DOES16 London - Antony Collard & Lyndsay Prewer - Making Tax Digital
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Making Tax Digital: Transforming the Culture and Code of HMRC’s Tax Services Antony Collard, Deputy Director, Digital Delivery, HM Revenue and Customs Lyndsay Prewer, Delivery Lead, Equal Experts This is the story of HMRC’s digital transformation. Our starting point was a fifteen year legacy of outsourced IT, dominated by costly contracts, project plans and long release cycles. Three years into our transformation, HMRC is delivering digital tax services that cater for the UK’s largest tax events, serving up to five million business users and up to forty million personal users. From the outset we’ve applied Continuous Delivery and DevOps principles that enable our teams to perform multiple releases per day. This is hand-in-hand with a you build it, you run it ethos to ensure that each team maintains responsibility for live service performance. In this session, you’ll hear our story so far and learn about the approaches we took to making this transformation a success.
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DOES16 London - Antony Collard & Lyndsay Prewer - Making Tax Digital
- 1. Making tax digital transforming the culture and code of HMRC’s tax services Antony Collard - Deputy Director – Digital Delivery Lyndsay Prewer - Delivery Lead – Digital Platform
- 2. 75% government transactions of all 5mBusiness customers 15% Net reduction in baseline costs by 2020 HMRC at a glance in 2016 £1.3bnReinvestment in digital transformation £517.7bn revenue 45m Individual customers
- 3. What are we creating? • World-class public services – essential for the UK • One of the most digitally advanced tax administrations in the world - simpler for taxpayers • One of the most technologically progressive workplaces
- 4. Proof in delivery - starting a channel shift ● Major business peak – 31st July – Tax Credit Renewals ● C4m people expected to renew with C2m users in the last week ● Predominance of phone & post channels generate serious customer and business impacts
- 5. "seminal moment across the leadership of HMRC". Mark Dearnley, HMRC Chief Information Officer 8weeks build 410,000 customers 94% customer satisfaction rate Proof in delivery - starting a channel shift
- 6. Start small, learn from Experts
- 9. Taking the load - but safe to fail Tax Account Router
- 10. Our Dev-Ops evolution - some context Change Freeze Period 2 months No freeze!
- 11. Our Dev-Ops evolution - going multi-active
- 12. Dev-Ops models
- 13. Our Dev-Ops evolution - capabilities
- 15. Digital transformation happening at pace ● SA16 was HMRC’s most digital ever c500k more people filed online ● PTA MVP built Sept to Dec, introduced early Dec. ● Over 1m new users of PTA with 102,607 on 31/1. ● Plan to have 7m by end of March 17 and eliminate Self Assessment over time
- 16. Today’s Multi-channel Digital Tax Platform Our award-winning multi-channel digital tax platform • Supports 28 new digital services • Has handled more than 55m visits to date • New services built in as little as 6 weeks • Saved more than £8m in operating costs • Not just HMRC - 5 other Government Dept’s on- board
- 17. And finally ... Follow our progress at hmrcdigital.blog.gov.uk and @HMRCdigital Sign up for your PTA at https://www.gov.uk/personal-tax-account ● We have come a long way but are still children in the sense of our growth and development – learning every day ● Looking for companies who have been there before and been doing this for some time, to learn, to benchmark, share best practice to help us do even more, even more quickly ● Looking to you to use our services – try out the App, sign up for your PTA and follow us on our journey…give us your feedback
Editor's Notes
- Antony to kick off
- Antony HMRC touches the lives of almost every single adult and business in the UK We are also one of the UK’s biggest organisations We have around 58,000 full-time equivalent employees currently spread throughout 170 offices across the country This includes an extra 3,000 people that we recruited over the summer as customer service advisers to take calls and deal with post,so we could improve our service to customers Over the course of this Parliament, HMRC needs to: Continue to bring in more money to fund UK Plc Improve the service we offer customers Lower our cost base As part of it’s Spending Review and Autumn Statement in November 2015, the Government announced a £1.3 billion investment through to 2019-20 to fund our transformation
- Antony
- Lyndsay At the start of HMRC’s digital transformation in 2013 we set out to deliver noticeable value quickly. The Tax Credits peak at the end of July 2014 provided a great opportunity to do this. Between April and August around 4 million people will renew their tax credits. Most currently do so by phone, and face the frustration of HMRC’s infamous long wait times. We wanted to make life better for these callers.
