 First welcome, thank you everyone for coming, you can see the title of our session just now is Mastering Agency Outsourcing, Strategies for Success in Government Projects. My name is Anthony Fox-Davis, I'm CEO at System Seed, this is Ev, he's our CTO, you might know us or our faces, Quick Intro to System Seed, we only work on social impact work, so that is Government, NGO, Health, Education or Charity, we tend to provide many services pillars including UX, Design, Development, QA, DevOps, Hosting and so we're a trusted partner across all of those services. We've got deep roots in the Drupal community, so we've been in Drupal for about 15 years, we're one of the major contributors. I think we've got 50 modules offered now and another 50 co-maintained, actively maintained, four distributions built, over 6,000 commits, you may have come across this. Why we wanted to run this session, so large government contracts often need lots of staff and there are additional requirements like security clearance, verification, certification, due diligence at the lead project, agency might need to go through and high quality delivery is quite essential, so from the product owner perspective, QA, UX to look at and the lead agency can't just use any agency or freelancers, they have to go with people they trust and obviously outsourcing to an agency, you've got a number of people, you've actually got a more secure business relationship on a contractual level and only one relationship to manage that's often elastic and scalable. It's hard to find agency partners that can deliver high quality results and fit in well with the team, so culture fit is quite important and otherwise you have to end up doing a lot of micr management and running around not doing the actual work. System seed often works as a partner to other agencies on government contracts and we've seen a lot of what works and what doesn't, so we're here to share what we've learned. Ever over to you. Thank you and hey everybody. So let's see what we are going to talk about today. We will introduce you a short case study. We will have to make it unanimised because we have signed an NDA and we can't give you real names unfortunately, but it's all based on the true story. So we will talk about how to select a partner for your project that you are planning to outsource and how to efficiently create a blended team, what kind of strategies you have to embrace. A couple of do's and don'ts that we will share throughout the talk as well as some useful tips and tricks how to get into this straight away. So the case study that we are going to talk about was British central government project. There was a leading agency in London, let's call the agency X for the length of the talk, and they have requested our help. They've previously used some freelancers with very variable quality, with some of them they were not happy at all, with some of them they were like okay ish. And they also had issues with freelancers availability because what sometimes happens when people work just for themselves, they take too much work, they can't handle, and that was not the project which that leading agency could have failed. It was for one of their biggest and the most important clients from the central government. So the company has decided to work with an agency and they needed not just a pair of hands who can do some capacity or help with the capacity overflow. However, they needed a technical leadership who could actually take on the entire project and deliver it for the quality that they usually claim that they do and provide to their clients. One of the key problems that they had was clearly timings and because the project landed for them quite urgently and they had a contract signed to deliver the project in a very short time before they even know what the project was about. And they had absolutely no capacity to deliver that. Well, it never happened and here we go again. So, and they needed the problem that they had with the timings is that they didn't even have time to hire someone and start onboarding those people. Because onboarding is not about just showing developers what the code leaves. It's about the alignment of processes of delivery practices of the processes. So I will hand over to Anthony to start with the tips that we have from those projects. Thanks, Ev. Thanks. So, yeah, that's why agency partnerships are good to work on up front of the actual need. As I've mentioned, the onboarding process, due diligence steps, things like that can be prepared beforehand. You can find the right culture fit beforehand. You can sign NDAs. You can get basic arrangements and understanding, get relationships started up front. So for us, things went well from the start. We just decided to be open and honest so you can ask a lot of probing questions as the agency partner. You can start to open up the conversation. You will understand if it is a good partner agency to work with, the more questions they ask. And the lead agency had to be open and clear about what they needed. So we were open and honest about our day rates which made their plan predictable. The people on the business end of the lead agency wanted to know where their profit margins would be. So the predictability and the day rates being up front was very clear. Showing the specific needs, that can be around text app choices that were already made. We were coming into a project not at the beginning and green field and helping them outline all of those architectural choices, but partway through. The type of skills that they have on the team, so where the black holes are, where you're expected to fill the gaps. Timelines, milestones, high level objectives, the whole thing. We also talked about previous issues they'd had, why they were talking to us. And so, as Eves mentioned already, that was quite important. We wanted them to feel good about our engagement and not repeat mistakes that they'd found with other freelancers and other agencies. So we had to give them certain assurances that that wouldn't happen again. Again, being transparent with the client about our relationship. Obviously you can white label agencies or you can be transparent to say there's multiple agencies in the mix. They each have their time and place, but we were up front with the client. We didn't have to create additional email addresses, disclose our real identity in the communications