PegaWorld iNspire 2023: Tinker, Taylor, Sailor, Developer - How UK Defence broke the mould

A story of how a diverse group of professionals from different backgrounds came together to drive rapid digital transformation in the UK Military. By challenging the traditional top-down military model and adopting a people-centric approach, they were able to drive higher-value outcomes and improve decision-making, tempo, and quality of application delivery in a challenging environment.

Working with SiXworks and using Pega Customer Service, embracing Pega low code, automation, and Pega agile delivery methodologies, they were able to develop a whole new way of delivering digital innovation, removing the digital skills gap, and allowing work to be done at pace.

Learn more about the specific challenges they faced, how they overcame them, and what strategies they employed to drive successful outcomes.

Transcript:

- So good afternoon everybody. Thank you for coming to this session. You clearly have excellent taste and so congratulations on that. Good start. So, because you are here, we obviously need now need to entertain you. So we are gonna talk about a project we did in the U.K. so Pega and SiXworks, working with the Royal Navy and the Royal Air Force. And when I was asked to do this session or put at least a story together that we could talk about, there was probably four different major story angles that we could have gone. And we've gone for this one that you'll see in a second. And the reason why is because I think it resonates with everybody in the room, everybody at PegaWorld and everybody globally, all of Pega's customers, every major organization in the world has this issue right now. And, I'll move on, I'll introduce myself. Should I? I'll do that. So my name's Colin Chambers. I'm a Client Director in the U.K. for Defense and Intelligence. And I'll introduce the A team here. So we have Tinker, Taylor, who's not here, and I'll explain why in a second. Sailor on the end and developer, which is Ben from SiXworks. So the reason why Sarah isn't here, she's obviously missing on the stage, is that she currently looks like this. So she's had major surgery in her arm and apparently you can't put people in cargo holds of international aircraft, which I think is unfair to be honest. So yeah, so she couldn't travel, but she sends her best wishes. We messaged her earlier and she was excited that she was gonna be on stage but not on stage. So Sarah would've represented her story from a Royal Air Force perspective and obviously SiXworks as well. So let me set the scene. I don't think this is a shock to anyone in this room or anyone at the conference today. There is a unprecedented demand for digital to drive productivity and growth across the world as a whole. And digital's become more critical to combat productivity drops mostly from COVID. Alan talked about it this morning. COVID has really changed the way organizations operate and what they need to do to do things differently moving forward. There's also a demographic expectation as well. So, the old generation couldn't leave their house and walk down the road and go to a post office, or go shopping. So they've had to upskill themselves. The demographic, digital demographic has changed dramatically. So now they want digital by default. They want digital all the time. They've got a taste of it, now they want it. And it's the same with the younger generation as well. The younger generation had to learn how to use a computer, because they were being taught from home. So they had to get their digital skills up and running and now they expect digital by default. So everyone's expecting digital by default and obviously, other economic factors as well. As we know the world is in a strange economic state at the moment and obviously the war in Europe as well, which has driven demand for resources and cost and other things. So, here's a Gartner quote, which I think is very relevant, very relevant for everyone. "The demand for professional developers far exceeds the availability of skilled talent in the market." There is not enough people to deliver digital applications. The focus is on maintaining legacy code, not innovation, not digitization or real business transformation. They are there just to keep the lights on. They're there just doing what they've done for a long time. There's no additional benefits, there's no productivity that needs to be driven in every organization. So IT capacity bottlenecks are a major business and operational issue for everyone, including the U.K. Ministry of Defense. So just to put this into a bit of context, 71% of CEOs see the skills gap as their biggest business disruptor. 85 million jobs will go unfulfilled in digital by 2030, which is crazy. Three in four workers don't have any digital skills at all. And only 28% of organizations actually have a plan to fill that gap moving forward. That results in, and get ready for this, $8.5 trillion in unrealized annual revenues across the world because the digital can't be driven out quick enough. This is all off the backdrop of COVID and an intensive job competition market at the moment as well. And there's more pressure on every organization to have retention and the retention plan and keep the skills and the people attracted into their own organizations. So, early retirement has been a factor of COVID. People have decided that they don't wanna work until into their older ages. They want to retire now and enjoy life, 'cause COVID has given them a different perspective. And that more intensive job competition is more than ever. And it's not just the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy have got that. Everyone in this room is expecting that and the the skills talent is difficult at the moment to get over. However, only 70% of employees who have received digital training or have received skills, which we'll talk about in a second or been exposed to a digital transformation project are actually more at work. So these people wanna stay. So your skills, your people want to stay in your organization because they feel like they're contributing. And George will tell his side of his story in a second. They're also 60% more likely to stay in their jobs as well. So if you give them skills and you give 'em the ability to make change in their organizations, then there's more likely to stay. So from an intensive job perspective, when we've met with Admiral Nick Hine and Air Marshall, Andy Turner, they said to us that the types of people they're looking for and the skills that the Royal Air Force and the Royal Navy are looking for has changed and is very different. They are now competing with the likes of Amazon, with the likes of Microsoft, Google, Pega, and other tech organizations because the skills they need to address their future operational plans are very different to where they were a few years ago. And digital obviously is driving that move forward. So a different approach is required and this story we're gonna tell you is a good example of how to bridge that digital gap. So enough of me, that's me setting the scene. Tom, can you give us a quick overview of the challenge?