- Lyndsay We built an online renewal service in just eight weeks that was small, but able to handle the high load of this peak Calendar event, thus starting to shift customers from phones and paper to the digital channel. We did this with one team, a few Dev Ops engineers and our own stack, running in the cloud. We took a continuous delivery approach that allowed us to iteratively design and deliver this service. We targeted this problem because it meant our solution was safe to fail. If we didn’t deliver, or we had to take the digital service offline, customers could still use the pre-existing, non-digital routes. This was a small but significant step in the organic growth of HMRC Digital. We thought if it went really well, maybe 80,000 people would use it – 410,000 people used it. We had about a 94% customer satisfaction rate, which is absolutely phenomenal." Dearnley describes it as a "seminal moment across the leadership of HMRC".
- Lyndsay Starting a digital transformation is a bit like learning a new language. Story about learning French at school Prior to HMRC Digital, our organisation didn’t deliver it’s own IT. We not only lacked the technical know-how, we also lacked a culture that did agile, lean or continuous delivery. HMRC Digital started with just one team of experts, from three organisations. - HMRC provided expert knowledge of the domain and a group of empowered service managers who could get things done - GDS provided guidance on designing public services based on user needs and help to cut through bureaucratic red tape - Equal Experts provided the technical know-how, guidance on turning the ideas into real services, and a culture of delivering value Accenture and Cap Gemini joined shortly thereafter, followed by other SME’s.
- Lyndsay HMRC Digital started in London in 2013, with just the one team, with experts from HMRC, GDS and EE. By early 2014, we had delivered three exemplar services out of the London delivery centre, and now we wanted to expand to multiple teams across two delivery centres. The first Tax Credits delivery in 2014 was started out of a new delivery centre in Newcastle. The team there worked closely with their London counterparts to deliver this ground breaking service in just 8 weeks. By delivering a Production service that was so successful, HMRC Digital gained trust from the rest of the business in digital services. This allowed us to grow further, so that by 2015, we had multiple teams, across two centres working on services for the Tax Credits peak. Again, we achieved a successful channel shift with over 800,000 Tax Credit renewals via the digital route. For 2016, we now have multiple teams across multiple delivery centres, including one team that has rebuilt the HMRC Mobile app from scratch, to allow customers to do their tax credit renewal from their phone.
- Antony HMRC’s web traffic rises exponentially from December to 11.5 million page views at the end of January. This is the Self-Assessment peak, when over 10 million people have to file their tax return by the 31st January. Over 9 million people file their return online. If we get something wrong with our IT during this peak, then it’s very bad news all round. This year saw the introduction of the Personal Tax Account <how best to summarise this>. To drive up-take of this new service, we needed to take all Self Assessment users and selectively route about one third of them to it. This means all of the Self Assessment journeys would have to go through our new, cloud based platform. We achieved this in just 6 weeks, with a newly formed team of five, who built a Tax Account Router. On the peak day the Tax Account Router processed 3.5 million requests, diverting about one third of them to the Personal Tax Account. As before, we took a continuous delivery approach to iteratively design and deliver this service. At first, the service just gathered data to validate our assumptions. All traffic went through it, and the routing rules were silently run in the background, without actually diverting the traffic. This validated several unknowns straight away: Could we take the load? Was our routing logic correct? Did we have the right metrics in place? As a safeguard against downstream problems, a throttle was also implemented in the service, so we could dial up or down the volume going through the routing logic. This allowed us to start routing requests for real in a controlled fashion, from a very low percentage to gain confidence, then up to 100% once we were happy. The service itself and its underlying implementation was built around the safe to fail principle. We wanted users to always be able to file their Self Assessment return. Hence, if any part of the router service failed, or if we had to take the whole router out, users would default to the old route, which still allowed them to file.
- Antony
- Lyndsay The story of multi active switch over for SA16 Peak Add influence on other suppliers so they are now adopting a more flexible delivery approach.
- Lyndsay The story of multi active switch over for SA16 Peak
- TODO - add second circle Lyndsay Distributed vs centralised Web/Dev Ops We've gone for centralised, but focus on building a platform that provides a Dev Ops capability and support Dev-Ops capabilities CD Process and Pipeline Jenkins Puppet Docker ELK Elastic Logstash Kibana Pagerduty Not the standard one team one Dev Ops approach 1 team of 37 Dev Ops vs 37 teams each with 1 Dev Ops Could we have achieved the same with a standard model? Organic growth of platform as well as teams
- Lyndsay Dev-Ops capabilities Jenkins Puppet Docker ELK Elastic Logstash Kibana Pagerduty
- Lyndsay
- Antony, wrapping up SA
- Antony
- Antony Not sure how best to summarise this? Four stories, three principles Gaining confidence through delivery Safe to fail Organic growth Help we need / what we don't know Be a customer, give us feedback – PTA, BTA, Mobile App Synergy, if what you’re doing is similar to what we’re doing, then we’d love to have a conversation – it’s your taxes that pay for us