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Using the right working methods is key to the successful delivery of all digital projects.
To help establish this on a government transformation project, consultants held ‘agile ways of working’ sessions with the internal project team and the wider digital community. To help the internal team take on further development after we’d finished work, we ran collaboration and handover sessions involving key people from various teams. These included business analysts, product managers and delivery managers, as well as user-centred design consultants. And, to share knowledge with other internal teams, we joined communities of practice in engineering and delivery management.
Good documentation is essential for effective large-scale content design. It streamlines processes and allows designers to track design decisions.
Working on a central government project, a senior Opencast content designer created detailed design documentation, which the in-house content design lead recognised for its thoroughness. This opened up an opportunity to help two other content designers within the programme who had been struggling with their own documentation, methods and processes. Our consultant explained the importance of documentation in the design process, offering examples of great content documentation. This learning was incorporated into their own methods and processes, leading to a better content result.
Amazon’s open-source Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) automates the management, scaling and deployment of containerised applications, eliminating the need for teams to install, operate and maintain their own control planes.
DevOps consultants working with a central government department’s AWS Cloud and EKS service helped upskill the in-house team, sharing knowledge of AWS DevOps tech stack and tools. Documentation detailing steps and screenshots has provided a comprehensive guide for in-house client teams, supporting the implementation of similar solutions for other project needs. The documentation has been successfully used by other DevOps engineers in the department and is available as a resource for ongoing learning and reference.
Learning on the job is among the most effective forms of coaching – and it helps government promote people from within with less of the time and cost of external recruitment.
While working as a lead product manager to a central government digital programme, our lead product manager provided one-to-one product management coaching to help support the development of a permanent digital service manager. This coaching helped the manager move, first into a temporary promotion as lead product manager, and on the back of this, the manager successfully interviewed to progress to a permanent role as lead product manager within the programme.
Government teams may need support upskilling in-house apprentices and developers to become quality assurance engineers.
Working for a government health client, Opencast ran two five-day, off-site interactive training courses, taking into account accessibility needs. Using an agile approach, we created the training with the business tech stack, adding user stories for each task. We presented the fundamentals of testing and how to create a new framework using best practice, then supported each person as they completed each story. The trainees were then able to create their own test framework, debugging and executing tests on the integrated development environment. We then offered ongoing project support to all involved.
Bringing teams together to learn agile principles, improve software and embrace new frameworks can be a highly effective way of boosting in-house capability.
Partnering with an English county council to take its tech infrastructure into the cloud, we recognised an in-house skills gap in cloud technologies and cyber resilience. We helped develop an upskilling programme for council staff, designing a training curriculum using theoretical presentations, hands-on workshops and real-world case studies. We encouraged collaborative learning to foster peer-to-peer learning and problem-solving. This has helped the council team to successfully migrate its service into the cloud, enhancing operational efficiency, security and scalability.
Apprenticeships offer the opportunity for people to add technical skills to the essential skills they already hold.
Opencast’s central government client was committed to growing its apprentices, creating a need to on-board people into development roles with no programming experience. It would have been unfeasible for our delivery teams to manage this - so we ran a 12-week bootcamp-style course to give the apprentices sufficient knowledge to work in teams. The course offered basics in procedural programming, functional techniques, test-driven development, agile coding and modern delivery lifecycle practices. Most of the apprentices have now been promoted into technical roles in their teams.
Opencast's report sets out ways to help government grow digital skills at scale, with practical advice on successful knowledge transfer to in-house teams.
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The digital skills gap is a major pressure point for civil servants tasked with delivering digital public services. Opencast’s skills report offers pr...
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