This post is about the Digital Service community – what we do, why we do it, and at which points it’s important for Co-op Digital teams to get in touch with us. Michaela wrote a post that aimed to do a similar thing in May 2017 but so much has happened in the last 9 months, never mind the last 3 years.
Firstly, instead of sitting within the Membership team like we used to, the 10 of us are now spread out and embedded across different product teams. We know multidisciplinary teams are higher-performing and a lot of that comes down to there being representatives from different areas of expertise present to advise at each stage. We realised that if we want teams to consider the things that our community champions, it’s better if we’re more visible throughout a product or service lifecycle.
So, our name has changed too to reflect our new set up: we used to be the Digital Service team and now we’re the Digital Service community.
When Co-op Digital teams should get in touch
Here are some of the main things we help teams with. Email gdl_digitalserviceteam@coop.co.uk
Speak to one of us:
Before your service goes into beta
The earlier you speak to us, the better. We will help you:
- put the correct support in place, for example, the service might need support from our 24/7 operations team
- develop a process so that everyone on the team knows what to do if something goes wrong
- understand how to identify, record and mitigate risks
Before you make changes to a system
If you want to make changes to a system or you want to push something to live, get in touch so we can make sure change happens in the right way. For example, we coordinate changes across Co-op Digital to make sure your proposed changes won’t clash with another. We’ll consider risk details – but we’re here to enable change, not block it.
If there’s a major incident
If there’s a major incident, like a site going down, we will bring the right people together – often in virtual ‘war rooms’ – so we can discuss the incident and restore the service. We also send out regular communications to the relevant stakeholders to update them on progress. Our aim is to minimise disruption to our colleagues and customers.
After an incident
When we’ve dealt with the incident together, the Digital Service community will facilitate a post-incident review session with product teams. The aim is to understand what went wrong, how we can mitigate the problem in the future and where we can improve. Each incident is an opportunity to learn more and be better.
Work we’re proud of
We’ve been involved in many projects, where we’ve added value. Here are a few we’re particularly proud of.
Re-platforming the Funeralcare website
We supported the transition from Episerver to the coop.co.uk platform, whilst embedding practices such as incident, problem and change management. We ran a 3-month training plan to help our Funeralcare colleagues, to support our product in an agile way.
Moving Shifts over to ‘maintenance only’
Development on the Shifts app has ended so we worked with the Retail and product teams to change how support works. This support now comes from an operations team rather than the product team but we’ve still had to make sure unresolved issues are managed effectively by the Ecommerce product team. It’s been a success so we’re using this support model as a template for new services within Retail.
Optimising ‘one web’ coop.co.uk
We reviewed coop.co.uk and identified opportunities to make improvements. Since then we’ve built service models, defined an engagement model for how teams raise incidents, enhanced 24/7 support and created risk frameworks, impact matrixes and service catalogues.
Supporting Co-operate
Co-operate support is now live, we set out processes and best practices so product and service teams can follow a defined support model, which covers monitoring, alerting and reporting.
Saving time and money through Tech Ops
Our tech operations specialists have been working with our suppliers and third parties, to optimise our cloud costs. Providing efficiencies within infrastructure has resulted in savings.
Our culture: here to help, not hinder
The Digital Service community is here to support Co-op Digital teams to build robust services, efficiently. We’re not about blame culture or heavy-handed governance, we’re about being there – involved – from the start.
The bottom line is: we are here to enable you to do some awesome things!
Georgie Jacobs
Digital service analyst
Thanks for sharing Georgie, great to see your processes working in action yesterday.