manage and deploy their services independently, reducing friction and speeding up delivery.
• with built-in security features, the new platform meets strict government compliance standards. Flexible governance policies also ensure the services are compliant without limiting agility.
• the platform can now scale with DBT’s needs. It’s designed to handle increased demand as services and users grow, remaining cost effective and efficient.

Migrating a complex digital service such as ours inevitably involves managing uncertainty. If we had any worries about that, our platform migration team helped put our minds at rest. Their knowledge, experience and approach ensured a safe and successfully migrated platform. We’re very happy that our new platform performs as we’d hoped and offers a great deal more besides!” 

Paul Pepper, Software Engineer (Tariff Application Platform)

Source: Delivering-seamless-migrations-and-a-future-ready-platform 

What’s next?

Our journey with DBT didn’t stop at migrating critical services. Together, we’re continuing to evolve the platform. We’re improving onboarding, simplifying infrastructure and supporting teams to innovate faster and more securely.

For departments facing the end of GOV.UK PaaS or other large-scale migrations, this work shows what’s possible: with the right support, structured planning and focus on user needs, even the most complex estates can be transitioned smoothly.

For more information on the services we offer to central government visit our web pages.

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Forecasting weather requires deep scientific knowledge and vast amounts of computing power. World-leading experts, the Met Office are constantly improving their forecasting process – to help us stay safe and thrive. But how can they measure the success of a new weather model? It’s one thing to know that your model is more scientifically accurate. But when it comes to data-driven insights on how users respond to and understand that information – it’s a whole different ball game.

By using data and AI to automate the sentiment analysis of vast amounts of user feedback, we allowed the Met Office to extract patterns and trends with an efficiency that was previously impossible.

We knew we could then combine this with traditional methods of user research that provide in-depth, qualitative insights into user behaviours.

Our data science team helped the Met Office interrogate hundreds of thousands of individual pieces of user feedback. These came from from millions of daily users of the Met Office public website and mobile apps. Our challenge lay in extracting a needle of insight from this haystack of information. Together we set out to demonstrate if a new weather model was more trusted than previous iterations.

Our approach

When we joined, a sole team member was reading hundreds of comments every day on top of their day job. They were trying to extract insight from multiple spreadsheets and data sources. Our data scientists quickly recognised this tiresome task was a perfect opportunity for AI.

To begin, there were conversations around which technology to use. Should we jump on the large language model (LLM) bandwagon, or use a simpler, more tailored solution?

Despite the hype in the industry, we knew an LLM was not appropriate for this use case. Due to the complexity of these systems, their unpredictable behaviour and the large cost associated with the compute. We recommended in this early stage to use well-established natural language processing (NLP).

Following the advice of our Made Tech colleagues who are experts in this field, we opted for a tried and tested NLP model. As this would be best to categorise the thousands of items of accuracy feedback we receive. The efficiency of this system and the amount of time it has saved extracting insight from our feedback has been invaluable.

Fleur Layzell
User Journey Manager

To get started, we broke this task into 3 problems:

• how do we feed this insight back to stakeholders?
• how do we collect and process so much data?
• what insight can we extract from user comments?

In order to process the hundreds of thousands of pieces of user feedback, we built an automated analytics pipeline. This pipeline had to be easy to maintain and robust enough to support computationally heavy machine learning (ML) tasks. It also had to safely strip any personal information that users might have submitted. 

Building this platform centralised a single source of truth for all user feedback. We were then able to begin sifting through comments and developing analytics processes. It was in this space that the majority of data cleaning, enriching and preparing processes were carried out.

This central analytics environment instantly began closing the feedback loop between stakeholders and users, empowering the Met Office to begin asking for bespoke pieces of analysis and digging into feedback following feature releases. We presented their user feedback in a completely new light. We helped visualise user distributions, target specific use cases and report on different weather scenarios as they happened. Something that had not been possible before. 

