When emergencies strike, every second counts. Which is why we worked with the Maritime Coastguard Agency (MCA) to build and support a vital service for users to register emergency beacons. These beacons support people using boats and aircrafts to alert search and rescue authorities to their location.

In this case study we’ll discuss the managed services support we’re providing for a stable, reliable service that helps MCA do what they do best. A project which has been the basis for work with 2 further MCA digital services.

Our approach to managed services support

Working closely with the MCA we set out to make sure the online service met their needs. This meant including features like comprehensive and accurate information on users and their beacons. It’s crucial that MCA can access and use this information quickly to pull reports, making sure all relevant data is accessible to services such as coastguard rescue. 

We also wanted to make sure the service continues to meet the needs of users and the MCA over time, so we discussed the level of ongoing support they’d need. This involved taking into consideration the criticality of the service, budget, stability of the applications infrastructure and its data.

Seamless support and open communication

We set up multiple channels for MCA to raise any support requests with our managed services team. These included email, our online portal, team calls and messaging. We also actively monitor the service, using tools such as Pingdom, so our engineers can address issues as they come up.

Monthly service reviews give us a chance to improve our support by evaluating performance with MCA by sharing reports on SLA adherence, ticket resolution efficiency and forecasted works. In the last 12 months these reviews have revealed 100% SLA compliance on incident response time and service availability. 

As part of our support we provide a service delivery manager that’s visible and available. The delivery manager worked with MCA to agree ways of working that best suits the organisation. This included open communication channels and arranging dedicated calls to discuss ad hoc requests. These provide the space for regular ticket prioritisation and refinement sessions to determine which incidents and requests will provide the most value to the MCA and the users of the Beacons service. 

We use Zendesk (a service management tool) to streamline communication between MCA and our engineers. This encourages smooth collaboration on ad-hoc requests and minimises any friction.

Proactive monitoring

Risks identified by Made Tech or MCA are noted in a risk log. These are proactively monitored, progressed and addressed at service reviews. The team at MCA can also use Zendesk to request help themselves or ask questions, allowing us to quickly provide support whatever the nature of the issue.

The tickets we work on range from critical outages, service improvements and incidents only affecting one user. A recent example is an error that caused beacon battery expiry dates to display incorrectly on downloadable certificates.

Through investigation it was discovered that the data was also incorrect in other fields and only present on beacons registered within a specific time period. A fix was deployed and the incident was quickly resolved within SLA compliance.

Results we achieved together

Ensuring that our emergency beacon registration service is stable and reliable is essential for supporting search and rescue operations. Having a managed service in place allows us to respond quickly to incidents and maintain high service availability, which is critical when lives are at stake.

Beacons Service Owner

We’re proud to provide specialist engineering support on this critical service. We continually work with MCA’s technology team and other suppliers in our support role and governance responsibilities. This allows MCA to run new initiatives with minimum disruptions. Our collaborative approach means we continue to meet our goals and deliver high quality support for MCA and their users.

The ongoing support and open communication have been valuable in helping us meet the needs of both our organisation and the users of the service.

Beacons Service Owner

Further managed services with the MCA

We’re thrilled that the MCA has expanded our managed services support with 2 further services. These include Report Wreck Material (Droits). This is an online service where members of the public can report wreck materials found on the seashore or in tidal water. The second is Support for Maritime Training Service (SMarT). This government funded scheme supports courses approved by the MCA and the Merchant Navy Training Board.

Managed services

Our managed services take away the stress of maintaining and supporting live digital and data services, applications and cloud infrastructure.

National security and public safety

National security and public safety organisations are turning to technology to help them respond to emergencies and keep people safe.

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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.

Managed services

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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. 

Managed services

Lack of modernisation? Our managed services take away the stress of maintaining and supporting live digital and data services, applications and cloud infrastructure.

National security and public safety

In the need to do more with less, organisations are turning to technology to help them fight crime, respond to emergencies and keep people safe.

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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

Managed services

Lack of modernisation? Our managed services take away the stress of maintaining and supporting live digital and data services, applications and cloud infrastructure.

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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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