Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office
About the FCDO
The FCDO is the UK government department responsible for protecting and promoting British interests around the world. They work in the UK and in 178 countries and territories.
The FCDO pursues the UK's national interests and projects the UK as a force for good in the world, promoting the interests of British nationals, safeguard the UK's security, defending their values, reducing poverty, and tackling global challenges with its international partners.
The Managed Services unit of Kainos have worked with FCDO Consular Services since 2014. Kainos help support and maintain a number of digital Consular services that provide global support to British nationals across the world.
The Customer Challenge
The FCDO required a managed service and delivery solution to support the ongoing continuous improvement for various digital Consular services delivering critical functionality to British nationals and FCDO diplomatic staff around the world.
FCDO needed a technically skilled and agile partner to run and maintain its digital services.
They needed a supplier that was able to provide:
- Support for the service infrastructure providing regular maintenance to the underlying architecture
- Support for the service application to ensure it consistently provides the intended business benefits to the end users
- Taking service enhancement requests from solution design through development to testing and ultimately release to continuously improve the service to deliver against the modern needs of those that use the service
- Supply a 24/7/365 service restoration offering
- Deliver all this using agile principles and in line with ISO20000 accredited standards
The solution
The solution was multi-disciplinary spanning many of our capabilities.
- Incident Management
- Fully ISO20000 aligned Service Management
- Full delegated public cloud platform management
- Provision of on-call 24/7/365 for critical service restoration
- Continuous improvement and enhancement of all services using agile principles
- Medium-to-large scale development projects to complement our existing portfolio of services
Kainos delivered support in three key areas:
Regular Support & Maintenance
- Diligent execution and monitoring of recurring software updates
- Immediate mitigation of any critical vulnerabilities
- Prompt response/correction of any defects
- Full integration with service logging, monitoring, and analytics for up-to-the-minute service health
- 24/7/365 automated alerting to on-call engineers
Service improvements
- High-quality solution designs using existing cloud & open-source components
- Accuracy of estimations
- Built-in testing methodology
- Code reuse if pertinent
- Continuous delivery with no-downtime releases
Incident Management
- Pragmatic/systematic approach to problem solving
- Controlled execution of service restoration
- Clear & concise communications
- Use of all public cloud logging services to aid diagnosis
The services we helped the FCDO with are:
- Emergency Travel Documents
- Get Document Legalised
- Verify Apostille
- E-Apostille
- Consular Payments
- Configurable Forms
- Find a Professional
- Register your presence
- Manage Your Move
- Contact Centre Enquiry Handler
- Consular Integration System
- Crisis Hub
- Contact Hub
- Post Hub
Outcomes
The Live Operations team delivering support into the FCDO is now 20+ individuals ranging from software engineers, platform engineers, Dynamics experts, management, and access to a wealth of specialist skills on demand such as cyber security, user experience, and business analysts.
The team have successfully supported all the services above consistently releasing dozens of small-scale improvements every month while also delivering several key highlights to FCDO such as:
- 3 x Full-service migrations to more resilient, stable, and cost-efficient AWS public cloud solutions
- 4 x successful service transitions from incumbent suppliers (2 of these during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic for critical global Consular services)
- Full life cycle design, build, and release of the new Register your Presence service
For example, the Emergency Travel Documents (ETD) service handles around 30,000 applications from British nationals abroad each year. The Kainos Managed Service ensures the ETD solution is robust, secure, stable, available, and modern to the critical and urgent needs of British nationals abroad.
Also, our support for the Crisis Hub is internal facing but used by Consular staff to manage the safe handling of any global crisis such as natural disasters, large-scale disruption to travel and political instability.
“It has been a great experience to work with Kainos to maintain and support the FCDO’s digital consular services. Kainos has been a reliable and professional partner. The UK Government has committed to enhance the support and assistance available to our nationals overseas, offering a wider choice of digital services for consular assistance.”
Portfolio Manager, Consular Services Department, FCDO