We\u2019re particularly proud of our work for HMRC\u2019s Digital Delivery Centres.<\/p>\n
The department supports multiple separate agile teams, and you\u2019ll find EE associates working alongside civil servants on many of those. Each team is continually designing, testing and delivering new digital products and services for HMRC.<\/p>\n
Underpinning this digital capability is the Multi-Channel Digital Tax Platform (MDTP), which we helped to build. It\u2019s MDTP that allows HMRC to support this continuous delivery from multiple locations.<\/p>\n
This is true digital transformation within the heart of Government, and the speed with which we can deploy new enhancements is largely down to the way our teams work together. But what\u2019s the secret to helping so many teams collaborate?<\/p>\n
For Alun Coppack \u2013 a Partner at Equal Experts, and Digital Operations Manager on the HMRC project \u2013the key is to treat the platform as a club, rather than a service.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you want to work on the MDTP platform\u201d, says Alun, \u201cyou need to play by its rules. Technology-wise, that means using the specific tools they use \u2013 for the time being, at least.\u201d It also requires teams to take ongoing responsibility for the work they produce: \u201cif your team is making something for the platform, the team needs to be ready to look after it once it\u2019s live.\u201d<\/p>\n
In return for working within these parameters, each team can reap the many benefits of being a club member…<\/p>\n
The chief benefit of our club mentality is that teams collaborate openly, and can easily re-use each others\u2019 work.<\/p>\n
This means new features can be added to existing services, rather than starting from scratch. As an example, the first team that needed to send emails created a microservice to do this. Later, when a team working on another product needed to send emails rather than create a new email service or run a new instance of the existing one, they worked with the first team to add functionality.<\/p>\n
Teams use the github \u2018fork and pull\u2019 model to add the features they need \u2013 forking the codebase, making (and testing) changes, before sending enhancements to the original team to review and accept. Working this way means teams need to be open to requests from other teams, for everyone\u2019s benefit but we can get new products up and running much faster, with far less replication of existing work.<\/p>\n
With so many teams continually releasing new services and enhancements on one platform, it\u2019s vital everyone knows what\u2019s going on. A key way we do this \u2013\u00a0beyond the daily scrums within individual teams \u2013\u00a0is to run a fortnightly show and tell session.<\/p>\n
Bringing teams together for a regular overview of everyone\u2019s work keeps people informed, and crucially, fosters our club mentality. Everyone comes together to share progress and feedback, keeping knowledge moving around the whole organisation. As Benjamin Mitchell (a Partner at Equal Experts) points out,\u00a0it\u2019s also great for team spirit. \u201cThere\u2019s a great esprit de corps<\/em> here \u2013\u00a0each team has its own way of doing things, and everyone gets to learn from others and share each other\u2019s success\u201d.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" We\u2019re particularly proud of our work for HMRC\u2019s Digital Delivery Centres. The department supports multiple separate agile teams, and you\u2019ll find EE associates working alongside civil servants on many of those. Each team is continually designing, testing and delivering new digital products and services for HMRC. Underpinning this digital capability is the Multi-Channel Digital Tax […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":1970,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"location":[397],"class_list":["post-1958","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-our-thinking"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n