Antony Collard

My name's Antony Collard, and I'm Deputy Director for Digital Delivery. Up here on stage with me I have Lyndsay Prewer, who is one of our technical leads working on our digital tax platform.

It's an honor to be asked to be here and talk about what we're doing in HMRC. As a public servant in the UK, we don't expect to be on a stage talking about DevOps with all you people in this room. We have that sense of inferiority, I guess, which thinks that what we're about to tell you, you've done before. But Gene assures me that actually we've got an interesting journey and interesting narrative, and we're going to try and share a couple of stories about what we've done that hopefully will show you how far we've come and what we are going to do next.

A bit of context for those of you who don't know who we are. Anybody who wants to confess to not knowing who we are, who aren't UK citizens, please let me know.

So we have been around since about 1200. We are the UK tax authority. We collect all tax and all customs duties, and we also pay out benefits and we pay out credits. 1200 was the first customs duty introduced, and the first Board of Tax was introduced in the late 1600s. In fact, I think some of the people who were in that first organization are still in the current one. At least, that's how it feels sometimes.

I really hope this isn't being live streamed.

We collect 517 billion pounds a year for UK PLC. We service five million business customers and 45 million individual taxpayers. There should be 46 million, but we can't find the other one.

We have an online journey already, and in those online journeys we're responsible for about 75% of all government digital transactions already. But we're on a journey to transform that even further. As you can see, over the next five years we plan to spend 1.3 billion on digital transformation. Over the last three years, we've come a long way, and we're going to talk to you about how we've done that and what we're going to do.

Our plan is to build world-class public services, which are going to be essential for the UK, and be one of the most digitally advanced tax authorities in the world. We have done a lot of that already. We want to make it easier for the UK citizen to pay their tax, pay on time, and get it right with limited input and limited involvement from HMRC as a whole. Then we want to focus our efforts on targeting those people who don't want to engage with this. You know who you are.

We also want to be one of the most technologically advanced workplaces, and we've started that journey. We now have, as Lyndsay will talk about, six digital centers around the country, and I have 850 people working in them doing agile delivery.

Lyndsay is going to start talking about one of the journeys we've made, which I think shows where we have got to in such a short time. But it's important to understand that in context. Where have we come from?

In 2012, we were a typical organization, much like some of you, but probably typical to government. We had all of our IT outsourced. We had no in-house capability whatsoever. We worked with four large partners, before that another company, to deliver all of our IT. We worked on tin infrastructure. We had resilience built in all over the place. We were very waterfall, and being government, waterfall-plus. Therefore you get to the point you should have delivered it, about a month later you do it, a bit late and a bit more expensive.

So from that background, in 2013 a small, probably embryonic, DevOps revolutionary team suddenly emerged. As you look at where we've come from, there are two stories, I think, that resonate, that show what we've managed to achieve since 2013.

Lyndsay is going to talk about one of them.

Lyndsay Prewer

Thanks, Antony.

Every year between April and the beginning of August, about four million people were expected to renew their tax credits. Around two million of those people would choose to renew their tax credits in the very last week of this peak. There's a deadline on 31st of July.

For many of these people, successfully renewing their tax credits affects whether they can get bread on the table at the end of the day.

Before HMRC Digital, the predominant way of doing this was through the phone or the post. For anyone that's tried phoning HMRC, you'll know that we have infamously long wait times, and they cause a massive amount of frustration to a lot of people that phone, particularly people that are phoning in for their tax credits.

So about a year after HMRC Digital started, we looked at this problem and realized it was an opportunity to make life easier for these people.

We stood up a team, and they built a new digital service in eight weeks. It was a small service, just focused on allowing people to come onto the platform, renew their tax credits all the way through to the back-end system. It wasn't very big, but it allowed people to complete their end-to-end journey without needing to go to the phone or use the post.

We chose this particular problem to solve because it was safe to fail. If we didn't deliver the service in time, or if we had to take the service offline, people could still go back to the phone and the post.

As I said, we built with one team, a handful of DevOps engineers, and we were running our own stack in the cloud. We took a continuous delivery approach. We constantly iterated and delivered the service into production over the course of eight weeks.

We thought we might get around 80,000 people using this service. But in fact, by the end of the renewals peak, we had over 410,000 customers go through it. They were pretty pleased with the process. Our customer satisfaction rate for this service was 94%.

Mark Dearnley, our Chief Information Officer, was interviewed a few months later, and he said these words about the service. He described it as being a seminal moment in the leadership of HMRC.

