Background
The Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) leads on the Government response to overseas crises involving British Nationals and will be the first point of contact by those concerned about individuals who may be involved in such incidents. In recent years FCO has managed crises as diverse as the Philippines Typhoon (Haiyan), Nepal earthquake and Tunisia and Paris Terrorist attacks. In these situations, FCO needs reliable IT to capture up to date information quickly and efficiently which is accessible worldwide by its staff and partner Government Agencies. In 2013, FCO commenced an ambitious programme to build new IT solutions; Ministerial commitments meant that the new core solution needed to be in place within 5 months of project start up. Agile Byte were commissioned to manage the design, development, implementation and accreditation of the required solution.
Solution
Working closely with FCO business stakeholders to develop a set of high level requirements we defined a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for the core solution - Crisis Hub. We identified the agile delivery method as the most appropriate way to deliver the MVP quickly and a Cloud Hosting approach to provide access to the solution by teams in London, overseas and in the field. We used G Cloud to procure agile development and cloud hosting suppliers. We also advised that Agile Development should be based on use of Open Source components and that FCO should retain IPR for the solution to avoid supplier lock in.
A project Elaboration phase focused on-boarding activities and agreed the split of requirements into epics and user stories that the team could realistically and accurately estimate against and achieve within a sprint time box. The agile development was closely managed and reviewed by Agile Byte who provided project, technical, test management and security assurance and overall guidance to the FCO Product Owners throughout the process. Critical changes were made early on to ensure that required velocity was achieved. This included changing the initially proposed 2 week duration sprints to 3 weeks - reflecting the scale of the work to develop a well-engineered enterprise application from scratch. A User Interface specialist was also procured to inform design principles and ensure the system was intuitive and easy to use. Emphasis was also placed on requirements traceability relating the MVP to the stories used by the agile development team to code and test against.
To support accreditation of the solution we worked closely with FCO’s accreditors from project outset, to establish the sensitivity of the information being processed and appropriate controls to protect it. These informed the design of the system and hosting (IaaS) solution for what was to be FCO’s first cloud hosted IT solution.
Agile Byte was also able to define a product and service roadmap for developing the solution beyond the MVP and initial ‘go-live’ features. This included new features and a rolling programme to off/on board services to meet the needs of the project an solution over the first three years of operation. Both the support/maintenance service, and the original cloud platform supplier were subsequently replaced with more cost efficient but equivalent services from the G Cloud. This was all possible because of the G Cloud and FCO retention of the IPR providing an opportunity to see if the market place had a better, more cost effective supplier. These changes have delivered real cost savings and benefit to FCO in a relatively short space of time.
Outcome
The fully accredited Crisis Hub solution went live ahead of the original deadline - around four months after development commenced - and was used successfully in a crisis almost immediately. Agile Byte have managed and assured the subsequent development against the defined roadmap for new features and a programme of continual improvement to reflect outcomes and lessons learned from crises. With well over twenty overseas crises having been supported by the Crisis Hub Service during the past 18 months, the FCO have fully embraced the G Cloud approach and agile delivery process. Other areas of HMG are now starting to look at how they can follow a similar approach or re-use what FCO have developed.
