Improving Security, Reliability &
Time-To-Market Through Platform Engineering

Motability Operations (MO) is helping over 700,000 disabled people and their families benefit from worry-free mobility through their Motability Scheme. Through this scheme, people with disabilities along with their families and carers are able to lease a wide range of cars, Wheelchair Accessible Vehicles, scooters and powered wheelchairs to meet their disability needs.

Accelerate & Improve Reliability in the Software Delivery Process 

Having already started a broader cloud migration and transformation initiative, MO had been making good progress moving business logic and services to the cloud. However, during this journey it became clear that some supporting technical areas and processes surrounding this had not received the same amount of attention, resulting in inefficiencies. 

The key challenge that needed addressing revolved around how to improve the speed, reliability and delivery of the end-to-end release process. This included providing explicit quality guarantees to relevant stakeholders in the software engineering, architecture, platform and security teams – ensuring that deployment artefacts could be passed securely and immutably through the automated quality gates and delivered through to production in a controlled manner.

Guided Problem Space Exploration → Tailored Adaptations  

To get to the heart of the matter, MO brought in OpenCredo to conduct a guided exploration of the problem space over a period of a few weeks. This discovery style phase helped to map out the current release process and setup, create a unified view of all aspects involved, and probe different areas of the journey which were not working as effectively as possible. This included interviewing stakeholders as well as shadowing core development teams spread across the country including London and Bristol.

The findings (presented both in person and via a report) highlighted the need to address both technical as well as broader team and structural issues (such as creating a lightweight governance function to oversee organisation-wide concerns including standardisation).

Moving beyond these recommendations, OpenCredo was further invited by MO to become a hands-on partner, helping to practically turn these insights into reality. Through the collaboration of our specialist consultants and the MO software engineering teams we were able to address the following goals/objectives:

• Increased process visibility and data consistency of the deployment pipeline through better use of existing tools as well as the introduction of tracked metrics (eg DORA)
• A shift towards a GitOps approach for microservice (K8S based) deployments
• The establishment of various feedback loops (through technical automation as well as social interactions) making deployments safer
• Alignment of expectations and approaches between development teams and core platform & architecture teams.

Rapid delivery of business objectives through fully
automated GitOps CD pipelines

Through our collaboration, Motability Operations were able to go on to achieve their vision of gaining fully automated GitOps Continuous Deployment pipelines, for almost all of their cloud-based microservices and micro frontends. 

As a result of this partnership Motability Operations gained:  

• A clear view of where to invest and the areas that would reap the most benefits.
• A sensible and realistic roadmap to help move them further along the maturity scale and towards their ultimate vision.
• The ability to deploy software multiple times a day
• The ability to shift security left and have very low change failure rates (CFR)
• Happier & more productive development teams!
• Knowledge sharing and upskilling to empower independent internal software engineering teams

“…As a result of working with OpenCredo, we were able to go on to achieve our vision of fully automated GitOps Continuous Deployment pipelines, for almost all of our Cloud-based microservices and micro frontends. We can now deploy software multiple times a day, ensure security is moved left, have very low change failure rates (CFR), and have faster time to market, whilst minimising risks” – Julian Austin, Head / Lead Software Engineering & Agile Transformation Department