channel, things like that. Then on the legal side and for security, we had to have those NDAs, non-disclosure agreements. So we're allowed to talk at this level but not mention certain names. We're not in breach, I promise. And mutual subcontracting agreement. So again, the way that you can lay down those foundations for the partnerships. Often the lead agency will approach its agency partners when they need overflow capacity at the drop of a hat. And so if you don't have those additional due diligence and legal steps to jump through at the time when they need it, you can keep the communication going, find out that you've got all of your boxes ticked for let's call it procurement or contracting. And then when they eventually need the capacity, the overflow capacity, they can come to you and you can hit the ground running. That allowed us both to talk openly and candidly safely. And then onboarding was mentioned by Eve, that's quite important. You can't always do that up front. Each project is slightly different. But one of the things we were looking at was security clearance, working for what's called Whitehall, which is central national government in the UK. So that is part of either government digital services, GDS or gov.uk. So we were working on a sub-site for gov.uk. One of the security clearance was BPSS, which is the baseline personal security standard for G-Cloud. Anyone who doesn't know about G-Cloud for UK government contracts, it used to be that central government could only work with people within a very short perimeter around London. And more recently, they threw the gates open to the whole of the UK. And so now there's the same checks and balances but on the whole UK region. So G-Cloud is where you can find more information on that. Find out what due diligence you might have to jump through hoops to clear. And then, yeah, communication systems, common tools, things like working in agile, communication systems like Slack, and just knowing how we're going to navigate all of that as a blended team. Right, so first tip, get things right from the start. I think people understand that if they're in business. I don't know how many people in the room are in business rather than delivery. But if you get things right from the start, you have a solid premise to work on. And for us, that means treat contractors or subcontractors like respected partners. What you're really looking for is to develop long-term relationships. Everyone says people by people. You have to work on that relationships level and set the tone for the rest of the relationship. So use contracts only as a backup tool. As like a backstop in terms of those difficult conversations you might have. But start with trust and openness and flexibility. And that is effectively because if something goes wrong, you want to fix it quickly. And you can only do that if you're in a very open conversation. So open transparency is very important. Only use the contracts. You may have failed at the rest of the job if you rely on contracts to get a decision across a line. So things should be written in a contract, but then that should be backed up by really great operations and account management project product owners and delivery teams. And you can roll back one step at a time if any of those points fail. So just looking at my notes. So trust from the start, be open, stay open and stay in good communication. The agency that we worked with, we had a relationship for five years before any work began. So we were talking to them about their needs, our culture, the fit, the tools, the technologies, etc. And it was only when the shit hit the fan, let's say, and they needed overflow capacity. They came to us and we could hit the ground running at that point. You also want to remove any hippos and separas in the room. I don't know if people know the term hippos, but the highest paid person's opinion is not what you want to hear in any of the discussions. You want to have strong management in each of those conversations, so to eradicate those loud voices that you might want to ignore. Zebras is one I just heard today, but there's zero evidence, really arrogant. So hippos and zebras get out of the room. No one wants those in their office. Yeah, but we had to work hard on a positive relationship with the lead agency even before the contracting. So that was years in the making. And it's worth building those relationships and building trust around that you can find the culture fit in those relationships early on. So we didn't actually sign NDAs for years, but we had networking in play. We had the culture fit in play. We were aligned with those other agencies. And sometimes you sow those seeds and they take a while to bloom. So, you know, do that networking and relationship level stuff up front. When they came to us, we believe it was because we had a C level connection. So that is your CXOs talking to theirs. And we moved in the same circles. We knew some of the same people and there was evidence to support our claims. So for us, I think I mentioned at the beginning, but we've done a ton of open source and we refer to that as our raw evidence and data. And evidence that we had the quality and the scalability as well because they weren't coming to us for just one team member. They could have done that with a freelance so they were coming to us for an elastic team. So tip two, build long term relationships with agencies. It's not just about knowing the right people. So our understanding of government procurement and projects helped us to act like a partner and not just a subcontractor. So government procurement is quite particular and it's very bureaucratic. It's very drawn out and it's not always outcomes oriented. So a lot of people talk about output versus outcomes. You don't want to be a feature factory just developing one feature at a time and throwing it over a wall. It's not about output. It's about outcomes and outcomes is really what is the success within the project. And so stay hand in hand or hand in glove as they say and walk that walk with them and deliver on the customer success or the user success. But that's changing. So procurement in government is changing. It is now more agile and it's now more focused on results. So we've got a friend, David Kershaw, who you can see quoted here. He helps national governments make procurement digital and says this about