Case Studies

Foden Grealy was the driving force behind a successful initiative to develop better collaborative working across ten UK Government departments.

The initiative followed the failure of an earlier large-scale attempt to solve the problem of collaboration and knowledge-sharing across departments in a complex security environment. It was delivered by a small, empowered team that adopted an incremental delivery approach. We set out a vision for the community that could be delivered in clear, incremental steps, with far less risk and at a fraction of the cost of a big system approach. We won the support of senior managers; engaged a diverse community of stakeholders; managed significant security, legal, policy and information risks; and pioneered the use of open source software delivered using agile software development methods.

We see this as a great example of how small-scale, incremental, business-driven approaches can be far more effective than more traditional ways of delivering new capability.

Foden Grealy have made a significant contribution to the implementation of agile working at major UK Government department.

The organisation was facing the problem of needing to deliver large capabilities involving new technology and new business practices much more quickly and flexibly than in the past. Whilst having world class capabilities in both research and engineering, it was struggling to bring innovations from lab to beneficial operation quickly enough, cheaply enough and at acceptable risk.

Through a series of change initiatives over several years we…

• Inspired and established an effective, incremental approach to the management of change, which the organisation now relies on…
• …and through this approach, supported the successful delivery of many critical new operational systems.
• Devised a model for capability delivery that is now at the heart of the organisation’s agile strategy guiding system design, technology deployment practices and structuring of IT environments.
• Supported changes to practices related to the implementation of IT that enabled rapid deployment and risk management of less-mature, developmental software for operational use (which won a national IT service management award).
• Supported the adoption of ‘cloud’-style open technology platforms, associated services and behaviours to enable other communities to develop applications on those platforms.
• Helped grow an open, collaborative culture that has eased working across organisational silos.
• Initiated and fostered a number of initiatives to improve collaboration (using new social tools) to improve operational effectiveness.

We believe we have made a very serious difference to the way the department works.