We brought in junior developers to the team to provide valuable experience on at greenfield project. By aligning to the Met Office’s strong culture of excellent people, culture and developing capabilities, the team were able to provide a supportive space to learn, upskill and share knowledge across the team and wider Consumer Digital Programme.

Through their hard work and dedication, our colleagues at Made Tech have created a robust data pipeline. And in doing so, a more efficient way for the Met Office to not only monitor accuracy and cost reporting, but open the door to other areas where accuracy and potentially more general feedback can be monitored. This increasing our validity as an organisation where user-centred experience is at the heart of everything we do.

Fleur Layzell
User Journey Manager

Results: Data-driven insights at the Met Office

Improving the response to user feedback

Thanks to the development of the feedback analytics platform, the Met Office can now actively monitor user feedback and measure the perceived success of new weather models in real time. Stakeholders and product owners can track user sentiment throughout the rollout and precisely quantify the impact of any changes they make to the service.

They’re able to monitor the impact of different weather systems, check model performance across different regions and environments and rapidly respond and iterate on issues as they arise – reducing the feedback-to-development loop from weeks to days. All focused on providing the best service possible for users.

User feedback analytics platform

The new analytics platform empowers the Met Office to conduct more types of data analysis. We’re now able to use powerful NLP techniques to categorise comments, allowing a shift from anecdotal to actual evidence. We can visualise and monitor feedback as it lands, and slice it however needed. For example, if the weather science team needs to know how users in Region X responded to forecast Y,  this is now achievable with the click of just a few buttons.

By presenting this analysis in responsive, live dashboards, Made Tech has enabled an interaction with Met Office user data like never before. 

Moving forward

AI technology continues to progress at a lightning pace. Smaller, open-source generative AI solutions are now far more available, with performance and reliability nipping at the heels of the larger closed-source models. The next steps for the Met Office will be to further enhance this analysis platform by generating automated, summary reports, condensing a never-ending river of user feedback into easy-to-understand, direct points of action. 

This is an excellent example of delivering value to our public sector clients. By working in partnership with us, we have led the Met Office to the adoption of new technologies that harness the power of their own data.

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The Met Office National Severe Weather Warning Service (NSWWS) warns of the impacts caused by severe weather. The severity of the Met Office weather warnings is based on the level of impact and the likelihood of these impacts occurring. The combination of level of impact and likelihood results in a red, amber or yellow weather warning colour.

Red weather warnings are the most severe (high impact and likelihood) followed by amber and then yellow. The weather warnings could be issued for various conditions: for example, rain, thunderstorms, wind, snow, lightning, ice, extreme heat, and fog.

Typically the release of weather warnings can drive significant quantities of traffic to the Met Office website over a very short period of time, for example, 2018’s “Beast from the East”.

The challenge

Spikes in internet traffic caused significant strain on the Met Office’s public website. The existing solution was not able to meet demand quickly enough resulting in significant downtime with large parts of the website, including NSWWS, becoming unavailable.

Our approach

Working in partnership, the blended team identified a series of possible causes of the sub-optimal performance during weather warning initiated internet traffic spikes:

• Ineffective implementation of maps
• Overly complicated calls to the Content Management System (CMS)
• Manual scaling required by third-party CMS provider
• Delays and miscommunications about manual scaling caused misalignment between CMS resources and demand; for example, Kubernetes pods were reduced to ‘normal’ levels prematurely resulting in additional downtime

Improving website resilience

Improving website resilience during weather warnings was our primary concern. The understandably complicated requests from the maps were difficult to cache and rapidly drained available resources from the CMS making other parts of the website unresponsive.

After reviewing the implementation, we were able to simplify the requests originating in the maps and, therefore, improve the cacheability of the requests to the CMS. The improved cacheability reduced the number of calls that ‘missed’ the cache and needed to be served by the CMS during traffic spikes.

Building decoupled, auto-scaling resilience

The work to improve the resilience highlighted the tight coupling of the NSWWS pages with other, less critical parts of the website. Made Tech’s solution was to build a standalone NSWWS website decoupled from the main website.