- Yeah, thank you very much Col. Before I talk about the challenge though, I would really like to highlight someone in the audience here today and it's Wing Commander Mike Burt, who's on the front row here.

- [Col] Do I send a mic to say hello?

- The story that I'm going to tell to you is very Navy focused 'cause I was the deputy head of Navy recruitment from early 2020 to the mid part of 2022. But the story of our transformation and the story of our involvement with Pega actually starts with the RAF and it starts with Mike Bird, the RAF did a rapid innovation project to create a digital tool to answer a question in a small part of the recruitment process that was called the Digital Candidate Test and Allocation Tool. It was Mike's vision, it was Mike's idea, and it was Mike's project. When that was successfully delivered, he saw the value, he saw that you could take this small acorn of a project, you could plant it, and it could grow into a mighty oak. And he brought it and demonstrated it to the Navy. And the Navy saw that it was clearly aligned to what we wanted to do. So that's when we got into lockstep. I'm gonna talk lots about the benefits, the outcomes, and the successes that Navy recruitment has had over that two-year period. A lot of that needs to be attributed to a person who wasn't wearing a dark blue uniform but was wearing a light blue one and was in the Air Force. So there's a real debt of gratitude that we owe to Mike Bird. So not sit on the stage, but I wish you to be recognized for that. And I'll then talk about leadership, okay? And I would like to bring up a quote from Admiral Radakin. Now in my story, he was the first Sea Lord and the head of the Navy. He's now the chief of the defense staff in the United Kingdom. And that is the most senior military officer in the United Kingdom. This is from a speech to RUSI, where he's talking about what he perceives are the greatest risks and he sees that it is the risk of not changing, not challenging the way that we are working and taking the Navy in a new direction. Now if you studied change management and digital transformation, there's some great work out there, particularly by John Kotter, and he talks about two of the greatest things to motivate people to change and embrace transformation, is inspirational leadership with a vision. We got that from Mike and we also got it from Admiral Tony. The next thing they talk about is having a burning platform. The pressing need to drive people away from the old and into the new. And these two things will feature heavily in our discussions and the challenge we had. So going back to the burning platform, if you go back to 2020, the world felt very much on edge, and there was a lot of challenges and there was a lot of friction and a lot of turbulence. And in the United Kingdom, Defense was really looking at how it would achieve its defense objectives. And for the Navy, we were clearly focused on how vital it was to provide new talent into the service, but also keep a constant stream of workforce in recruitment. Now, if anybody here did a Google search on military recruitment in the United Kingdom from let's say 2010 to about 2020, you will see that it was quite challenging. It was quite a struggle. And this wasn't a problem that was unique to the Navy. It is a problem that we shared with our fellow services like the Air Force, like the Army, but also our global partners around the world. So this was our burning platform. We needed to look at how we did recruitment and then work out how we were going to change it to improve it and move forward. And I'll give you some figures to highlight the kind of problems that we were facing. So on a good year, we would get about 31,000 applications a year to join the Royal Navy. We had a very low-tech recruitment model that was based on armed forces careers offices on the high street. We would need about 17 hours of effort from a recruiter to progress and application from initial entry all the way through the process to being a successful recruit that joins the Royal Navy. So