// 01The context
Axiologik were engaged by the Immigration Technology Portfolio, a large digital transformation portfolio within the Home Office's Digital, Data and Technology directorate, to transform the maturity of project and product delivery across their organisation of circa 900 personnel.
The Portfolio's remit is to build the digital future of immigration for the UK: streamlining the way eligibility is determined to visit, work or remain in the UK, and how the reduction of illegal population on our shores is managed.
"Axiologik have led the transformation of culture within the Immigration Technology Portfolio, helping us to create a leaner organisation."
— JOHN HOLBEN, CTO, IMMIGRATION TECHNOLOGY PORTFOLIO
// 02What we did
We were selected for our expertise in bringing structure, rigour, transparency and repeatability to delivery on large portfolios, and our experience in building sustainable, large-scale, enterprise product management teams.
We restructured the organisation to bring greater accountability and efficiency across the Portfolio. Project delivery processes and governance arrangements were rationalised from top to bottom and brought under a consistent execution and governance framework, increasing transparency and predictability.
Our team also led the implementation of a product management organisation focused on building long-term, sustainable products for the Home Office — balancing investment in customer outcomes with improving how the products were built, tested and released.
We stayed to drive adoption of the benefits, heading up both project and product delivery for the Portfolio. A key part of the approach was data-driven management: instrumenting the delivery lifecycle and using rich data to provide insight on delivery performance, giving leadership the basis for a continuous improvement culture.
"They introduced a new set of project delivery processes and engineering standards for the portfolio which have provided a foundation for better management."
— JOHN HOLBEN, CTO, IMMIGRATION TECHNOLOGY PORTFOLIO
// 03The results
Structured, repeatable and transparent ways of working across project and product delivery allowed Portfolio leadership to focus on the issues that really mattered. With increased predictability and control established, we led the achievement of headcount and efficiency savings of circa 30% on the Portfolio's largest programme, while at the same time improving the speed and predictability of delivery.
We also led the adoption and refinement of accelerated engineering practices across the Portfolio, resulting in a 400% increase in the ability to deliver software in the Portfolio's largest product.
Alongside this, we spearheaded a number of cross-Portfolio initiatives to reduce cost and improve efficiency. These included strategies to reduce cloud infrastructure cost — delivering widespread reductions, up to 66% in key areas of expenditure — and the rationalisation of support arrangements across the enterprise to drive better value for money.