agile, applying agile ways of work to public contracting and using a minimum viable procurement approach delivers better and quicker results for all users, ultimately the citizens and taxpayers, which obviously is great. David was key in the team that put together GDS in the UK that went on to create Gov.uk. And so I think he knows a thing or two about this. Yep, that means to work with governments or contractors to government and help understand you can use the same words that they use and try and be a subject matter expert. People talk about a T of knowledge often, which is a wide breadth and a one deep discipline that you know a lot about. We hear more about a comb shaped knowledge these days and so that is a wide breadth but several different disciplines. And often those disciplines should be both technical and subject matter expertise. So try and keep track of your target market and if you're talking to governments make sure you're talking the same language that they talk and that you have subject matter experts in the room. Also be honest, I mentioned open transparency a lot. To be the expert in the room is wonderful if you're a consultant but know when to stop talking and ask the appropriate questions to the other people. You can seem very arrogant and you'll easily be found out if you try and overstep and try and help people where you're not really the expert in the room. So be the subject matter expert as much as you can but rely on that blended team approach. So yeah, tip three is speak the same technical procurement language. Back to Eve. Give the mic. Oh yeah, it's yours. So moving on, tip number four. Get on the same page. When we started with our relationships with our lead agency, we talked a lot about our processes and about our alignment on tooling that we use methodology that we use and we found out that like 80% of our development and delivery workflow is the same. It's not like you're hiring somebody and then they go away, do the job and then come back with the results. You literally create a team, a couple of people from one team, a couple of people from the other team, and then it's one blended team that works together as it usually happens in the companies when the new project is done. Because you always shape a team, right, from the people from the organization. You do the same with your outsourcing partner. Like the same people joining the same stand up events, the same sprint and the agile ceremony and so on and so forth. So operate as one team. So it's the same team. The next one is highlight common working practices, how you show up at the events within the project, how you write stories, how you do testing. All of these commonalities help to find the common ground for this. The next one is highlight common working practices, how you show up at the events within the project, how you write stories, how you do testing. All of these commonalities help to find the common ground for the teams. What we found very important is to establish transparent communication. Meaning that no hidden messages in Slack or whatever tools you use for chatting. So as soon as you have a question, you write it in a public channel. Even if you want to mention a specific person, make sure that everybody else can see this because they may help to answer some of the questions. If that person is not responding or at least be on top of the problem or what's going on. So keep talking and make these conversations public. It's pretty important. That's my favorite tip. It says give more than you get. It's a common mistake to think that when you're hiring in you or just an outsourcing partner, you're hiring them to help with capacity overflow just as a pair of hands. However, your value is in the extra you provide to your lead agency. By extra, what I mean. Here's an example from what we have done. When we started working with them, you've noticed some inefficiencies in their delivery practices. That they didn't do some automation for certain processes or they had a couple of security issues. We started picking them up even though it was not part of our main contract. It happens naturally when you work in an agency that does automation of delivery processes and does quite professional development practices. When you come to an organization that doesn't have some of the things that you have filled in, you naturally start helping them to fix those problems. We ended up, as another example, helping them to open source some of their solutions and create reusable software. Lots of developers are just into the code writing. I deliver this piece of code. It kind of works for the client. We've never been paid for something else. However, having open source experience that, for instance, our system seed has, we've managed to identify where they can create reusable solutions for their own business or to actually open source those solutions. That made them to think slightly different in terms of how they write code and how they reuse those delivered software as the company. Also what happened that is interesting in that relationship is that our team was more senior than their team and we ended up naturally mentoring their staff members to do better job helping fix some of the security issues that they were not aware of helping close some of the annoying, let's call them delivery practices that they didn't know how to fix. They were doing things manually and they kind of used to that, but they ended up spending a couple of days a month on that. Practices that they had no idea how to fix. You actually worked on that project and you were escalated to a technical architect, right? So you ended up leading the team? Yes, that's my only answer I can tell. Eventually it all ended up with them telling us that we were one of the best agencies we have worked with, so I think it paid off. And handing over to Anthony for the final recap. Yep, great thanks, Ev. So that's our short explanation as to how to be a good outsourcing partner for government projects. You can also come and see us and ask questions just to read off the screen. Five tips. Get things right from the start. It's all about relationships. Speak the same language that includes technical and subject matter expertise. Make onboarding easy. You can do some of that up front but not all of it and give more than you get as Ev mentioned. Thank you very much. Please give honest feedback through the app.