Transforming a 300 year-old Organization in Four Weeks

A conversation with Matt Stutely, former Director of Engineering, British Parliament

This week I interviewed Matt Stutely, Director of Engineering at Gallagher Insurance. We talked about his experiences as heading an initiative to create a new set of products to deploy a secure voting platform for 650 members of the British Parliament. This project which allowed Members of Parliament to vote remotely for the first time, was conceived and delivered in four weeks.

How long have you been in technology?

Getting on for 25 years now, which is quite scary when I say it out loud.

You're currently the Director of Engineering at Gallagher Insurance, but pre-pandemic, you were working for the British Parliament as the Director of Software Engineering. I want to take us back to early 2020 in the before times. What was your day-to-day like, and what were you and your team working on?

Happy to take a trip down memory lane to those old days. We were responsible for all of the bespoke development that takes place across Parliament. That was a variety of systems from internal line of business type applications that kind of run various business functions, integrations between those systems and the Parliamentary website, which is a massive public facing website that has many millions of page views per month. Then, kind of public data APIs that are used by organizations such as people at the BBC and people like that who use our data, and then repurpose it for their own means. That was the remit of the team. Then, obviously, in my role was also a lot of stuff around working with the wider senior leadership team across the organization, looking at organizational structures, how we're managing delivery across the board, and all that kind of fun stuff that leadership brings with it.

How many people were in your org that you managed and how long had you been at the organization?

My software engineering team was around about 50 people in total. When I became the Director of Software Engineering, I'd been there about six and a half, seven years. I'd started as the development manager for the website, and I moved around a little bit. As it's often the case in these roles, as you do a role and do it well, you take a bit more responsibility and a bit more, and it kind of grew and grew and grew and grew. Parliament always had multiple teams for doing different pieces of work, so we had a team for the website, a team for a data, and a team for kind of business systems. This was the first time we unified them all together as one function, which we'd done about a year before the pandemic hit. I've been in this post for about just over a year when COVID came along.

So April 2020-ish, as the UK was shutting down, your team was challenged to deliver, a new set of products to deploy a secure remote voting platform for 650 members of Parliament. Would that be the first time that members of Parliament had voted remotely?

Remote voting had never happened before. Parliament, being a very traditional organization is all geared around people being in the place and doing their work in the place. I suspect, not dissimilar to Congress. It's designed for people to go to London, go to the Palace of Westminster from across all of the country and represent their constituency there. For all of time — so hundreds of years —that's how it's been done.

I had a strategy in place to kind of start offering the option for doing some things remotely, but it was kind of what I would call the transactional business — things they would do offline normally anyway, put a request in to the central office to ask a question, put their expenses in, put in that kind of behind the scenes stuff, declare a payment for an interest when they've gone out and spoken, and they've been given a payment. We'd done a lot of work around starting to build out a platform that allowed that to happen, but any kind of what would call live Parliamentary business, that was always conducted in the chamber. Everything had to be done in there. That's how it worked.

Tell me a little bit about how this request came in, and how you discovered that you had to suddenly build something that you weren't already working on.

The request came in from the Clerk of Parliament, who's the most senior official, kind of senior non-political figure that kind of runs the administration of the House of Commons. The House of Commons is our kind of lower house, like the House of Representatives, I guess, in American terms. He asked me to present him some options to keep working during the pandemic. If the chamber was to be locked down, we couldn't come in, what were our options? That was, basically, what I was asked, and that's how it started off. I pitched to him a few concepts about what we could do to take it forward, and that's kind of how we kind of kicked the whole thing off.

When was that? When did that request come in?

It was around April, just after the lockdown started. Although we were being locked down, obviously, Parliament was being an essential service that wasn't covered, so members would still be going in. They hadn't completely kind of turned that off yet, and they were looking at what could our options be if we needed to.

A lot of it started closing before it was officially nobody can come in anymore. It was, obviously, on the way, but I guess back then, there was still probably a hope that it wouldn't happen before we realized what we had all got ourselves into. We didn't quite know that for sure at that time. It was kind of planning ahead and, happily, it was part of my job is to think about contingencies. I'd never thought of a pandemic contingency, but I had, as part of what I was trying to do, to kind of modernize and innovate and change the way the procedures worked behind the scenes. I did have a number of options that we could do to kind offer some of these services electronically and digitally if anyone ever wanted them. The idea had batted around for a while, and it was part of my job is to have options, and it was presenting those options and then seeing which ones they wanted to take forward.

How quickly from presenting these options was an option picked and what was the timeline when you had to deliver it?