We rebuilt the NSWWS website using our established best practices:

• Test Driven Development to assure code quality and service segregation
• A decoupled, hexagonal architecture
• Infrastructure as code, allowing the creation of consistent environments and track changes in version control

We also decided to develop the new NSWWS website using Kotlin because it is an ergonomic, JVM-based language that enabled faster development whilst remaining compatible with the Met Office’s existing Java ecosystem and expertise.

The new NSWWS website runs on its own independent, automatically scalable, AWS infrastructure to deliver resilience during internet traffic spikes.

Results we achieved together

We released the new NSWWS website, with no noticeable impact to users, and our highly integrated approach means that the warnings appear as part of the main site.

Coping with the UK’s weather

To users, the new NSWWS website appears unchanged as part of the main site; however, it runs on its own independent, decoupled, auto-scaling infrastructure serving customers regardless of, and without impacting on, the performance of other parts of the website. Since going into Production, numerous weather warnings have been issued as storms battered the United Kingdom throughout the Winter ‘23-24.

The standalone service has seamlessly handled the increased load. In fact, the new solution has performed so well we are reducing the specifications of the underlying infrastructure and, therefore, the overall cost to the Met Office of providing the service.

The outlook moving forward

We’re working to ensure the NSWWS website continues to deliver for millions of users every day and we’re applying the success of this decoupling activity to other parts of the Met Office website (for example, forecast pages).

By reducing dependencies across the website, we’ll not only create services that are cheaper to run and easier to support, but we’ll deliver a robust and resilient public website to ultimately achieve the Met Office’s mission to help people ‘make better decisions to stay safe and thrive’ when it matters most.

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The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) uses an application called Bichard 7 to receive court hearing outcomes. It then adds them to the Police National Computer. It processes 7,000 to 10,000 cases a day and its users include the police and HM Revenue & Customs. 

Bichard 7 provides access to all 47 police forces across England and Wales so they can correct data errors and complete any manual actions as needed. Without the system, police forces would manually track arrest warrants and bail denials. 

We came on board to help MoJ with application modernisation of Bichard 7, migrate it onto AWS and provide an improved 24/7 support service through our managed service.

Modernisation to deliver efficiency and security

As part of this application modernisation project, we designed a unique transition plan for Bichard 7 based on our knowledge of the AWS transfer process. 

To find out user needs and process requirements we watched how its users interacted with the system. This helped us design a new transition process, one that was reviewed by relevant teams and delivered with no impact on existing users. 

To minimise the existing manual intervention needed from police forces while shortening data correction times, we introduced:

During this transition all runbooks and playbooks were reviewed, upgraded and moved into GitHub. Knowledge articles were also created to help service desk handlers quickly resolve user queries.

Managed service for uninterrupted support and improvement

Our fully security check-cleared managed services team provides support and continuous improvement. This managed service consists of 24/7 365 days a year Level 2 support with a combined Level 2 and 3 during standard working hours. 

With great support and guidance from Made Tech’s managed services team, I’m delighted to say this project has been a huge success. A great level of dedicated work has helped us modernise, migrate to AWS and rollout ongoing improvements to meet user needs.

Dom Tomkins, Ministry of Justice Service Owner

Our support increases following a significant release or if external events need it. By working closely with police users and policy makers we schedule technical changes and service improvements at times that work for them. Our managed services team are responsible for operating and delivering:

• knowledge management
• incident management
• problem management
• proactive monitoring and reporting 
• service requests
• capacity management 
• vulnerability management
• service reporting

We also make regular changes to the service to improve user experiences and respond to changes in government policy. To do this, our analysts track data collected through the service desk to identify incident trends. User researchers also work closely with 30 representatives from English and Welsh police forces to inform future work and get early feedback.

Finally, all testing and releasing new software is now automated, with different processes used for a “small change” versus a “major release”. This way 100% uptime is maintained during deployments and there’s no impact on users or the public. 

