Federal government agency consolidates 17…

01 · The challenge

Problem

A federal agency operated 17 citizen-facing portals built over a decade by different vendors. Cost-to-serve was rising 12% YoY, NPS was static, and citizens described the experience as fragmented.

02 · How we delivered

Solution

Unified service hub with shared identity, journey orchestration, and AI triage. Strangler-fig migration of 17 portals into a single product squad model with a published service catalogue.

03 · Outcome

Impact

Citizen NPS lifted 41 points. Cost-to-serve fell 44%. 6.4M monthly active users on the unified platform. 100% audit pass at first attempt — cited as a national reference.

How we delivered

Programme phases.

Five phases. One accountable team. Every phase had a named decision point and a measurable outcome.

Discovery & alignment

2–3 weeks

Workshops with the Leading Federal Government Agency executive team, baseline metrics, target outcome tree, programme governance set up.

Design & architecture

4–6 weeks

Reference architecture, security blueprint, joint squad model agreed. Data model and integration contracts published.

Build & live-parallel

Q2 onwards

Vertical slice built and run live-parallel against the existing system. Continuous integration, daily deploys, weekly business demos.

Cutover & scale

Mid-programme

Phased cutover, audit-aligned reconciliation, scaling out of squads, capability transfer to Leading Federal Government Agency teams.

Run & continuous improve

Steady state

Managed run with named SLOs, quarterly value reviews, and a 15% optimisation budget reserved for improvement work.

Engineering view

Architecture overview.

Foundations

Cloud landing zone, identity, network, security baseline. Data fabric with lineage-by-default. Audit-grade observability stack from day one.

Application & integration

Domain-aligned microservices behind a published API surface. Event-driven core with CDC into the data fabric. Live-parallel capability built in, not bolted on.

Trust & governance

RBAC, audit logs, lineage, policy-as-code. Model risk records for every production model. Compliance posture on the executive dashboard, not in a quarterly slide.

Built on

Technology stack.

Production-grade choices, defended by track record. The stack is one engineering decision among many — but a load-bearing one.

Azure Mendix Microsoft Entra Postgres Power BI Cloudflare

Trust by design

Governance & assurance.

01

Programme assurance

Independent assurance reviews at each phase gate. Findings tracked in a single risk register with named owners and remediation deadlines.

02

Security & data

ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II controls applied throughout. Data lineage captured by default; sensitive data tokenised at the edge.

03

NESA / sovereign cloud

Deployment aligned to national cybersecurity authority controls. Sovereign cloud where data residency requires it.

04

Accessibility & inclusion

WCAG-AA on every citizen-facing journey. Arabic-first design with parallel English; user-research panels include accessibility users.

Not consultants — engineers who ship. We extended the model into three other ministries the next year.

C Chief Technology Officer · Federal government agency

What we learnt

Three things we would do again.

01

14 months from kickoff to first regulated outcome — squad density and decision velocity matter more than headcount.
02

Joint squads with Leading Federal Government Agency engineers stayed in place after go-live. Ownership did not transfer in a hand-off — it grew in place.
03

Live-parallel for a meaningful window before cutover bought us trust. The cutover itself was a flag flip, not a war room.