I'd say it took about a week or so to kind of get the green light to do the work. It was fast. Everything was completely new. From a Parliamentary point of view, it works like a large business. That's how it really operates. There's rightly lots of governance and procedures in place to make sure that we're doing the right things at the right time. Ultimately, spending public money, we've got to make sure we're doing it right. It's not just there to be spent on the whim. But, obviously, there was a real need for something to happen, and the decision- making process was all sped up significantly. Because of how the process works, the administration can't decide what members of Parliament do. Members of Parliament decide what members of Parliament do.

So the idea was that we would start the work, start preparing things, and if the situation deteriorated, then we would go to the MPs and say this is what you need to do. You need to get approval for it because ultimately a committee of MPs say, yes, we should do this. Then it gets decided as that becomes a policy for how the House of Commons works. We started the work probably about a week after that. We had four weeks, basically, to do it. It was a very, very tight deadline. We had to have it ready just after Easter.

Oh, that's quick. For our American audience, can you just give us a quick definition, what's an MP?

So an MP is a member of Parliament. It's similar to a Congressman or woman. That's the kind of similarity. The British system's a bit different because we have two houses, House of Commons and a House of Lords, perhaps a bit like House of Representatives and the Senate. However, our House of Commons, the lower house, has the supremacy on making decisions because that's the one that's duly elected by people. The House of Lords is appointed per experienced business people, people with experience in different sectors. Lots of different things that are appointed to the House of Lords, the idea being they've got expertise in areas. But the House of Commons are the people that you vote for. You vote for your representative, but that's the only one that you vote for. We don't have two like you guys do over there.

How long were your typical projects before this one?  Were you all used to delivering in four week sprints?

We ran a number of product teams covering a broad range of products and services, some new, some doing  support and maintenance work. Normally we’d be running two week sprints using traditional scrum artifacts to deliver them. Depending on the product and urgency we’d occasionally swap out for a Kanban approach, which is what we used on the voting project, there was no value or indeed option to do iterative releasing here and so a slightly different agile based approach was needed.

Aside from Slack, were there any structures that helped you all complete this monster task so quickly and on time?

Having a hugely supportive and dedicated team was the most important structure of all! But tooling wise, we managed our backlog using JetBrains YouTrack, which is a bit like Jira but a lot more developer friendly and lightweight. I worked closely with an expert clerk on the procedural/rules side of things to ensure the system behaved in the right way and was also easy to operate by those who’d be taking care of it day to day. In addition to this, we had a regular project team check in, to make sure upcoming tasks around areas such as QA and security were lined up in advance so we didn’t hit any blockers or delays in

So you had four weeks to develop and deliver of this project. What were some of the biggest challenges that you all face?

I guess the single biggest challenge was the situation we were doing it under, so the fact that everybody in my team had gone from a world where we were all working in an office together to the fact we were not anymore. We were spread out across, well, not all over the country, but certainly across kind of the southeast of England. Everyone was in different places. We couldn't come together. We physically weren't permitted to do. We had to deal with it remotely. Obviously, the people involved in doing this were all in very different situations. People were terrified. I mean, I remember I was terrified by it. COVID, nobody knew what it meant. Nobody knew what was going to happen. People had lost or had relatives that were very sick.

I'm very fortunate. I think, it's like yourself there. I’ve got a space I can work in, I can close a door or keep out of the way. It's very nice. I can work. It doesn't make a hell of a lot of difference to me, but some people, younger members of the team, they're in flat shares, they're in house shares. They're living with other people who are all in the same position, so that's very hard. Some people live alone, and they're kind of having the problem of they're on their own. They've got no one to talk to all day, and they come to work for the social piece as much as the work piece. Kind of making sure the team were okay and able to do more than we'd ever asked them to do before in a situation where probably they were the least able to do more than they'd ever done before.

That was the single most challenging piece of work, I would say, and making sure that we factored in time every day for us to have a get together in a kind of a decompressed world. Work talk was totally banned. We'd get together in a chat every day, and we talked about other things just to make sure we're all kind of all right and keeping happy and on top of things. That was the single biggest challenge, I think, the people part of it and making sure they were all right working through it.

One thing I hear is making sure that you were treating people like humans, and you had time to just connect as human beings. Anything else that you did as a leader or the leadership team did to help make that transition and deliver a project in four weeks?

Exactly that. We had to piece the work around, so my head of delivery was making sure that everyone was aware of what is the work, why are we trying to do this work, and how are we going to chop it up into the right areas. There’s the engineering piece, the a QA and testing piece. Obviously, there's a whole delivery piece, how we're going to roll it out. But there was also a lot of work around understanding that and then the technical design challenge, and how are we going to get together with the technical people to work at how we're going to solve this, doing it all remotely with new tools. Finding the right tools to use.

