A case of pandemic agility

HMRC is an established government department, with a multitude of suppliers, hundreds of teams and thousands of engineers.

A huge amount of work was required to build and maintain the platform and services needed to deliver financial support to more than 12 million employed and self-employed workers via the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme and the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme.

Due to the timescales, Equal Experts worked with HMRC to enable the team structure to work differently on the Multi Tax Digital Platform (MDTP). Specialists from each discipline needed to be represented at team level. A platform engineer was embedded into each digital service team to safely “short-circuit” existing processes. This allowed us to eliminate risks early in the process and maximise on collaboration.

This was adopted as a short term measure and within weeks of the first launch, we adapted digital platform tools and processes to make some of those “short-circuits” unnecessary.

The HMRC response would not have been possible without the huge effort of the people who made it happen.

The response relied on digital capability and expertise to make policy into reality quickly – often going from concept to live in just a few weeks.

• 4 weeks to launch all services
• 97% customer satisfaction level

Collaborative ways of working were essential. It is difficult to comprehend how impressive the delivery of these services is. Equal Experts consultants were focused on delivery, working alongside a pool of very talented HMRC people. This was a collaborative environment where learning from each other to solve real problems meant that anything was possible.

At Equal Experts, we trade on our ability to learn and share knowledge, rather than protecting or ‘guarding’ it. At its core, Equal Experts is a haven where this sharing happens freely and happily, between like-minded practitioners and our customers.

The established culture and collaboration between digital service and digital platform teams was a foundation to the success of this project. Digital platform teams were already used to bi-directional feedback loops with digital service teams. This meant everyone was able to run these at high-speed, leveraging existing relationships and collaboration tools.

Another shared obstacle was the increase in remote working. In a matter of days, HMRC had gone from being a mainly office-based workforce to having 55,000 people working from home. The most important aspect of delivering a system at speed is the ability for engineers to be able to just ‘get on with it’. The work we’d already done with HMRC supported governance, best practices and a mandate for teams to use certain tools; this meant that any shift made to accommodate this radical change did not risk causing new technology problems or security concerns that might otherwise have delayed delivery.

Automating the setup can have many benefits:

• Makes an engineer’s life easy by taking away pains of setup
• Eases the burden of costs for companies
• The setup itself will become an onboarding document and will be validated with every (new) team member trying to set up their machine
• Consistent setup across the team and thus helps in the effective pairing
• Get rid of the “works on my machine” phenomenon
• Helps in keeping the tools upgraded

Equal Experts already used Slack for effective communication with client teams. It is very easy to have instant conversations but also keep track of what happens elsewhere. A Slack channel could be created ad-hoc for a specific issue. Engineers, analysts and designers from multiple teams and specialisations can focus on collaborating and solving problems without endless meetings or endless email chains.

• Questions for a specific team – the team uses public team channel as the first option
• Private Slack channels – for the day to day internal discussions that don’t need to be aired in the public
• A consistent naming convention, with good channel descriptions.

The other really important aspect of working at speed is that as much as possible can be achieved using self-service. Logs, performance monitoring, automated alerting, a build pipeline that would automatically build and deploy to the non-production environments. It would even configure a Pull Request Builder that would run the tests before committing to the main branch.

A really important aspect of working at speed is that as much as possible can be achieved using self-service. Here is a view from one of the engineers on the project:

“Within next to no time, I had all the supporting components in place. Logs, performance monitoring, automated alerting, a build pipeline that would automatically build and deploy to the non-production environments as soon as I committed to the main branch. It would even configure a Pull Request Builder that would run the tests before committing to the main branch. All this was done in a matter of minutes, giving me time to focus on writing the service itself.”

Unless the project is built from scratch, there will always be a requirement to work around legacy systems. In this case, each digital service required interactions with legacy systems across HMRC. With HMRC’s technical experts, we analysed each system to understand whether it was ‘fit for purpose’. Where it was possible to work with the system, we supported service teams to leverage existing, well-defined interfaces to legacy systems. Where there was a potential risk of destabilising the whole process, the platform team quickly and iteratively built well-defined interfaces to new software systems.

Organisations, over the years, build up tens or even hundreds of legacy IT systems (either off the shelf or bespoke). Typically, these systems are stand-alone or have limited ability to integrate with a wider enterprise. A digital platform can allow these disparate legacy systems to evolve into modern-looking, more flexible systems.