HMRC is this massive organization, and when HMRC Digital was formed and we said, "We can shift traffic away from the costly phone and postal channels onto something called digital," people didn't believe it could be done. This delivery in just eight weeks gave HMRC the confidence in the agile delivery of digital services and allowed us to grow further.

So, how did we get to this point?

As Antony said, in 2012 HMRC didn't deliver its own IT. It was all outsourced. HMRC didn't have the technical know-how nor the culture to do agile, lean, or continuous delivery. Learning these kinds of practices, or going through a culture change, it's a bit like learning a new language.

I tried to learn French back in the 1980s at a standard state school, so it's a normal kind of setup. We had a class of 30, a French teacher who happened to be Scottish, which is a problem. We had a textbook from the 1970s that bore no resemblance to everyday life, and lots of verb tables we had to learn. It was a real struggle. I made such little progress.

What transformed my learning of French was when I went to France and lived with a French family for a week. We spoke French, ate French food, drank lots of French wine, and pretty soon, not only was I speaking French fluently, I was also thinking in French.

And so it is with changing the culture and introducing new practices into an organization.

At HMRC Digital, we started small, with just one team of experts. We brought experts in from HMRC, so they knew their business really well. We had digital service managers. They were able to make decisions about what we needed to do in certain business situations.

We brought in the Government Digital Service. They were experts in designing user-focused services and cutting through bureaucratic red tape. And we brought in a consultancy, Equal Experts. They provided the technical know-how, the ability to iteratively deliver services into production, and a culture of continuous delivery.

As that team proved its value and grew, so other consultancies such as Capgemini, Accenture, and other SMEs soon joined us.

In 2013, when HMRC Digital started, it was just one team of experts from three organizations. We started in London in a delivery center and quickly grew to multiple teams.

By the start of 2014, we'd delivered three exemplar tax services. That gave HMRC the confidence to add a new delivery center up in Newcastle. So for the 2014 tax credit renewals delivery that I told you about, that was the first one that was done by a brand new team up in Newcastle.

That eight-week delivery of such an amazing service gave HMRC confidence in its digital transformation to grow further. So by 2015, when we were improving our tax credits renewal service, we had multiple teams working across two locations. They built a service that allowed us to double the number of people that renewed their tax credits online. That gave HMRC further confidence in our ability to digitally transform and get people off costly phone and postal channels.

So in 2016, we now have multiple teams working across multiple delivery centers. And this year, for the first time, people can renew their tax credits using our new mobile app.

Tax credits peak is HMRC's second largest peak. So Antony is going to now tell you about our biggest peak of the year, which is the self-assessment peak.

Antony Collard

So one of the words that Lyndsay was talking about there was confidence. Confidence can breed cockiness. So I suspect that's where we ended up in this particular situation.

We'd got through tax credits. We were also delivering loads of other services, and we looked at our next peak, self-assessment 2016. For those of you who live in the UK, you'll know self-assessment, because it's the time at which, about January 30th, you realize you've got to dig out a form that you got in April and you've got to file it before the 31st of January.

We have nine million people who file online by the 31st of January, and within that population are people who are in business, who we would expect to have to fill in a return, but also people who are just ordinary people in employment who might have other sources of income, who in the future we would like to serve through something our Chancellor announced in April: a tax account.

So we got a little bit cocky and thought, "Wouldn't it be good if we could introduce these customers to their tax account as part of their filing journey for 2016? Great idea. Let's do that." At the same time, we need to segment the ones who should be in a personal tax account, who aren't in business. We need to work out who they are from the nine million coming through our authentication processes, to make sure they go to the right place.

The problem with that was, as you can see from this slide, which shows the journey, your paper at the top, which is what traditionally people do, and at the bottom the other, neither the tax account router, as we call it, nor the personal tax account itself had even been built. We were talking about this in September, and we needed to deliver this in December.

Boring, I can see you. "We've done all this before. You're not telling us anything new."

So okay, if you like a challenge, what else we decided to do was... I've just forgotten.

That was it. We have a cloud platform. We have all of our infrastructure, of our digital hosting, our own tax platform, and we were looking at thinking, "We need more resilience around that cloud platform. So I know, at the same time as we're doing that, we'll go multi-active with our cloud providers, and we'll deliver a platform that works on two different cloud providers."