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In March 2022 we worked with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) to support the rapid design, build and iteration of the Homes for Ukraine service. The service needed to urgently meet the needs of sponsors (communities and local authorities) looking to help those fleeing the war in Ukraine.

Our approach

We wasted no time getting the project off the ground, delivering a minimum viable product in 2 weeks. As the needs of the project changed, our team grew to include diverse expertise spanning cloud and engineering, data, user-centred design and more.

Once the service went live, our collaboration with DLUHC continued as we worked on a monitoring and support service. Our team worked to make sure the service hit all uptime targets and incident response service level agreements (SLAs) to support sponsors quickly. We supported the service 24/7 and took an Agile approach to service management. This way we were able to make sure that ongoing development of the service and support of incidents on the live service were balanced.

Results we achieved together

We left the team with recommendations on transitioning from rapid response to a solid business as usual framework. This included different ways to scale the team as needs changed. As part of this we supported the transition of the service back to DLUHC. This included knowledge transfer to non-Made Tech team members and new senior management from DLUHC.

Following this we have continued to work with DLUHC to deliver further discovery and alpha phases to research and test new concepts for developing the service for the longer term to create a repeatable and reusable service should this type of a crisis happen again.

Working with policy makers

We bridged the gap between policy, digital delivery and service management using user insights to drive decision-making. We mapped the end to end service to help ease decisions for ongoing improvement, working closely with policy teams. The team can now make iterative changes to the service that improve the user experience while still responding quickly to policy changes.

Technology and features

• Ruby on Rails
• Running on GovPaaS
• Database is PostgreSQL
• Uses Redis for throttling and for delayed jobs using Sidekiq
• Sends notification emails (delayed job) via GOV.UK Notify
• Sends data to Foundry (Palantir Case Management System) via HTTP API
• Monitored with Prometheus
• Deployed via GitHub Actions
• Alerting and incident management via PagerDuty

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The Data Hub is a self-built customer relationship management system (CRM) used by The Department for Business and Trade (DBT). As a data platform it provides:

• the department with a single view of all the companies they work with
• help for UK businesses find new export markets and expand existing ones
• support for businesses from across the globe looking to invest in the UK

As a learning organisation DBT wanted to review how the Data Hub meets its changing needs. With a goal to provide the best possible service, DBT also wanted to explore future design requirements for the data platform.

Our approach

Together with the Digital Data and Technology and Implementation Unit team we set out to create a report on the Data Hub. This paper narrowed the direction of travel down to 3 options, including:

• continuing with Data Hub as it is
• moving to a Salesforce or Dynamics alternative
• developing a new approach that brings together the best features of the Data Hub, Salesforce and other CRMs

We knew we wanted to first find out what was working well with the current data platform and what was performing not so well. Supported by user and market research, we set out to interview DBT teams worldwide using different CRM systems. Next up we spoke to other government departments, agencies and local authorities. This helped us understand their experiences of running a CRM system like Salesforce or Dynamics – the good, the bad and the ugly.

When creating the report it was important we balanced both buy and build options. So all this research helped us run a comparative analysis that included examples of startup and run costs for different options. However, we also made sure to include a modular build option that brings together different CRM systems into the existing Data Hub.

This is a complex issue. Your team’s paper and all the underpinning work enabled the committee to have a productive discussion and move this issue forward. Many executive committee members commented on the quality of the work – do keep it up!

James Bowler
Permanent Secretary, the Department for International Trade

Results we achieved together

Supported by Digital Data and Technology leaders and the Implementation Unit strategy team we developed an in-depth report that included:

• a strategic and economic analysis
• workshops with senior civil servants
• policy recommendations and insights into CRM options
• detailed assessments of key strategic benefits or costs of each option

We’re delighted that the report was presented to DBT’s executive committee, setting out the options for a way forward that would improve all user experiences.

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In recognition of their service, veterans in the UK are entitled to prioritised access to benefits and services. Working with the Office for Veterans’ Affairs (OVA) and GDS, we looked at ways to best support ex-service personnel to access the benefits they’re entitled to quickly, easily and consistently.