A big shout out to Slack as the thing that helped us the most in making that happen over that period of time because we'd used a little bit in the office, but we weren't dependent on it like we suddenly became. It was just making sure we were checking in with people every morning, just to have a quick check in, you okay today, what you got lined up? We would do standups and things that, but making sure there's a little bit of personal time as well because that kind of personal connection was really, really important.

Then it was the reaching out to other teams we needed to help was to make it happen because it's not just, all right, software engineering led the delivery of this piece of work. But it wasn't only done by us. There was a huge group of people across the organization we needed to get involved to help us make it happen.

So you all were in an office before the pandemic hit. You weren't really remote or distributed before?

That's right. People would do a day a week at home or that kind of, as it once was. People had a flexible arrangement. They might do a day at home, some people did part-time because they had childcare, so they'd do a compressed week or they wouldn't work certain days, but the vast majority of our work was being together in an office.

That's a huge change. You have to keep team of 50 people coordinated and work cross-functionally across the organization. What were some of the things that you felt like you did maybe successfully to help make sure that everybody was coordinated across the organization?

Certainly across the team, we were using Slack. I'm a massive fan of Microsoft. I don't want to complain about Microsoft Teams, but organizationally at that time, we hadn't had it rolled out in a very mature fashion. Other things to remember, of course, is we were doing this piece of work, but that was just, again, a small piece of Parliament's response to the pandemic. It wasn't only build a remote voting system, it was also all those MPs, all of their staff, all of the rest of the staff across the Parliament, all of them are going to be remote doing their jobs. There was actually, at the time, a massive project to roll out Microsoft Teams, and to give everybody a laptop. There was so much that went on behind the scenes with other parts of our organization to make that happen. This was just a kind of a small section. We got quite focused in on that.

But even with the engineering team, there were other things, the day-to-day, the business as usual was still taking place. That coordination was vital, so Slack was the tool certainly within the team. Then kind of without the team, a couple of kind of my leaders of my team come ahead in delivery and the QA function were kind of working externally as well to bring people on board and help us out. A lot of that was done through good old-fashioned phone calls to start with.

Were there any big technical challenges that you were facing because you hadn't done it before, but also legal-wise, security, or other kinds of things, were any big technical challenges you had to overcome in that time, in four weeks?

From a technical design point of view, it's a relatively straightforward concept. It's essentially a hub. The system, it was a website. You log into the website, the person would cast their vote. That data would then be behind the scenes. We have a nice microservice architecture that would then send the data to the current voting system that already existed because we have a system for doing that. It's just designed about the people walking in and touching their name on the button and saying that's me. Then it carries on. That back end was there. It was building in an integration, so it was kind of all tied together.

But, as you can imagine, as you kind of touched on the biggest challenge, technically, is the cybersecurity aspect because, obviously, that's a very interesting target for a wide variety of nefarious actors to target the system. We had to work very closely with our national cybersecurity center, which is the organization that looks behind the scenes at kind of the threats that are facing the country out there and making sure that we're on top of them all. Spent quite a lot of time working with them to make sure we were overcoming challenges, having them have a look at it, analyze it and make sure they're happy.

When, obviously, they weren't to start with, you come back and have a look at it again and address your design, because 650 MPs, they've all got their own interests. They've got their own needs. They've got their own wants. They've got very, very different levels of digital experience. Some of them are all over it. They're tweeting all the time, and they're posting on Instagram. They do all of that, and they're amazing. Some of them, less so because that's not their way of working. They've been in maybe been in Parliament for 40 years. They represent their constituents in a more, again, traditional fashion. They do things by letter. They do things like that. They like coming into Parliament and doing their business because it's traditional, and they like that. That's okay, too.

But, of course, they now have to do it online. So we had to address the cyber challenge and then help the members perhaps that were less experienced technically to better use this system in a nice, easy way because you only get a 10-minute window to vote when a vote happens. So it was making sure they could get on, log on, cast their vote, and move on with their day. They were the two single biggest challenges if that's possible to have.

10 minutes is a small window for people who less familiar with technology and because them not being able to vote seems fairly bad or catastrophic. I mean, I just have to ask, did you hit the deadline?

Yes, we did. We did. It was a hard deadline for a number of reasons because, again, no different anywhere...certain laws exist and they run for periods of time, and, then, if they're not renewed, they lapse, and all these kinds of things. There were votes coming out that were really important. If we'd have missed the deadline, I don't really know what would've happened. There was a lot of we just have to, and so a lot of work went into it. A lot of hours went into it, but we did.

