Within BAE Systems Digital Intelligence, we're unashamedly customer obsessed. Our customers’ priorities, focus areas and missions drive so many of our decisions; from the people we hire and the skills we train, to the research we conduct and the investments we make.
The use of cloud has been a growing focus for our UK Government customers due to the agility, security and operational efficiencies it can provide, and guidance such as the Cloud guide for the public sector has helped re-enforce this. In 2021, we launched our Cloud Enablement Team (CET) to drive the transformational activities of our organisation, alongside our customers, to support this increasing focus.
In this blog we share some insights from the formation of our CET to help others who might be considering doing the same.
What is a Cloud Enablement Team?
A Cloud Enablement Team or Cloud Centre of Excellence (CCoE) is widely recognised as the best practice approach for ensuring successful cloud adoption projects. For example, Gartner says:
"To ensure cloud adoption success, organizations must have the right skills and structure in place. The optimal way to achieve this is by setting up a centralized cloud center of excellence (CCOE). A CCOE is a centralized governance function for the organization and acts in a consultative role for central IT, business-unit IT and cloud service consumers in the business. A CCOE is key to driving cloud-enabled IT transformation."
As a technology consultancy, this transformation applies to us as we support our customer-embedded engineering teams, and our customers themselves as they embark on their cloud journeys.
As a technology consultancy, this transformation applies to us as we support our customer-embedded engineering teams, and our customers themselves as they embark on their cloud journeys.
How we started
Whilst we work with multiple cloud vendors, our focus in UK National Security – based upon customer demand – has been AWS. We have worked with AWS to understand what good looks like for our CET and followed AWS' now famous 'Working Backwards' approach to define the end state for the capability. We wanted to start small to build the team and prove its value. We identified people from across our business with a range of skills to join the team: a Project Manager, a Business Consultant, an Engineering Manager, an AWS Solution Architect and an AWS DevOps Engineer. Cloud affects the entire organisation, and it’s important that our team skills reflect this.
Recognising the business change aspects of the CET, communications were really important. We tackled this in two main ways:
- Promotion - We popped up at all hands calls, team meetings and customer forums to announce the launch of our CET, and all the ways people could engage with the team. This helped build awareness and let people know the team was available to help.
- Evangelists - We built up a small network of evangelists for the CET, often Tech Leads and Engineering Managers, who the team could engage directly with and would help with engagement at a local level.
Setting our priorities
The range of things our CET could target was significant, but we wanted to be realistic and set achievable goals. We also wanted to be clear in our communications as to what services we were offering. Through the Working Backwards approach, we settled on four main capability areas:
- Learning and development - Coordinating and running a series of learning and development activities to ensure we have the right skills at the right time.
- Knowledge management - A centralised hub of people and projects and ways to share knowledge amongst this community to ensure we can leverage our collective experience.
- Good practice - A repository of good practice guides and artefacts to help enable consistency with how we run cloud teams and tackle cloud problems.
- Support to engineering teams - A way of getting time directly from the CET to join a project team for a short period of time to help with particular challenges.
To provide real focus to the team and be able to measure progress, each year we've defined a set of Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) that align to our capabilities. An example of an OKR aligned to 'Learning and development' might be:
As a team, we agree our objectives at the start of the year based upon feedback from our teams and customer priorities, and then review progress against our key results each quarter. This use of OKRs has proven to be very effective, both within the team to create clear and measurable targets and also as a communication tool out to our wider stakeholders for buy-in.
Key successes
In the 18 months it has been running, the CET has provided a central and co-ordinated focus for our efforts to transform and drive our customers' cloud adoption journeys. For a modest amount of effort and investment, we've managed to accelerate our progress significantly. The team's highlights have included:
- Broad uptake of AWS Cloud Practitioner certification to provide all of our people with a solid foundation of cloud concepts. This has been achieved by running training cohorts of 70 people every other month.
- Production of an AWS Sandbox capability that enables experimentation with AWS services by Engineers, provisioned in minutes and free at the point of use through AWS provided credits.
- Quarterly Game Days hosted by AWS, providing a fun and competitive way of putting learning into practice through hands on challenges.
- AWS Well-Architected Reviews conducted by our AWS specialists over our projects most heavily used on AWS.
- A strong partnership between BAE Systems and AWS through relationships established between key individuals in both organisations, and regular governance.
Where next?
Our Cloud Enablement Team has demonstrated its value to our organisation and provided a strong foundation to enable our Engineering and Consulting teams to support and drive our customers' cloud adoption journeys.
As we progress further along this path, our next steps are to lean in further and help engineering teams with their cloud migrations, sharing lessons from previous migrations and curating knowledge and good practice from across teams to create efficiencies. As a model, we're also exploring whether the Enablement Team approach can be applied to other non-cloud disciplines for emerging technologies and ways of working.
If you're interested in working with our team using the cloud to help deliver our customers' digital transformation journeys, visit our Careers page.
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