Our approach

We worked in an agile, scrumban way to build and test prototypes with veterans and those who provide services for them. This let us build on research from a discovery phase and understand veteran’s needs and any wider issues. We spoke to people remotely to make sure we got a good spread across the country and so we could engage with people who might struggle to attend in-person interviews. We also went to drop-in centres in person to meet people that might not be able or willing to engage digitally.

We consulted extensively with the services that need to confirm veteran status, looking at whether it might also be worth scaling and digitising existing services for 3rd parties to confirm veteran status.

We had to consider a wider landscape of factors involved in delivering a service that works for everyone. There were dependencies on other government work that needed to be factored into our work. These included:

• needing access to data that the Ministry of Defence (MoD) holds in legacy systems. As this needs to be very secure, we shared a great deal of evidence around our approach to data security.
• working closely with the team developing GOV.UK One Login – a new digital identity service that’s being developed with the aim of allowing citizens to access all the government services they need to use with one sign in.
• collaborating with different governmental departments (Ministry of Defence as well as the Office for Veterans’ Affairs) that are engaged with defence and ex-defence employees, taking into account and influencing policy to make sure the service meets user needs.

In compliance with the service standard, everything we did was open source and reused existing tools such as GOV.UK One Login, IPV and Notify. Tried and tested patterns and components developed by government departments like HM Revenue & Customs and the Home Office and using the GOV.UK Design System.

The Veterans’ ID card project is a priority for the Office for Veterans’ Affairs. Passing the Alpha assessment in November was a significant milestone and could not have been done without the support, guidance and expertise from the team at Made Tech. The Made Tech team, working alongside Government Digital Service colleagues, have highlighted the best in agile digital design in government.

Tom Godfrey
Office for Veterans’ Affairs

Technology used

Node js:

• GOV.UK Frontend is a Node.js package delivering the Design System
• Certified OIDC FAPI client library available in NPM, providing Passport.js strategy
• Express is a convenient, well-understood framework

Splink:

• Open-source probabilistic record matching tool developed by MoJ
• Python (PySpark) library

Open ID connect:

• GOV.UK One Login is OIDC Provider

Hosting environment:

• Defence Digital’s DevSecOps service (RedHat OpenShift Container Platform)
• Kubernetes implementation

Results we achieved together

Following a successful alpha assessment, the ‘Apply for a Veteran ID card’ service is now progressing to Beta. This will progress in tandem with the development of the GOV.UK One Login service and be a great testing ground for that service’s ability to allow users to access government services more easily.

We’re delighted to have contributed to addressing a long-standing issue for veterans as part of the government’s pledge to make sure they receive the recognition they’re due. The whole team was committed to understanding veterans’ needs as fully as we could to make sure we designed a service that would truly make their lives easier.

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Founded in 1939, Citizens Advice is an independent organisation that provides confidential support and advice to people experiencing legal, debt, consumer, housing or other issues across the United Kingdom. It was founded with two key aims at its core: to provide the advice people need for the problems they face, and to improve the policies and principles that affect people’s lives. 

Citizens Advice approached us to collaborate with them on a discovery phase for their Witness Service. The Witness Service at Citizens Advice provides free and independent support for both prosecution and defence witnesses in every criminal court in England and Wales. Trained volunteers provide practical information about the court process as well as emotional support to help witnesses feel more confident when giving evidence.

Citizens Advice needed our help to explore how they could enable a seamless experience for witnesses using the service, and increase the efficiency and sustainability of Witness Services technology and operations.

Our approach

We worked within the existing team at Citizens Advice to run a technical discovery to build a series of actionable recommendations for the organisation to take forward for future digital expansion of the Witness Service.

We began by building a picture of the ‘as-is’ architecture used to support the service, building a blueprint that we refined on a weekly basis. This included a detailed review of existing documentation covering the technical landscape, followed by an extensive round of interviews with key stakeholders to identify goals, pain points and user journeys. We also listened to anonymised witness calls to gather further insight.

