Case Study - Ministry of Justice
The challenge
The UK Ministry of Justice (MoJ) is a major government department at the heart of the UK justice system. Its vision is to deliver a world-class justice system that works for everyone in society.
As such it relies on a large software delivery team of several hundred software engineers to deliver a roadmap of features that are strategically critical for the Ministry.
As a result, Plandek was adopted with the sponsorship of Lianne Mellor, Head of Delivery Management, and Giulio Folino, Head of Digital, to:
- Define and present a set of North Star delivery and engineering metrics around which all teams could align.
- Empower teams with intelligent insights surfaced via Plandek’s customisable dashboards and related analytics to self-improve at a team level.
- Share success and learnings across teams based on a quantitative understanding of what makes for a high-performing team.
The scope
The team at MoJ used Plandek’s simple set-up process to connect issue tracking, code repos and CI/CD pipelines in a matter of minutes to gain visibility throughout their end-to-end delivery toolchain.
Once connected, the MoJ and Plandek Customer Success team worked collectively to identify a core set of North Star metrics that would underpin their main delivery objectives.
By pairing the outcomes they wanted to achieve with a set of North Star metrics, MoJ was able to align teams, support their growth and generate scalable conversations and learnings across their organisation.
The outcomes they wanted to achieve were:
- We want to become a more efficient delivery organisation, adopting and promoting Agile principles.
- We want to establish a highly reliable delivery organisation that regularly meets commitments.
- We want to ensure that we’re proactively managing quality to delight our users and minimise the potential impact on value delivery.
- We want our engineers to actively share knowledge and closely collaborate in order to work more efficiently and minimise the risk of consolidated knowledge.
The outcome
Whilst North Star metrics have enabled them to establish a set of outcome-led metrics that facilitate scalable conversations that lead to scalable learnings across their delivery organisation, team-level dashboards provide delivery and engineering managers with the ability to quickly focus on any particular challenges a team is going through.
MoJ can therefore deliver demonstrable improvement in the metrics that drive value delivery, such as:
- Lead Time to Value: MoJ has seen a 15% improvement in Lead Time to Value over the last year, whilst Cycle Time has improved by nearly 20%.
- Velocity: teams have seen Velocity increase by nearly 15%.
- Sprint Completion: teams have become 20% more effective at planning and executing Sprints.
- Code Cycle Time: engineering is taking 15% less time to get new pull requests in review.
