The challenges were twofold: firstly, JSP604 is called ‘Network Joining Rules’ and, as the name suggests, is designed for a paradigm in which one is using on-premise hosting solutions, which we are not. Nevertheless, we were adamant that we would do things the right way, and so began the challenging process of gaining accreditation and generally meeting the requirements of a piece of policy called Joint Service Publication (JSP) 604. This is understandable, since much of the MOD’s work is extremely sensitive – secret, even – and the department has had a more difficult journey than most other Government departments in transitioning from the old classification system to the new. We in the Defence Digital Service (DDS) are quite clear that data is more secure in public cloud, but this is not a common attitude in Defence. That challenge overcome (and documented, so that we can do it again more easily), the next challenge was far more wholesome and the first major counter-cultural shift that we were asking Defence to make: namely, allowing us to store sensitive data in a public cloud hosting environment. With more than a little help from financial and commercial colleagues, and some bureaucracy hackers whom we had got to know well, we finally welcomed the team you see above. Our first challenge predates the team arriving and was not particularly glamorous: how do we a) get funding, and b) hire a team? Not as easy as you may think, in a large part because there was no great precedent in Defence for hiring agile delivery teams, using a Government framework, in a reasonable amount of time. The R2-D2 team met for the first time in a park Challenges along the way and a series of firsts

The effort was entirely worth it!Īs if that wasn’t challenging enough, we were doing all of this having never met and working fully remotely (we’ll be blogging about our experiences of doing so soon), apart from a single, in-person, socially-distanced meeting in a park in Basingstoke.

We followed that induction with hypothesis generation exercises, spin-off deep-dive sessions, and so on, before creating our first Trello cards, beginning to find the right users, and all that good stuff. The induction was intense and tiring, as we (Rob and Iain, who continued from the discovery team) had to explain both how the Ministry of Defence works – a feat in itself – and enough detail of the discovery phase outputs to be able to be effective in alpha. On May the 4th ( obviously), we established a complete multi-disciplinary delivery team and started an in-depth, week-long induction for the new members, before then moving properly into the alpha phase of delivery. Back in January 2020, not long after we finished our Discovery sprint, we posted about a project called Readiness Reporting and Deployability Discovery, or R2-D2 for short.

How to mod r2d2