We assessed the security, maintainability and technical debt of the existing application and infrastructure. From this analysis, we were able to provide a number of recommendations to take forward, including quick wins to improve performance, as well as provide longer-term strategies to expand services.

We’ll use technology to enable a positive experience for everyone… and continue to design and develop our products and services based on what our users need.

From the Citizens Advice Strategic Framework 2019 – 2022

Results we achieved together

During our six-week discovery, we delivered a report that outlined key next steps to improve the scalability, reliability, and sustainability of the Witness Service. This included a technical assessment of their current system to provide a future roadmap for the service, as well as identifying application performance issues.

As a result, Citizens Advice was able to use our Discovery findings as the foundation to immediately improve their Witness Service performance, as well as informing future programmes of work.

• Completed Discovery within 6 weeks
• Identified pain points within Witness Service processes and areas for improvement
• One-team, agile approach to Discovery
• Defined a future roadmap to expand the digital footprint of the Witness Service
• Identified ways to optimise performance short-term

The Made Tech team worked very quickly to build credibility and understanding from Day 1 on the Witness Service discovery project. They were enthusiastic, understanding of organisational complexities but also great at challenging us to think differently about the service and technology. Their recommendations were pragmatic, well-considered and we are finding following these suggestions already beneficial to our organisation.

Scott Painter
Product Lead at Citizens Advice

Digi­tal serv­ice delivery

We support you at every point in the delivery lifecycle, right from defining the problem right through to the live services that solve them.

Central government

As society becomes more digitally driven, government needs to meet citizen’s raised expectations by applying the culture, processes and technologies of the internet era.

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The post Building a seamless, supportive experience for witnesses with Citizens Advice appeared first on Made Tech.

United Kingdom Research & Innovation (UKRI) is an umbrella organisation responsible for managing the majority of government funded research in the UK. It has nine different research councils, all with independent systems and ways of working, which need to be unified into a single platform that is built and managed by UKRI.

To achieve this, UKRI needed to progress through Discovery by developing a migration and decommissioning strategy that included a validated application map, a migration plan, a decommissioning roadmap and a projection of complexity.

Our approach

We used a lean and user-focused methodology to complete a rapid but comprehensive Discovery that enabled UKRI to continue building a business case for change. This involved conducting as many interviews as possible to gather domain knowledge as quickly as possible.

We used narrative interviews and then moved onto a more prescriptive checklist of questions in order to help us understand what users do, what they want to achieve and how their goals interacted with the wider ecosystem. This user journey mapping resulted in us being able to build a validated application map, which could be used to map business priorities against technical complexities.

We also created workstreams for various aspects of the migration and decommissioning strategy and proposed temporary solutions, such as APIs and microservices, to migrate and decommission bits of legacy technology in a way that constantly delivered value.

The report you produced was excellent…You set a deadline and nailed it, well done to the Made Tech team.

Nick Walmsley
Programme Manager

Results we achieved together

The report we delivered as the main output from discovery included technology recommendations, a decommissioning roadmap and hybrid migration strategies for the seven priority UKRI research councils.

Our user-focused approach involved mapping over 120 different UKRI interfaces and resulted in a validated application map, with complexity projections and technology recommendations that were focused on extensibility, scalability and security.

As a result, UKRI was able to use our Discovery findings as the foundation for its modernisation business case and future programmes of work.

• Migration strategies for UKRI councils
• Prioritised technology recommendations
• Decommissioning roadmap
• Over 120 UKRI interfaces mapped
• Service design blueprint based on user needs
• API and microservices used to deliver value

We will create a holistic review of our data landscape to enable the easy and sustainable use of data within UKRI.

From the UKRI Corporate Plan, 2020-21

Legacy application transformation

We support you at every point in the delivery lifecycle, right from defining the problem right through to the live services that solve them.

Central government

As society becomes more digitally driven, government needs to meet citizen’s raised expectations by applying the culture, processes and technologies of the internet era.

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The post Preparing UKRI for a major technology modernisation appeared first on Made Tech.