Then at the same time as we did that, because if that's not robust enough for you, we also are in an environment where our IT suppliers who manage our back-end estate normally require us to have a three-month change freeze before that self-assessment peak at the end of January. Yet our plan showed us building the tax account and the router right out to about the 30th.

So we have a slight conflict in our history. We have old processes that say, "You can't do anything from about November. You must just sit down and not touch anything. Keep your hands off the keyboard," and us wanting to deliver something in an iterative way that would change how our UK citizens would engage with us.

More crucially, there we go. Sorry, boss. It just shows that we are watching. That's my boss telling me that I'm overstepping the mark. We're watching all of you.

The other bit about that is that the SA is really important to UK PLC. So if that service falls over, we get in the press very, very quickly. There are a number of press who don't like HMRC, so if we fall over, great news story.

Secondly, we collect one billion pounds... I think Disney are on a bit later. I think I may be being controlled. Or maybe you're just in Mickey Mouse before they come on. Who knows?

We collect one billion pounds on that last day, the 31st of January. So that's a big risk for us to take on to do this, and so we had to build it in such a way that it was safe to fail. Either HMRC could control that router and that personal tax account and take them down so that customers could go from their first bit, either log-in that we already had, to the very clunky online portal for SA filing that some of you will know and love.

Recipe for disaster, potentially. Lyndsay will tell you whether or not it was.

Lyndsay Prewer

Hopefully. Some might say it was.

Thanks, Antony.

Can you hear me at the back? Is this any better? Yeah, okay.

So here's some numbers. I guess no presentation is good without a bunch of stats. This shows how our traffic varied between 2015 and 2016. As Antony said, in 2016 we made some changes that meant all of the SA was routing through the HMRC Digital platform.

The two rows at the top show the difference between 2015 and 2016, how we increased significantly the amount of traffic going through our new platform. What's more interesting, though, is what the rest of the table shows.

As Antony said, because HMRC Digital were managing the SA event, we had agreed, because we are continuous delivery in culture, we wouldn't have a change freeze. Over the peak, we still did about 33 releases.

Now, with our amount of traffic and that number of releases, you'd think something bad is bound to happen. Okay, we had some problems, but we had no P1 or P2 incidents, and we had no downtime.

So how do we achieve this kind of change despite all of the other product changes that we were making at that time?

We improved our resilience. So we did what Antony said, and we went multi-active.

The previous year, we had problems with our single supplier that provided our single production environment in terms of its reliability. So we set out for 2016 to have two production environments managed by two different suppliers and the ability to balance traffic across the two.

In October 2015, we selected a supplier to work with, and then between then and December, we built a completely new production environment and the ability to balance traffic across the two.

The bottom of these graphs shows the traffic in the last week of the peak and how it was split between the old and the new supplier. The graph at the top is from our busiest day, and it shows for about an hour when we switched traffic completely away from our old supplier onto a new production environment that hadn't existed four months ago.

How did we achieve this kind of massive infrastructural change amid so many other product changes?

We believe this is due to the DevOps model that we've adopted at HMRC Digital.

This diagram shows two different types of DevOps models. On the left-hand side, you have truly cross-functional teams, where the orange denotes a DevOps engineer in each product team.

The right-hand side shows the model that we've developed at HMRC Digital, where we have many product teams, but only two centralized DevOps teams. The focus of those two DevOps teams is to provide a very high level of DevOps capability to the rest of the product teams.

The way they do this is by focusing on providing a platform and the tools that allow each product team to achieve a DevOps capability themselves. So when a new product team comes onto the platform, they instantly have access to private and public GitHub repos. They instantly can build their services and deploy them all the way through to production using Jenkins, Puppet, and Docker.

Once those services are in any environment, they can instantly monitor those services and respond to any alerts using Elasticsearch, Kibana, and PagerDuty.

This approach has allowed us to adopt Amazon's principle of "you build it, you run it." That means that if a team is building a digital service, when they deploy into production, they are the ones that run it. They're the ones that operate it. It's the team that builds the service that monitors it. It's the team that builds the service that receives alerts when the service goes down. It's the team that builds the service that has to figure out what's gone wrong and how to fix it.

This model has allowed us to scale HMRC Digital to a very significant size.

This diagram just shows how big we've gotten. The big bubble with the circles around it in the middle is HMRC Digital's platform itself, and it shows about 30 different areas of tax that people can interact with HMRC through, through our new digital platform.