if you look at those applications, you look at that effort, you are looking about 510,000 workforce hours a year if you're going to treat every case the same. Now here comes the rub. We only had 200 frontline recruiters and if the only thing they did for every working hour was progressing an application through our system, you could only get 334,000 workforce hours out of them. Okay? So we were short of about 180,000 hours, okay? We're in Vegas. So I'll use a gamblers quote here. We were very much onto a busted flush. We needed to do something with our processes, we could increase the workforce, but that's super expensive. And actually we needed all our workforce to crew the front line. So we looked at digitization and automation and we saw this in the demonstration that Mike did for us, okay? That this was the way forward. This is how we could get the work to fit inside that workforce envelope that we had. But that was only half the problem. We were speaking to our candidates and we were asking them what they wanted from a recruitment process. And they wanted more convenience. They wanted a process that they could do at a time and a place of their choosing, rather than under the demands of a military recruiter. And they wanted something that was more akin to the modern practices that they were seeing other leading employers in the United Kingdom offer. So we saw this and said, "Yes, that's what we want. We want a digital pipeline where we can have useful nudges provided by a recruiter at an appropriate time to a candidate to get them through the recruitment process." So if you're going to do that, you need a world-leading CRM system and you need workflow automation. And we found that in Pega. But then again, you have to ask yourself, if you're going to deliver that amount of change, how are you going to do it in the process? Yes, how are you going to achieve that? Because it's quite a tall order. We were a non-tech organization, so how are we going to do it? We traditionally consumed IT services and digital processes in an outsource model. That's great for maybe 10 years ago. But the speed of change that was needed in the recruitment market was so quick now, the idea that you could only have one change window a year, it would last for eight weeks. And when it closed midsummer, that was it. You'd sit on a swivel chair for 11 months and you'd come up with some cobbled work around. It just wasn't fit for purpose. So how are you gonna do that? If you haven't got a crew of tech savvy sailors, how are you gonna achieve it? Well we found that in Pega, no-code, low-code platform and the ideas of co-development and citizen developers, 'cause really that's what the Navy wanted to do. We wanted to become masters and commanders of our digital services. We wanted to set the course our digital platform was gonna deliver to our candidates. We were then gonna exploit the ebbs and the flows of the U.K. jobs market to find new opportunities and then winning the war on talent and bring them into the Royal Navy and we found that in Pega. This was also aligned to a wider strategy that the Navy was following. Now, remember the quote from Tony Radakin? I've got another one for you. And this is from his same RUSI speech and he was saying about, "We're about upskilling the workforce, we're getting more tech savvy. We want to do secondments to industry, we want to change the way the Navy works. We wanna bring up skills and we definitely want to get into this mantra, faster, cheaper, better. We want to deliver minimum viable products quickly and get them onto the front line." So you can see we had inspired leadership, Mike, Admiral Tony, we had a burning platform, our recruitment was failing and it needed to change. We had a call to action, which was what was happening on the global stage around us. So when you combine all those together, that was the challenge. The challenge was, how do you change recruitment? How do you upskill the people to deliver that change? That was really the challenge. And hopefully that answers the question, Colin.

