A UK Media and Entertainment company needed to quickly streamline numerous, fragmented onboarding processes for a workforce including many temporary freelancers.

BJSS built and deployed an application that consolidated these processes into a single place, with an intuitive interface and simplified user journey for the client’s Identity Admin team. Using several cloud-native products from Google Cloud Platform, the team was able to roll out the application in just ten months.

The onboarding process for employees can now be managed through a single, easy-to-use application, saving the internal client team, on average, 19 minutes per action.

Challenge

The client is one of the largest global media and entertainment companies in the UK. Every year, the client must onboard thousands of employees and provide them with access to downstream systems.

This onboarding process involved a dedicated Identity Admin team creating user accounts across multiple systems, which was an inefficient, time-consuming process. There were added complications due to the number of freelancers employed temporarily by the client, some of whom would need to be rapidly onboarded at short notice. Furthermore, many of these freelancers could return months or years later to work on a different production, which created additional administrative work for the Identity Admin team when creating, managing, and keeping track of users, often resulting in duplicate accounts.

The client invested in an Identity and Access Management solution platform to improve this process, but the user experience was unwieldy. A need was identified to create an application that interfaced with the IAM platform and streamlined the process of creating new user accounts.

The client’s internal technical team created a Proof-of-Concept for this application, termed the Identity Platform, but needed help to rapidly turn it into a fully-fledged product to be used by the Identity Admin team.

Solution

BJSS was tasked with turning the Identity Platform Proof-of-Concept into a fully-fledged application and rolling it out to the client’s Identity Admin team. A key objective was to deliver the product as soon as possible, so that it could start delivering value as a time-saving measure. For that reason, the client made the decision to run the application on Google Cloud Platform, as it provided many cloud-native services that would allow the team to quickly deliver a Minimum Viable Product.

Of these, BJSS primarily leveraged:

• App Engine to build and deploy the application, which also provided scalability through a serverless environment that automatically scales depending on app traffic
• Cloud Build as the main part of the CI/CD pipeline
• Operations Suite to monitor, troubleshoot and improve application performance
• Pub/Sub, the real-time messaging service, to decouple the microservices and add resiliency through monitoring and alerting.

Outside of Google Cloud Platform, MongoDB Atlas was used as the cloud NoSQL database.

Many of Google Cloud Platform’s native services could be used for the purposes of the project, and very little needed to be built from scratch. Because the time and budget constraints of the project meant there were no Platform Engineers available, using Google Cloud Platform allowed a BJSS team, predominately made up of developers and software engineers, to quickly build and deploy the application without needing to manage the underlying infrastructure. While the decision to use Google Cloud Platform was made by the client, the BJSS team very much played a consulting role in advising best practice for how to use the platform to achieve the client’s goals as soon as possible.

BJSS’ specialist design agency, SPARCK, designed the UI and UX of the Identity Platform, streamlining the user journey and providing a simple, easy-to-use interface for the end-users in the Identity Admin team.

Results

BJSS took the client’s Identity Platform Proof-of-Concept and built and rolled it out into an MVP in just ten months.

The Identity Platform product is now in use by the client’s Identity Admin team, bringing together all onboarding functions into one place. Through the application, the Identity Admin team can create, deactivate, amend, and extend profiles for employees, as well as manage device access. All of these activities have been streamlined from a user journey perspective, with a tile-based UI and a simple form-based process that is quick and easy to administer.

Since BJSS rolled out the Identity Platform, the processing time per action has drastically decreased, reducing the amount of time to create a user account by 23 minutes, renew an account by six minutes, deactivate an account by 32 minutes, and reactivate an account by 14 minutes.