The two circles on the other side show other parts of HMRC that our service interacts with. So we have over 30 product teams who are building digital services, which means we've got over 300 microservices running in production, and we're doing multiple deployments of those microservices every day.

We couldn't have grown to this scale without the kind of DevOps model and DevOps capability that we've built.

That's me.

Antony Collard

So for SA '16, that peak, we ended up with 500,000 more people filing online than ever before. So we're dwindling that number of people who still use a paper return.

From the personal tax account, which hadn't even been built in September, we managed to go from nothing to the first MVP for that personal tax account, launching it straight into a public beta live journey on the 3rd of December. It had a private beta launch, about 3,000 people initially, and then by the end of January we'd actually had a million subscribers sign up to their tax account and flow through it, over 100,000 on that very first day.

As we stand now, over 2.5 million people have signed up to that personal tax account, which introduces them to the services that we hope will be the future for how HMRC engages with the wider population in the UK.

We have aims to get to seven million users by the end of this March, which will be a combination of increasing the number of services that we deliver through that tax account and increasing the stickability of customers once they go in, making it interesting to use.

And as Lyndsay said, we've also created, or revamped, an app that we did deliver a few years ago, which was a bit rubbish, and turned it into something that is actually more transactional. So you can go into it now as a native app and log in as if you are a customer, and start to service your account through the other services that currently we only do on a desktop.

Our plan for that is to expand it, and we're also looking at new ways to do authentication, biometrics, and everything else that goes with it. So we want to make it as accessible for UK PLC as we possibly can.

All of that has been hosted on the tax platform. Three years ago, it didn't exist. We had a legacy infrastructure estate with all of our contracts being handled external to HMRC. In three years, we've built a tax platform.

We are proud of the fact it did win an award last year, so we do mention it all the time. We're trying to gather awards, because that tends to get me to my CBE, obviously, looking forward to that. Are you watching, Mum?

We currently support 28 new digital services. As Lyndsay said, we're building at least 30. I have about 56 scrum teams currently across the country working on new services, iterating the old ones and building the new ones, and you'll see many more coming online.

We have saved, just in terms of operating this tax platform compared to where we were, eight million pounds. But we actually save more than that through some of the other digital initiatives that we've taken forward. We've followed our principles and saved millions for HMRC and UK PLC.

The platform is now not just about HMRC. We are working with at least five other government departments to use the capabilities that we've built to deliver digital services to the rest of the population.

So why did we bother turning up here? One, we were invited, and we hope you found that slightly interesting. You may have used our services, and you may want to feed back on them. I'm sure you'll find us in the break. We'll be the ones in the balaclavas hiding.

But I'm not sitting here saying we're experts. I saw the guy from Barclays. That was amazingly impressive, and we're nowhere near that level of capability. We are still children. We stumble. We fall over. I'm sure some of you have actually used a service that has fallen over. I hate it when that does happen because my ear gets chewed off by a number of people.

But we are learning as we do it. We didn't have this capability before. More and more customers want to do things online, and we're helping them to do that.

What are we looking for? So Gene said, "What do you want to come along for?" As a director of digital delivery, I'm looking for people who are doing a similar journey, so people who suffer my pain, because it's very lonely when you're suffering the pain. I'd like to work with you guys to find out how we can learn from you and what you've done, but also maybe how you can learn from us as well, and how we can maybe avoid the pitfalls that you fall into.

I also want to look at benchmarking. I have 56 teams in six locations. It's hard to work out what I'm getting for value for money. I want to see how are they doing? How are they doing on velocity and everything else that they need to do?

Finally, if you're in the UK, or if you're not and you want to pay taxes like Gene does, which is fantastic news to me, try the services out. Try out this personal tax account. Go online. Give us your feedback. We value your feedback because you've delivered this kind of stuff before. Tell us what you think.

Not the app yet, because the app, if you go on the App Store, the reviews aren't great. Because we took an old service and we launched it with a new service, and we didn't tell the old ones we were getting rid of it. The old one was just reconstituted web content with a few cheesy calculators. But the people who had it, about five of them, they really loved it. So there's lots of swearing when you go onto the one-stars when we actually launched the new one.

When we do some advertising for it, our expectation is that if you're a tax credit claimant in this country, you can sit on the bus on the way into work, you can log into your tax account, you can securely go in, you can renew your tax credit journey on the bus before you get to work without ever having to pick up the phone and speak to HMRC.

That's where we're heading. So I hope you found that of some interest, and if you want to have a chat to us, we'll be in the bar. Thanks very much.