- It does mate, thank you. So then, we have the challenge. What do these guys do to meet that challenge? So I'm gonna introduce George, you are George, are you not? Ben, you're George. George. I'm Ben. To join the conversation with Tom. So then what do you guys do? How did it operate?

- So I think I'll start off and then I'll pass over to Ben. So if I was to sum it up, ultimately, we changed Royal Navy recruitment from a recruitment organization into a recruitment organization plus a software delivery house. Yeah. And that was quite an interesting concept in the Navy, because in the military, you are used to divisions of responsibility and terms of reference. There's an organization called N6 or J6 or A6, they own technology, they own the digital processes and if you want to do this, they're the people that are supposed to be in the driving seat. In our project, that wasn't the case. We were going to firmly get into the driving seat, drive forward this change and upskill our workforce. So there was quite a bit of friction there. But the good news is Pega's got something to help you with that. So we had the Pega Express methodology, the ideas of discovery, preparation, build, adapt, you can bring those in-house. And then if you are rapidly developing capability, you're doing show and tells on a regular basis, you can show institutional IT that you are not lunatics. Yep. That you are actually disciplined individuals on professional growth and you are going to, you can be trusted to deliver what you've promised. There was also a couple of issues with accreditation that was really funny. We were the first large scale deployment in U.K. defense of a no-code, low-code platform. And we were using agile methodology to deliver this as express methodology tells you to do that. We found that most of the accreditation processes in defense were geared to an elongated waterfall delivery method. And you would phone up and sort of say, "Hey, I'm gonna roll out this capability, I need it accredited." They would tell you to take a ticket and get back to me in 2025. And you were like, "I'm sorry fella, it's coming down the line now you are gonna see it in 10 working days and we want to go live straight after that." So there was a bit of adjustment that needed doing. But I think from this project what's been really useful is, we've shown that you can do that change. And once again, we weren't lunatics, because we had the support of SiXworks and Pega behind us and over to you Ben. Add some more

- Thank you Tom. Yeah, as Tom's described and sort of alluded to further, YAML is a pretty secure environment to work within. So most if not all of the software development processes, the methodology and sort of guardrails in there are geared up to the standards that were required to meet in order to achieve our accreditation. Recruitment HQ, so Mike and Tom had the drive to become, but were not yet an area within the Ministry of Defense owning their own IT infrastructure and owning that ability to create new software. So we were engaged to provide that experience and to embed agility and innovation into the way that they do business. Our expertise at SiXworks is in secure experimentation and proof of concept development. And absolutely not presenting on a stage, but there you go. But that integrates really well with the philosophy behind Pega's own express methodology and Recruitment HQ's desire to be the master of their own destiny as well as the need for accelerated change. So working with the MOD, we'd established the roles and responsibilities required, not only just to produce a single working piece of software, but continue to allow that team to make valuable change without the need for traditional IT team intervention. So the end goal here was a robust and secure solution. One that was improved and owned by the MOD, and as Tom said there, that's no small task. As a team, we took a platform we knew would facilitate the business in making their own change and would also ensure that journey produced a solution with the appropriate security mechanism in place to project, I'll try that again, to protect candidates personal data and also to meet those accreditation requirements of the MOD. So it's not just a a change for RAF and Navy recruitment, it's a change in the way that MOD does their own internal business team. So working with those teams, the MOD accreditation teams, we ensured that there was a clear route to production and what we were planning to do would meet with the approval and the buy-in of other communities within the MOD, such as Navy Digital and RAF Digital. Actually the Army were involved a little bit there as well, but don't factor in too much in on this specific journey. So this included numerous in-depth conversations between the SiXwork security architects, the Pega systems technical team and of course the MOD information and security areas to agree the right governance and the guardrails on what was still a significantly changing platform. Establishing that right methodology was also an important part of the foundation. If the MOD were gonna have an enduring service instead of just a piece of shadow IT that sat there lingering around in the background with no continuing room for growth. So in fact it was also critical to prove to the accreditors that there was method to the approach that we were doing. We'd really got the benefit, as Tom had mentioned earlier, of learnings gathered by the RAF Recruitment Team and the RAF Rapid Capabilities Office working with us many months prior on an eight week demonstrator being used to prove the effectiveness of small multi-discipline teams, agile practices, and of course, local platforms such as Pega. So now with the buy-in of the RAF and the Navy to take on larger challenges, the scaling of that capability into multiple teams, and the additional supporting roles became achievable. It was then important to make sure that we were singing from the same hymn sheets across both the services. And as we continue to discover, just 'cause you've got the same words and phrases, they do not always mean the same thing. We're introduced to two different services with our own processes. So you've gotta remember, it's not just one team here, you brought in across two organizations that don't typically work very closely together in this space. Yeah, and it was two hours, therefore, which would not always align when it came to deciding how work got done. So it was immediately apparent that we needed to establish some kind of common goal and meaning. We started that conversation with the principles of SCRUM and as Tom mentioned, again, the supporting delivery approach offered by Pega Systems with the idea of discovery, preparation, build, iterating over that and ultimately adopting and changing the platform on a more continuous basis. So it was agreed that this kind of approach would be totemic and could be corralled around by both of the services. But actually I think Tom's got a point to make around this one.

