PLATFORM Overview

Government Digital Service (GDS) is a unit of government within the UK’s Cabinet Office. I led a cross-functional GOV.UK Platform as a Service (PaaS) team whose goal has been to meet the need of government teams working on public-facing services. PaaS using AWS and Cloud Foundry technology is a resilient and secure platform managed by a full-time team of developers, WebOps engineers, product managers and user researched at GDS who also provide 24/7 support for any platform-related issues.

The goal of PaaS is to support government teams by saving their time and money relating to hosting and running their environments.

Challenges

• Service teams building the same technical stack for their digital services
• Service teams spending a lot of time on building their own hosting stack
• Cost-ineffective solutions

Solution

• Common platform
• Government PaaS provides logging, monitoring, alerting etc.
• Self-service
• Support model: app developer on-call for their apps and platform team on-call for platform
• Multi-tenancy
• Easier and cheaper way of hosting applications, services and platforms across government

Team

As an Agile Delivery Managers I led a cross-functional team of DevOps engineers, Product Owner and User Researcher. I acted as a Scrum Master / Agile Coach and collaborated with the PaaS Product Owner on the roadmap and platform improvements for Cabinet Office. I led the team through the agile service delivery and made a plan for moving the service into public Beta as a fully operational and robust system. I coached the team of engineers on agile best practice and techniques when planning, estimating, and delivering their user stories and support to their tenants in other government departments.

The team followed Scrum and Kanban agile methods which worked very well for different work streams: product backlog and enhancements used Scrum and BAU, support tickets used Kanban.

Key Statistics/METRICS

• 0 incidents
• 24/7 platform support
• Increasing number of tenants of over 65