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The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is a department in His Majesty’s government, responsible for environmental protection, food production and standards, agriculture, fisheries and rural communities in England.
A vast legacy application estate
Founded in 2001, Defra is a large, well-established department with the responsibility for a multi-billion-pound budget. With such a wide remit, it’s no surprise the department suffers from significant numbers of legacy applications. This problem
was highlighted as a contributing factor to a potential cyber-security risk, coupled with the threat of operational failure, as outlined in a House of Commons Committee Report.
Due to this, work was commissioned to prioritise, modernise and protect the vast legacy estate of over 2000 applications across Defra, the Rural Payments Agency, Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA) and its other arm’s-length bodies (ALB), which
are a specific category of non-departmental public bodies administratively classified by the Cabinet Office.
Following a procurement exercise in January 2023, Sopra Steria was appointed to support the strategic Legacy Application Programme (LAP), a fast-paced, complex, multi-year programme of work addressing the legacy estate risks at Defra.
Delivering a complex programme
LAP is a multi-year, multi-supplier programme with Sopra Steria as the Client-Side Delivery Partner providing support on managing application migration projects, business case development, and benefits realisation.
The focus has been on the delivery of application migration projects. The team has been working closely with Defra’s delivery partners, Defra’s Cloud CoE, architecture teams, and other support functions such as commercial, service design,
and change management teams, as well as Defra’s arm’s-length bodies.
Managing and working with all stakeholders has been instrumental to the success of the delivery and completion of these projects. There have been several types of projects:
- Migration of applications to Cloud environments.
- Application remediations.
- Data Centre migration to Cloud environments.
- Discovery projects, for example for the ‘reach back’ applications (which are applications retained for access to historical data only); the creation of application catalogue (i.e., data set/type, functional and non-functional requirements),
and the creation of a data migration roadmap from these applications to Defra’s Common Data Platform.
In addition, there are several parallel workstreams:
- Managing PMO activities for the programme, such as programme & project risks/issues, governance reporting, creation of PMO handbook, etc.
- Application portfolio prioritisation, working with business owners within agencies and arm’s-length bodies to prioritise the application portfolio into delivery tranches.
- Management of suppliers’ reviews into the prioritised applications to understand technical architecture and options available.
- Working closely with Defra Commercial, Finance and IT teams to determine cashable/non-cashable savings available and insert them into the Programme Business Case and Benefits Realisation Plan.
- Supporting the creation of an HM Treasury Greenbook compliant Programme Business Case (PBC) and annual refreshes. Managing and facilitating the PBC through Defra approval and assurance processes as required.
- Create and maintain a programme-level benefits tracking system, including a data modelling dashboard component to clearly present delivery progress and forecast. Working closely with multiple suppliers, PM’s and key stakeholders to ensure its
accuracy and implement appropriate assurance processes.
- Ongoing collaboration with business owners and management of stakeholder expectations.
- Ongoing adherence and compliance with Defra’s processes, policies, and procedures.
Outcome
The Sopra Steria team has developed a deep understanding of the business and technical challenges associated with this programme. They have embedded themselves with the legacy applications estate to understand the depth and breadth of this complex environment.
They have delivered several deep-dive discoveries with solution options and recommendations that have enabled Defra to make informed decisions in relation to remediation and migration pathways, as well as support other incumbent suppliers to do the
same.
The Sopra Steria team has been instrumental in supporting the delivery of application migration projects. A large number of applications have now been treated, which removed the technical debt and reduced security risks. The team managed the various stakeholders
well, keeping Defra’s delivery partners on track and working with Defra’s support functions to deliver successful outcomes.
The PMO team has been key to the programme, enabling the teams by providing structure and controls with regards to reporting, processes, and governance.
The team has also supported the creation of the Business Case for LAP and managing it through the different governance cycles. The team engaged with SMEs to validate cashable and non-cashable benefits from the first phase of delivery and have helped bring
stricter controls to identifying, monitoring, and managing further benefits in support of onward business and investment cases.
The multi-skilled Sopra Steria team is pleased to continue supporting Defra as their client-side delivery partner and play an integral role in the department’s achievement of its strategic goals. The LAP Programme has developed a strong reputation
for predictable delivery.
The team’s strength and experience have been recognised by the LAP Programme Director, Jahangir Khan:
“We are grateful to have had the insight and specialist knowledge of Sopra Steria’s team to support us in our ambitions to stabilise and enhance legacy applications across the Defra Group. Such experience has been vital in helping us to reduce
the risks of cyber-attack or operational failure. The team managed several complex migration and remediation projects successfully on time and within budget.”
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