DWP Digital’s collaboration with Red Hat has yielded impressive results. Service automation for processes, including monitoring and logging, has significantly reduced development time. It also removed the need to build common components repeatedly and increased the quality of cross-team communication.
Working with Red Hat Consulting also accelerated DWP Digital’s ability to create communities of practice around finding open source solutions to challenges. Red Hat’s expert consultants encouraged a more collaborative, shared experience across the Integration Product Delivery Unit at DWP Digital, breaking down silos, promoting collaboration and experimentation, and sharing reusable assets.
This broad cooperation inspired a series of ‘hackathons’ focused on pooling external engineers and those in DWP and other government departments. DWP Digital was quickly able to identify opportunities to improve processes, paring down the time needed to move code safely into production from nine hours to just 15 minutes. This resulted in delivering vastly improved claims-processing and turnaround times. At the height of the pandemic, despite the huge spike in claims, citizens could access the funds they needed to help support their basic needs including paying housing costs and food for their families.
The process has also enabled DWP to become a trusted source of data across the government. Other government departments rely on it to deliver additional services to support UK citizens.