It was rolled out and we did a number of tests and trials. As I said before, we reached out, and we had, basically, a lot of people pretend to be MPs. Much again, as I'm sure it is in Congress and things, we have a big visitor services team whose job is to take people around, show them, take them on a tour, show them all of the old sites, meaning what's that carving in the roof and all that kind of stuff. They were, obviously, had nothing much to do because nobody was allowed to come and have a look around. We were really fortunate that that team of people were able to work with us. We all pretended to be different MPs, and we'd run lots of tests and lots of test scenarios.

Then slowly, we started to involve the MPs in the process, which is all part of socializing the system with getting them to be familiar with it, which meant by the time we came to the kind of the rollout to go live, we knew it was going to work because we tested it so much. We knew it was going to be okay. We knew we had the backing because, again, in line with all this work, we had to get the MP themselves to sign off and say they would use it because if they said, no, then it would've all been for nothing.

It strikes me as a need for trust. You have to get people who have never really done this before to trust in the middle of the pandemic a new system. You had to build trust really pretty quickly. I mean, not that you didn't have it before, but to a stronger degree.

Exactly that, and the trust is the big, big thing. It's a big leap because there's a big leap between something where there's a nice backup of paper if it goes wrong anyway to something where if it doesn't work, what are you going to do? There was some resilience in the system, we had some backup. If the members, one or two people couldn't use the system, they could phone, and they give a password, and give their vote. But that wouldn't have worked for all 650 people because we wouldn't have had the staff to take the calls and deal with it, so that wouldn't have happened. It had to work well. We had to build that trust and that only came through showing people how it worked and getting them on board. It was showing some very, very senior officials and ministers and things, what took place and asking them the questions. Again, are really important, asking them questions about what do you need it to do? How do you operate day to day?

You learn quite a lot about how the organization works and functions, which meant we've addressed the question when it came up again and again and again. Little, tiny things like I'd rather use my own credentials to log in. Our response was well, you can't because the Parliament wants secure, you have to multifactor identification, all these are really important reasons because X, Y, and Z. The silliest thing that I learned out of all of it, I think, from a technical point of view from the cyber security team was when we were sending notifications by SMS. You've got a text message and a push alert when the vote happened, so they knew to vote saying, please log in and vote. We put the link in the text and they were like, we really don't like people doing that because when people are phishing, that's what they do, and we try to teach people, don't click on links in texts.

If they get something that looks a little bit official and someone learns that you use the name member hub, which is what our system was called. Once someone sees a text from member hub, you can spoof that. They put the fake link in, they click on that. All of a sudden, someone can steal their details, so can't put links in. It's so obvious, but you don't think about it. If you're trying to make it easy for the user. The user just wants to click a button. Those kind of balances are really fascinating. Don't put links in SMS, everybody.

It strikes me that this seems like a lot of pressure. I'm curious about what were some of your personal challenges as a leader?

Hardest challenge for me, personally, was making sure that my team were okay and they were all right, generally all right through it, because so how are you doing... Fine. I mean, that's the instant response, but it's kind of... But how are you really doing? You're following that up with that kind of just to make sure they're okay and making sure they were getting a bit of time down, having that downtime, having a little chance to reflect, taking that bit of time off a weekend even just to reset, go for a walk.

But, I guess from my own personal point of view, the thing was to be making sure I was doing it as well, because there wasn't necessarily anybody looking after my well-being there, and that's the big loneliness of leadership. As a leader, who's watching over you...nobody. You've got to suddenly make sure you're taking care of yourself. I think, to start with, I definitely didn't, and then, all of a sudden, I realized that I might be burning out soon. It was important.

I took a bit of time myself to go outside, do the same things, follow my own advice, because it's really easy to help and coach other people, and then not do it yourself. I'm very lucky that I've got an exec coach that I work with, and she's very forthright. She's quite happy telling me off. She's very good at pointing out to me when perhaps I need to listen to my own advice and look after myself. That's the tip for any leader, I think.

Absolutely. Leaders constantly take care of other of people, and they have to really turn that back on themselves because if they're not good, they're not going to be able to lead. I love that you shared that, and that you have an executive coach. Was this your first time in a leadership role like this?

I've been in dev, I've been a senior manager as opposed to being a leader. Suddenly, the responsibility shifted. I was in the post for a year, and it'd been a challenging year, but not like this. I would have liked perhaps a little more experience might have been nice, but nothing like being thrown in the deep end.

Are they still using the system, or are they back to voting in person?

