Case study

Helping DWP Digital improve consistency and standards

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Opencast has been working with DWP Digital part of the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) on a range of digital projects since 2020.

Challenge

An Opencast project team has worked within DWP Digital’s ‘green zone’ as an enabling team since 2021 to help ensure more consistency and standards in system builds, helping improve efficiency and reduce duplication.

The green zone focuses on reusable application services that can be used across different teams. DWP Digital’s project delivery units identified inconsistencies in their application build pipelines or integration solutions. Working together we were able to spot inefficiencies and duplication in workflows across teams, as well as complications when the app reached the deployment stage.

Black Department for Work and Pensions logo

Response

The Opencast team did a full review of the different solutions in place across DWP Digital. We focused on an off-the-shelf solution to reduce complexity and technical boundaries for application teams with reduced DevOps support.

The work has seen a reduction in inconsistencies and, crucially, we’ve developed new quality-assured templates that can be optimised for different application types such as Java, Node and Node Casa. Teams can now migrate on to these templates to improve application build workflow across the green zone within DWP Digital.

Three women having a conversation while writing on post-it notes

Impact

The work has culminated in a batch migration to integrate multiple PDUs into one Gitlab project, providing a consistent and high-quality template solution for 24 application service teams providing no less than 112 applications underpinning services that are consumed by millions of DWP public users.

Throughout the project Opencast worked collaboratively to share knowledge through one-to-one training and shared documentation, as well as participating in engineering steering groups across DWP Digital.

 

A consistent and high-quality template solution for 24 application service teams providing no less than 112 applications underpinning services that are consumed by millions of DWP public users

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