- So what I found this really, really interesting when you start to delve into it, and once again, I'm only applying this to the military, but I think it can work in other industries. All organizations have their own, sort of planning and their execution methodology. Once we lifted the hood on express methodology, we found that there was clear read across into a lot of the other methodologies we'd used in the military. The five question estimate, the seven question estimate, even things like the OODA loop, yeah, the Observe, the Orientate, Act, Decide you could talk in a language to military people where they would understand express methodology if you had a little bit exposures to what the military were doing before this. So what we found with SiXworks is because they had had a military background, they understood the military there were able to get after express methodology really quickly. You just had to understand, you know the Rosetta Stone. Yes. What does that actually mean to a military person? "Oh it sounds like this." "It means that." Once they got that actually we found this quite comfortable, quite easy to use. And this idea of totemic was very, very good, yeah. When you are using organizations that don't work together on a day-to-day basis on this problem, you're always gonna have that friction at the start. Who's got the best way of doing it? Is it this way? Is it that way? Let's just cut that out. Let's not have that discussion. Let's rally behind something and we rallied behind express methodology and it was used throughout the two years of the project and became embedded into the headquarters. Back to you Matt.

- Explained that a lot better than I could Tom. So, but effectively this is actually not new to the U.K. military, it's just new terminology, actually made our lives a lot easier as we were as we were doing the build. But whilst we look to effect change, it's always important to have that feeling of stability and some sturdy foundations which make people sort of feel comfortable as they're going on the journey. So, when we're bringing agility into this new organization, we have to be empirical in the way that we choose and demonstrate tried and tested methodologies. However, it's also as important, if not more so, to take the right people, put them into the right roles and empower them to make truly impactful decisions. Just looking over Mr. Bradley for that one. The RAF and the Navy established two product owners, one from each of the services who were suitably qualified and experienced both in the recruitment domain and within their own trades in a past life, you should say now for George Bradley, retired. So Sarah Taylor then working with RAF Recruitment HQ had previously been instrumental in defining an eight week demonstrator. Now, joining Sarah for this project was George Bradley, a sailor with both a strong engineering and a recruitment background and the drive to make change happen. So a strong product owner's vision was established with an evolving roadmap that would take recruitment HQ that one step closer to being a digital learning organization. We surrounded the product owners with people skilled in security, architecture, business analysis and program management, which gave us the right team to meet organizational quality gates and also to ensure that we engaged effectively with the owners of all the applications we needed to integrate with to maintain a consistent and accurate view of the data that we used and provided to others. We continue to enable that team as required, both with our own staff and further augment that using others in extensive Pega partner network such as lab, so we've got a couple of those sitting over there and that company for some of our support services. So a key component of the Pega Express methodology is the co-production of software in conjunction with the client. Some of those roles were identified as critical for the MOD to hold in-house and with the support of the Pega Academy Learning and on the job training in addition to that, they were able to assist with the build of their own software, bringing technical expertise into Recruitment HQ, which was unprecedented really. One such role was business analysis working in conjunction with highly skilled business analysts from Pega systems, uniformed and civil service personnel within the two recruitment HQs built an understanding of the software development lifecycle and implementing innovative change safely. One of those people was George. So yeah, over to you mate.

