Mayank Prakash

My name is Mayank Prakash, and I'm in between you and Tim Cook standing up for WWDC, so I'm sure you want to get out of here.

So let's start with: who are we? Who is DWP Digital?

There are many ways I could describe DWP Digital. I could describe us as a very large retail organization, because like very large retail organizations, we have a presence in every high street, and we have tens of millions of customers that we serve.

I could describe us as a really large retail financial services institution, if you wanted to stretch this conversation, because we process 170 million pounds in one-pound coins, the new one-pound coins. If we piled them all up, you would climb that stack to get from here to the moon. So we spend a whopping amount of money.

We also manage 1.75 trillion, not million, not billion, trillion pounds of assets as part of the state pensions that we manage. So there is a whopping amount of money we manage. That's another way to describe us.

All of this runs on 50 million lines of code, and those 50 million lines of code were not written yesterday. They were written over decades. We have one of Europe's largest IT estates, and I could describe it in many different ways. I could describe it in terms of the 200 million calls that our IP contact center takes every year, or I could describe it in terms of the 10 million data records we shared with 500 other organizations today, which was an average day for us.

I could describe this in many different ways. But if we were listed on FTSE 100, we'd be different from the other 455. There are a few things that would make us different, and I'd start with the first one, which is our employee engagement has gone up by close to 20 percentage points over the last few years, unlike the rest of FTSE 100.

I'd also suggest that what would set us apart from the rest of FTSE 100 is our social purpose. It is what brings me and 90,000 colleagues to work at the largest public sector organization in the UK, the largest part of UK government: the Department for Work and Pensions.

What we do is not work with customers who are a number in a database. What we do is serve millions, tens of millions of citizens. These are not people far away from you. This is somebody in your family who's retired, who is on a pension. This is somebody on your street who we are working with because they are disabled, or a carer looking after disabled people so that they have a good quality of life.

This is somebody amongst the 8 million people we work with so that they are in work. And the UK at present is experiencing the highest rate of employment across the G20, but for two other countries, Germany and Japan.

Or this is our purpose: to make sure children have better quality life chances protected as their parents separate. But look, instead of hearing from me, why don't we listen to one of our customers?

Me and my son are suffering. My son's father, we were sorting out a cash arrangement when he was born. And then he thought he was paying a bit too much, so he decided to approach yourselves and open the claim, and it turned out that he wasn't actually paying enough as he should do.

The paying parent was actually changing jobs. He was quitting jobs. He was coming on benefit, off benefit. So any time we'd actually get hold of him to secure a payment, he'd just move on to another job. So we actually couldn't really find the money.

We needed that money, and we didn't have it. I think it just got so hard. There were times where there was nothing in the fridge. And if you don't have that money, then it's not you that's suffering, it's the child that's suffering.

On a bad day, if you can't provide for your child, you feel like the worst person in the world.

Being a new office, it's new to us, the type of people that we're dealing with. We needed really to get an idea of how they saw us, and so that's where the Voice of the Client event idea came.

So I met Samantha at the Voice of the Client event that we organized in Leicester. And you think, "Actually, I don't want that to happen to my child." And I think it's such a powerful and emotional story, and when you're hearing that face-to-face, I think it had a greater impact on me anyway.

After the event, it was really good. We had a good rapport with one another. We worked together. We built some great relationships whilst we were working on Samantha's case. We finally got the money flowing for her. We secured 800 pounds for her and ongoing maintenance.

And money shouldn't bring you happiness, but to little kids, most of the time it does. It makes them happy. And when they're happy, you're happy. So it does feel amazing, yeah.

So with that purpose, I'm not surprised that for every opening that we advertise, we get 11 applications in DWP Digital on average. I'm not surprised that people want to achieve a bigger purpose in life using some of the most innovative, creative technologies that our profession offers.

I find myself thinking I am the luckiest person on this planet because there is such a big overlap between my hobbies of being a geek and my profession. But in the fact that, look, unlike the lawyers and the accountants, and I'm not trying to label them, but our profession constantly changes. Who can predict what we'll be doing five years from now?

Well, I can certainly predict that the technologies and the approaches to delivering those technologies we'll be deploying a few years from now will be different from what we did a few years back. And that is exciting, and to use that to change lives is truly inspiring as an opportunity.

So what did we do with DWP Digital? We set out to achieve three outcomes. Notice in this list, we do not talk about technology. One of the fundamental transformations that we're doing in DWP Digital is to remove the word "and" in between business and technology.

