Cloud Adoption AWS

Programme Overview

I worked for one of the largest government department which provides the UK’s national service to all UK citizens.
The goal of the Cloud Adoption programme (part of DevOps Transformation) was to support the central Cloud Team who has been an enabler for the delivery teams working on the public facing services.
I used the GDS framework starting with Discovery through Alpha, Beta and Live which has helped to define the outcomes and deliverables for each phase.  I managed the stakeholders’ expectations and coached and trained them in understanding how they can support agile teams.

Challenges
  • Remit and low morale of the central DevOps team
  • Lack of skills or experience with Cloud and AWS platform
  • Manual dev and ops processes increasing the time and effort spent on each task
  • Lack of essential roles on the team
  • Cloud strategy needed defining
  • Low agile maturity
Solution
  • Defining the remit of the team as well as the vision, mission and goals
  • Introducing Agile ways of working and conducting experiments to learn how to improve DevOps capability
  • Defining different workstreams for the feature/product squad and BAU / On demand consultancy squad
  • Automation and DevOps mindset
  • Easier and cheaper way of of supporting the delivery teams and their public facing services
  • Cost reduction of the AWS platform (EC2 instances, training accounts, user and account mng)
  • Increased collaboration and self-organisation within the teams
Team

I led a cross-functional team consisting of the DevOps engineers, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Software Developers and QA Tester. I provided guidance and consultancy to senior stakeholders and civil servants from Security, Operations, PMO, Product, Finance and Enterprise Architecture in defining the outcomes and value for their organisational change and end users.

I introduced Scrum and Kanban and the team experimented with both methods complementing them with additional best practice to suit their needs.

Key Statistics/METRICS

  • Faster incident response involving automated process
  • Automated BAU
  • Improved ways of working and team collaboration
  • Visible business benefits and positive feedback from the senior stakeholders and other delivery teams
  • Increased business agility and resilience