- I've only got a small notebook 'cause I don't know any big words and I've also got a new call sign. Apparently it's Tinker. Cheers for that. So, 1984, I went through the careers office store in Newcastle upon Tyne, I only went in 'cause it was raining. And 39 years later, as of last week I became a civilian. But the point of mine is my journey. So I started life in the Royal Navy's Air Engineering Technician, like my friend Trish down here. And I did 22 years fleet as avionics tech with weapons, radar, sonar, all that sort of stuff. And then I joined the career service and did 14 years and three of those were as we we noted all force manager or team leader. So we took that experience in, at my counterpart at the time of the project start was flight Sergeant Sarah Taylor, who unfortunately can't be here. And the point is that we undersell ourselves really badly in the military. We come out and we don't realize the skill set and transferable skills we have. So I was an air engineer and Sarah was a chef or in the Navy we call it a cabbage mechanic, okay? And she was also in the Royal Air Force Career Service. So there was that wealth of knowledge as well and the ability to strip something down, look at it, put it back together. And as Ben's alluded to, we had a lot of support. But the transferable skills are, if you can move manpower around, you can move any manpower around. If you understand engineering, it's just diagnostics. Okay? The transferable skills are the one that you've gotta get across to whoever you're taking it. They will have people that can do this. Just don't undersell yourself. And I'll hand back to Col.

- Thank you, mate. Cool, okay, so you've got an overview of what these guys did. Thank you for that. Okay, this all sounds great. What were the outcomes? What happened? What did you get from this project and what will this project leave as an enduring piece?

- Okay, I'll start with outcomes And first, at a strategic level, I believe that we changed the context and the culture of Royal Navy recruitment and that went way beyond the start and the finish point of this program, what we embedded into the organization was this idea that you could explore, you could be innovative, you could challenge and you could think about problems and come up with radical solutions, like, "Hey, we're gonna become a software delivery house." We also embedded things like design thinking into the recruitment process. We said, "We have to start focusing on the candidate and we start to have to look at what they want." Yeah, stop looking at this through the eyes of a 40-year-old naval commander who joined the Royal Navy in the late 1990s, because the world is different and the people are different and what they crave and they want is different. And if you don't give it to them, somebody else will, okay? So you have to get over your own arrogance and you have to focus on the person who wants these services. So we did that and we did that in some really innovative ways. Some were very challenging. So we brought in things like we took the DCTA that the RAF used and we were the first service to employ an unproctored test, an aptitude test. So that's a test that can be done at home, in a time and place of your choosing. And we used data to proctor the test to detect cheating, but we were the first service to do that. We also introduced widespread video interviewing on a really quick program, small timeframe. And then finally we came up with blind allocation. So we believed that we could improve the outcomes for recruitment if we improved the service that we gave to the candidate. So I think that's really important. And then we get into the operational nuts and bolts. Let's justify the business case. So we took out 130,000 workforce hours outta the end-to-end recruitment system on the front line. We get provided a 17% cost saving from workforce numbers. We didn't cut jobs, we just took that and reinvested it, 'cause we understood that actually our candidates need help. So if you can get more capacity in the workforce, they're able to lean in and help and do what's really important, which is human to human contact when a difficult decision comes along. We also increased candidate satisfaction levels by 78%. That was the highest we'd seen in four years. And then finally we'd go to a very personal point. I'd spent most of my 23 years in the military in frontline operations. So before I joined recruitment in 2019, I'd been in the Ukraine, 2018, I'd sailed HMS Montrose for a nine month deployment to the South China seas. I had been the person that has to sit down sailors and marines and say, "I'm really sorry you're staying on watch, you're not getting on that plane going home. You're gonna do some extra months." And when you unpick that problem, there is always a factor of recruitment in there. So I'd come away from the front line, I'd gone into recruitment. I had lots of friends that were still serving on the front line. I had friends who were commanding officers of frigates and destroyers and I definitely was going to do whatever I needed to do to make sure they got the people they wanted. I was going to make sure that recruitment showed the same dedication as what was being shown on the front line. So we were willing to stretch ourselves like George and Sarah did. Take ourselves out of our comfort zone of being an air engineer or being a military chef. And we were gonna learn new skills, because people relied on us doing that. And if we didn't do that, we were gonna let them down and we just weren't gonna do that. So over that two-year period, we put 9,000 people into the Royal Navy. That was unheard levels of performance. And we achieved it at the time of a global pandemic. And I think we've delivered some lasting change. And once again, I go back to Mike, that lasting change started with a wing commander in the RAF looking at something and going, "There's something different here." And then talking to people, that's me for delivering results.

