The Driver and Vehicle Standards Agency (DVSA) is an executive agency of the UK Department for Transport. It carries out driving tests, approves people to be driving instructors and MOT testers, carries out roadside checks, and ensures the general safety of road vehicles. As part of the agency’s digital, data and technology strategy, it is aiming to provide modern, efficient, and sustainable technology to support a mobile workforce and build brilliant digital services for its users.

To achieve this, the DVSA has migrated many of its core services to AWS Cloud. The services are supported by a unique 24/7 BJSS Technical Support Service that combines a helpdesk with key ITIL processes, agile development techniques and a DevOps culture. As a result, the DVSA benefits from stable, secure and modern cloud infrastructure, helping it to focus on delivering its core services and achieve its transformation ambitions.

“BJSS, through its Transformational Support Service has been instrumental in supporting our digital transformation and the efficient use of the AWS Cloud Services both during development and in live. BJSS has shown that they can work in a true client/supplier partnership delivering tangible benefits.” 

Alex Fiddes
Head of Digital Operations, DVSA

Challenge 

The DVSA is on a mission to develop modern, efficient and sustainable technology to support a mobile workforce and build brilliant digital services for its users.

However, it needed to overcome several challenges to achieve this. Its IT infrastructure was originally housed on physical server infrastructure. This was costly to maintain and was hampering the agency’s ability to transform and respond quickly enough to the demands of the modern age. Furthermore, its services and legacy infrastructure were supported by a traditional outsourced service desk which was responsible for resolving incidents. While the service desk played a vital role in incident resolution, it was not fit for the digital age and the DVSA’s transformation ambitions.

A vital enabler of the agency’s digital transformation programme was the migration of its core services to the cloud such as its MOT testing service, testing and registration system and roadside payments service.

For each of these cloud migrations to be a success, the DVSA required a managed service partner from the outset who would be responsible for working with project delivery teams to ensure that monitoring/alerting was in place and the right environment management controls were delivered.

As the DVSA’s digital partner, BJSS was chosen to support the migration of several services to AWS and provide a modern Technical Support Service (TSS).

Solution 

The aim of the BJSS TSS is to provide 24/7 operational support for all DVSA’s digital services in AWS. We have overseen the migration of ten DVSA core services to the cloud, ensuring service management controls were in place from the outset of each migration.

Our ISO27001 accredited TSS team supports each of the ten digital services with:

• Service management – Focusing on key process areas such as incident and problem resolution, service requests, release, change, availability, capacity, and continuous service improvement
• Comprehensive service level performance governance and reporting
• Integrated security incident management with DVSA SOC and IMS
• On-call engineers that are available 24/7, resolving 15 service incidents and 10 releases out of hours per month
• Digital delivery release coordination and dependency management across digital services.

Our TSS has helped to ensure the stability of the DVSA’s digital services, supporting the handling of £12m worth of monthly payment transactions. We deliver 20 releases a month across the services and provide specialist AWS expertise to ensure the cloud platforms are up to date and running smoothly. Crucially, we have successfully handled over 500 incidents, requests, and events every month.

Benefits 

Platform innovation and cost optimisation
By selecting to work with BJSS, the DVSA has access to our leading AWS certified platform engineers. This has enabled the agency to continuously improve its AWS platform through innovation. We’ve led the way in terms of helping the DVSA adopt new cloud features which have improved performance and reduced the overall cost of ownership. In just six months, our TSS and platform engineers were able to reduce the run costs of the DVSA’s MOT AWS platform by 50%.

Flexible and adaptable
The TSS we provide DVSA is both flexible and adaptable. Having overseen the agency’s digital transformation, we have evolved the service continuously in line with requirements and priorities. Our agile approach to service management, combined with our cross-functional team, allows us to rapidly switch resources to meet the needs of the DVSA. This flexibility and adaptability has played a crucial role in helping us achieve a 100% incident resolution within SLAs and zero penalties since the start of our service.

Integrated service management and project delivery
We pride ourselves in having a collaborative approach to service management. Our TSS team are fully integrated with project delivery teams across the DVSA’s supplier ecosystem. We ensure that service management processes are considered from the outset for all cloud migrations, which is essential in achieving a smooth transition from project delivery into our TSS. We also bring our expertise in DevOps, agile delivery and continuous improvement to support all DVSA digital projects. A peer review completed by the Government Digital Service (GDS) – confirmed that the support our TSS team provided during the MOT Service migration, was an exemplar of how to deliver an agile project. The BJSS TSS for the DVSA was also awarded ‘Service Transformation Project of the Year’ by ItSMF UK, the IT service management community.