It's back in voting in person now. But having done it once for our MPs, we did it again for our members of the House of Lords, who again, that's kind of the upper house. The demographic of that is a lot older, let's say, because it tends to be people that are older and more established in their careers. There are, again, obviously, younger members, but they tended to be an older demographic, which meant they're obviously much more on the kind of at-risk list in the COVID world. The House of Lords stayed in the remote operation for a lot, lot longer than the House of Commons. Both are back now, I say to normal, but both are kind of back now operating as they did before.

What I liked about the system is it demonstrated it could be done because people said, as we touched on it, it couldn't be. “We don't work like that. It couldn't possibly work”…and yet it could be done. And it was done in the time scales we said. Financially, it wasn't hugely expensive.

I cannot remember the figures from my head, but it was not expensive in the great scheme of things. It was a public sector IT project that delivered, and there aren't that many of those. It just showed there's a possibility for the future. So that it's kind of gone away a little bit for now, I like to think that one day, it'll come back perhaps in a future Parliament because it, ultimately, it did the thing that leaders want.

This potentially opens up a huge amount of diversity to who could represent you, who could be your elected representatives, because at the moment, ultimately, it has to be somebody who can go to London. It has to be, which rules out a lot of people with disabilities. It rules out a lot of working mothers and working fathers as well. People with childcare responsibilities, they're not going to want to do it. There's people that maybe just don't want to go, so that's completely reasonable. I don't want to go to London, I like living in Manchester or Birmingham or Scotland or in Wales or wherever I live. I like to be here. I don't want to be in London. It just gives that chance to build some diversity in your elected representative, which I think is going to be so important as time goes by.

The world we're in now is...I can be political now because I don't work there anymore. But the world we live in now is, obviously, a challenging place. Let's go with it. We've all seen it in both our countries. The way through that is going to be to have people who represent you who you feel maybe actually do represent you and don't represent some other interests. As time goes by, I think there's a huge opportunity for technology to help democracy. I really do.

I totally agree. I just learned that you were awarded an Order of the British Empire for your work. For us non-British folks, what is that?

The Order of the British Empire (OBE) is basically an award that is awarded by the Queen for exceptional work in a certain field. It gets awarded to a lot famous people like actors and sportsmen/women. David Beckham has one and we all know who he is, but they're also given out for kind of doing some leading work in your field. So there was quite a lot over the COVID pandemic given out to people that did work, people wouldn't normally get recognized were recognized for doing things in their area for kind of those services to Parliament. Myself and the chap who took care of all of the rollout as I talked before around the laptops and the sending everybody away stuff. We were both awarded them in Parliament as was the head of the House of Commons service as well. It was a real surprise because I didn't expect it. It was really nice to be recognized.

How did you learn about the award?

You get a nice little letter saying, you've been nominated. Would you like to have an OBE? You read these sort of rock stars that turn it down because they're too cool for it. Well, I'm not too cool for it.

Same. I am definitely not cool. I would take it.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm nowhere near. I'm not cool at all. It's really an honour to be nominated and also it reflects on the hard work of everybody who was involved. They can't, obviously, give them to everybody because that wouldn't work, but it's really nice to be recognized and for yours and your team's work. It reflects hugely on all of them as well because without them, none of it would've happened. But you get a nice, little scroll thing signed by the Queen, which is just on the wall above me there, in fact. You get to go to Windsor Castle for a ceremony where they give you the little medal. That's happening at Easter time for me because it has been delayed again because of COVID.

I was wondering if you got a medal. You get a little medal.

You do. Someone will pin it on. Prince Charles or Prince William or someone will pin it on me, which is quite exciting.

That's really cool. I mean, I don't know who doesn't like medals.

Exactly. I've not got one, so that first and only medal, I suspect I shall ever earn. But it's very nice. I think it maybe one at school, I might have got a participation medal for something. But I don't think it was anything better than that.

There are other leaders facing a similar situation where you cannot miss the deadline, very short timeline under high pressure stakes. What advice would you give them?

Reflecting back on it, I would think, first of all, trust yourself. You're in the position for a reason. You're there because you're trusted to be the bird to deliver this stuff in normal times. You can deliver in it in a crisis as well.

Give yourself that little bit of time. You might not have weeks and weeks to decide, but you've probably got a couple of days. Take a moment. Take a breath. Have a think about what's there. Use the people in your team to challenge you and support you and make it happen, but don't behave hugely differently to how you would in normal times. Just remember you're going to have to compress it, but just have a little moment to reflect and think. You've got more time than you think you have. That's probably the biggest one. Then, as we said about it before, obviously, look after your team. You're going to be doing that anyway. But don't forget to look after yourself as well.

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