Every organisation develops its own inertia, its culture, “the way we do things around here.” Anyone trying to change that may begin to feel like Sisyphus having to repeatedly roll a huge stone up a hill only to have it roll down again. This was the challenge one large Public Sector organisation faced in moving away from a culture of PRINCE2 project management and ITIL practices to agile, fast-paced delivery and cloud-native application development. In their day these approaches provided robust governance, minimised delivery failure and protected live services. They were also very transferrable.

This organisation wanted to implement its ‘Cloud First’ strategy and move towards consuming Software as a Service, breaking them free from having to maintain large datacentres and having swathes of staff having to provide networking, infrastructure, operations, governance and due diligence, none of which contributed to the end customer or organisational goals.

We had a wide range of process flows, strategies (technical, security, HR, operations), financial models, organisational models, to help you build a cloud native team and enjoy the benefits of more reliable, cheaper, elastic, resilient, secure hosted applications. Read about the journey to moving to agile cloud-native delivery below.

• Optimised end-to-end process from front-door request to fulfilment
• Time to release moved from 12 months to 2 minutes
• Development of over 30 shared services standardising services, reducing time to release and lower costs – faster, better, cheaper
• Migration away from portfolios, programmes and projects, spanning years to squads operating in fortnightly sprints
• 200% increase in productivity and output
• Ability to recruit and retain the best and brightest
• Applications built to be cloud-native, auto-scaling, self-healing, deployable using Infrastructure as Code commands and packaged into containers, to avoid future vendor lock-in
• Hybrid Cloud Capable – combining cloud hosting with on-premise, including Software Defined Wide Area Networking to securely connect it all
• Multi-Cloud Capable – teams can operate easily using one hyperscale cloud provider or multiple, e.g. Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform and others

• Any major cultural change takes time and energy and lots and lots of communication to gain the necessary traction
• Tackle the change at all levels of the organisation from the Executive Team to the engineer on the ground
• Be clear on your vision – what are the outcomes you want to achieve, what is the organisation model you want to build, what is the tooling you will use – we can advise on a variety of solutions for all of these
• Let the teams lead the change, you will be surprised how much they want to engage
• Be prepared that some people will leave, but some new people will also join refreshing the mindset and culture