Cultural change drives Civic developers towards unified DevOps Delivery
Civica is a market leader in specialist systems and business process services that help organisations to transform the way they work. Through experienced people who understand service delivery, the Group applies software, managed services and outsourcing to help customers streamline their activities. Civica supplies more than 2,000 organisations in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Canada and the USA, helping their customers to achieve a successful and more cost-efficient way of working.
Business needs
Civica recognised that they needed to improve their processes, to find a way to bring all their teams based across different sites into line, standardising across the business. Ultimately, they recognised that they needed to:
- bring all the disparate teams into the same system,
- save time and cost through removal of manual tasks,
- deliver services to their customers on demand quicker, faster, better.
Civica identified that they needed to move to a standard baseline that could be accomplished. Not just in terms of source control, and build approaches, but also in work item tracking, and testing. They had a testing framework that they wanted to implement.
Why Black Marble
Black Marble’s reputation for excellence in DevOps, especially around Microsoft’s Azure DevOps services, and as winner of the Global Partner of the Year award for Developer Platform in 2016, made us stand out, and ultimately the perfect choice for Civica.
Solution
To standardize processes and improve provisioning of environments Civica turned to Azure DevOps, a cloud development solution for DevOps management. Azure DevOps can handle bug tracking, work item management, code sharing, agile planning, and build and release management.
Black Marble worked with a select number of teams to initiate this development transformation with Civica. By helping them understand the capabilities of Azure DevOps, enhancing processes, teams were able to excel and get beyond the baseline of the technology stack they were using.
Knowledge Transference
In this engagement with Civica, we emphasised the importance of knowledge transfer at all levels, leading the teams, but ensuring they understand and can run with it. In the longer term, this is key for adoption and culture change within an organisation.
Organisational changes, such as those undertaken by Civica as part of their DevOps transformation with Black Marble is not a process that simply starts and stops. It is an ongoing effort, striving for constant process and tooling improvement.
Black Marble’s engagement with Civica successfully provided the numerous teams within the Civica organisation the skills to move their existing process to new models, as well as to continue to enhance their DevOps processes as future needs evolved.
Benefits
- Standardisation across the development teams.
- Consolidation of source code controls and work item tracking systems.
- Increasing efficiency.
- Ensuring best practices are followed.
Here is the full case study.
