Putting collaboration at the heart of Defra’s digital transformation

Co-working events offer fantastic opportunities to connect and collaborate, often sparking new ideas that can help deliver exceptional value to our clients. We’ve recently shared our thoughts on the co-working events we run here at Equal Experts and how they capture some of what makes our Network special [Co-working at EE: Less Zoom, More Boom in 2025] but we also wanted to know if they could be useful to our customers as well.

In October 2024, working in partnership with Defra’s Digital Director, Colin Banno-Thornton, we agreed to try an experiment. Using the tried and tested network co-working recipe, we designed a day that would bring together Defra staff with associates from both Equal Experts and our partner Esynergy. We also invited other suppliers we worked with day to day across the engagement.

This mix was a first for us at Equal Experts, as well as a new type of event for Defra. We wanted to start relatively lean to allow us to test the idea and to see if it brought the same level of value as the traditional Equal Experts network co-working days. What we saw was truly incredible. It has become an adopted approach for Defra, and the foundation to offer our other clients.

We booked a modern, vibrant and open layout space in Manchester city centre with a capacity for 70 people and in the end, we had 90 attend over the course of the day. We catered refreshments, pastries, lunch, nibbles and an evening bar as well as providing tools for collaboration and a bookable meeting space.

There was no agenda for the day, just a simple directive to turn up, adopt a name badge and benefit from a day being in a single space with other teams and people working across the engagement.

As we see regularly in the network co-working events, this provided a perfect opportunity for people to come together to share ideas, swap insights and connect.  The atmosphere was electric, as people who often work remotely, enjoyed the chance to get together and make new connections or see team members for the first time outside a virtual meeting room.  It allowed people to learn about what others were doing around their own outcomes, share insights and expand opportunities to sync up and optimise on value.

During the day, Ash Stephens, Defra’s Deputy Director for the Farming & Countryside Programme gave an impromptu overview of the programme’s direction and challenges.  Colin had the opportunity to spend time with teams delivering high-profile initiatives and had a chance to see demos and working software. The architects from across Defra and several suppliers came together for a working session to get to know each other as people and to talk through some key focus areas.

Overall the feedback from the day was amazing with people saying they’d found it a valuable day. Similarly, Colin, Ash and other Defra customers who joined the coworking event said they’d not experienced an event like it.

Fast forward to January 2025… off the back of the success of the first Defra co-working day, plus harnessing the feedback and lessons learned, we have gone even further.  On 14th January we hosted an Architects’ co-working day in York. This brought together 25 people from Equal Experts, eSynergy and the architect community with Defra’s Head of Architecture, Liam Walsh. We kept the day informal and free-form to allow relationships to build but held a couple of fish bowls where people could engage in focussed conversations on key topics, for example, how to ensure architecture remains relevant as we transition to more iterative ways of working.

On 23rd January we hosted the second Defra co-working day in Ducie Street Warehouse Manchester. We had 150 people, 35 of which were our customers, who are all working together across the six programme areas currently engaged through the AD3 contract.

In addition to what was offered at the first Defra co-working event, we hosted three public talks from the venue’s mini cinema:

• Large Language Models and a demo on how we are applying AI techniques across the Software Delivery Lifecycle.
• An overview from the Digital Deputy Director Richard Baines on how the Animal & Plant Health Agency Programme has adopted the new transformational Delivery Group Model and the lessons that can be learned as this model is rolled out.
• A state of the nation from Digital Director Colin covering Central Government and Defra priorities over the coming Spend Review, and how the Department will transform to meet them.

During the co-working day, we had large infographics showing service design thinking from across the Farming & Countryside Programme and a timeline of success stories, past, present and predicted from across the engagement.

We saw Civil Servant deputy directors, heads of practice, service owners, profession leads, service assessors and subject matter experts from across Defra coming together with their supplier teams to see demos, collaborate, plan and review in the boardroom, on tables and on the walls.

Once again the atmosphere was buzzing and the feedback on the value people got from the day was brilliant. For Defra as a customer account, this is now an approach we want to adopt and continue to shape together to bring a point of difference, and it will remain part of the value-added offering throughout the contract. Colin has mentioned that he is actively promoting our co-working style of working across Defra internally.

This year we also have a Farming & Countryside Programme co-working day planned for around 200 people at the end of February and we will work with Colin to plan the next Defra co-working event.

We will continue to evolve this model for Equal Experts and work with Defra to help them include this as a working pattern they can adopt themselves. To quote a line from Colin’s state of the nation… “these days where we can come together are precious and we should embrace them wholeheartedly”