If I met the genie in the bottle and I could have a wish for our profession, my wish would be that we never use the word "business" to ever exclude ourselves. We are the business owners who know how to unlock the potential of technology and data to achieve our business outcomes. Doesn't matter which organization you are working in. And that means we need to pursue business outcomes and behave like business owners to achieve those outcomes.

DWP has always broken new ground. Now, I'm told, and I promise you I wasn't here in the 1950s when this happened, I'm told that we set up what was called LEO, which was the first business machine that was used in the UK. Notice business machine, not even a computer at that point in time, in the 1950s.

I'm told that in the 1960s, we set up, for recording pensions, EMIDEC, which was the UK's largest computing platform. In the '80s, we did what was the largest civilian computerization program anywhere in the world.

So we have a proud history of breaking new ground. We are doing that one more time. And as we do that, we are starting with DevOps at the core of that transformation for us. So look, let's hear from my colleagues.

So what attracted me to the DWP was the vision. It's adopting digital across the board and building online services for citizens.

The department looks after 22 million people, about a third of the UK population.

The software we make helps people run their lives, helps people get by.

You are striving to make things better.

You are breaking the mold of government.

It was really attractive to get in at the start and just be a part of that process and that vision.

The opportunities I've had since I've started working here is the ability to choose areas that I'm interested in.

Very much in an area that innovates, whether it be with a central team that manages a central technology service, or whether it be with a business development feature team who are building a new feature for a public-facing service.

You're given quite an amount of latitude to identify problems and work out creative solutions to them.

It's a very dynamic, agile working environment. Probably one of the most agile environments I've actually worked in.

DWP Digital is extremely forward-thinking in the way that it develops software, in the way that it works, and creates a working environment.

I've never actually worked anywhere like it. I'm very surprised.

The breadth of knowledge is actually quite astounding.

The range of talent that you're able to interact with. You'll get an opportunity to learn from them a lot, and they will get you to raise your game.

It's a good mix of professional ambition and fun at the end of the day. I don't think there's much more that you can ask from a workplace.

So that is DWP Digital. That's the fun we are having across our DevOps community. But this has unleashed chaos in the organization.

You know this. This isn't a straight-line transformation journey that we're going through. We are way off course, somewhere where you can't even find us from the plotted straight line at this point. And so how do we bring ourselves back on course?

These are the four values that underpin everything that we stand for. And these four values anchor us back into a way of working that enables us to explore our potential.

This is an organization that has gone from managing my team, and my reports, my budget, my project. I am the sponsor of this, my business sponsor, to taking business ownership of delivering outcomes. To starting with design thinking to solve problems.

I am the first to admit that many times in my career I've gone with, "I just know what the solution is. Let's get on with delivering it." But just pausing at the start of that to think about what is the problem we are trying to solve, and how could we reimagine the customer experience as we solve that problem?

Breaking down organizational barriers to bring in behavioral science-driven user research alongside developers, alongside data scientists, alongside infrastructure engineers, alongside people who run our operations, so that we have a multidisciplinary team solving that problem.

Not all these people who deliver digital transformation report to me. But if I can't inspire them to come together for us to solve problems, we are back to being agile in a box, which then has to interface with the rest of the organization.

And this is a journey we are on, and we are curious to learn. We have much to learn as we set our aspiration to be the best at what we do.

We are a people business. We are only as good as the people in the organization. Skills are really, really easy to acquire. Values are the difficult bit in our profession.

The world's best developer is not as good as the world's best team that can, together, in a multidisciplinary way, solve problems. And that means that we are constantly looking for how do we not just up our game with skills, but also up our game with the values of what we can achieve together. And that is a journey for us.

Gene asked me what would I say to my younger self, and I thought I'd stick to the government brand identity and give you the answer.

So be bold in your aspirations. It is better to just miss an ambitious goal than to meet a goal that you think is very achievable. It is better to be ambitious in life and do something that you and your team would be proud of, would look back and be proud of.

And I have always done this, and this has worked well for me, so I'd share this back with you, which is work for an organization that you believe in, because there's more to life than just the work that we do.

And so with that, I hope you found this interesting and thought-provoking. And like all good presentations, I have no time for Q&A, but you can find me online if you'd like to find me.

And to make sure this just gets better from here on, let me hand over to Gene, and then Gene will hand over to Tim Cook in WWDC, and it just gets better.

Thank you, Mayank.