- Thank you Tom and Mike. Yeah, so we took the two recruitment HQs and helped to turn them into their own digital learning organizations able to quickly adapt to the changes in the recruitment processes. That ability to take ideas, drop 'em into a backlog, and make incremental change over time, spans often two weeks or even less from their inception, has proved to be a really powerful tool. So this team has shown that this works and is valuable as we now have an enduring relationship with both the RAF and the Navy. Whilst enabling really talented individuals, such as Sarah, George and others currently engaged in training through the Pega Play, through the Pega Academy platform in life changing career journeys to become capable IT professionals. Sort of off script, for me personally, there's probably from George most of all, but I've learned a rich tapestry of sometimes colorful, very colorful terminology, which is probably gonna stick with me for quite a while. So yeah, what do you think Shippers?

- Shippers' me, again, little notepad, Tinker, whatever. The standout thing for me in going back to Tom's point about the change window, if you were on the wrong side of it, we had an incident beginning of the year, I think it was Trish, was it? With the sickle cell. Sickle cell. And to put it in military terms that could have been 9 to 10 months of horrible work rounds and sickle cell can take life. So in military terms from flash to bang, from the problem to the solution was 72 hours. And to quote the Wing Commander once more is, "Most plans fail at first contact, but at least if you're agile you can change it." And just from a very famous quote, and it's me, "We are masters of our own destiny, not victims of fate."

- Brilliant. Thank you gents. I just wanna add another lovely outcome from this project as well. So yesterday, so our commander, Joe Lincoln is here. Wing Commander Mike Burt and Trish went up on stage yesterday, Matt Allen, and received the Impact Award Winner for the most compelling business value of this year. So, congratulations everyone. Well done, thank you. So you're gonna have to put up with me for another two minutes and then we'll take some questions. So, when organizations come together and they want to deliver something, especially an IT project, they normally refer to process people and technology as their way of doing things. And most organizations get two of the three generally and then they muddle through the third. Sometimes you only get one of the three, right? And they model three, they get two. And what we saw with this project was very different. Very, very different. So the idea of using low-code application development tools to empower your business users is tremendously appealing and will be the only way we're gonna be able to bridge that digital divide. That digital gap is to do them something differently. The MOD have proven that they have the skills to do this. IT capacity is a competitive advantage. If you can get this right, you will have advantage in everything you do as your organization. Demand for IT resources from business units is significantly greater than it's ability to meet that demand. Even more so in government, because government are basically, they're fighting for the same resources that Pega are, Microsoft are, and everyone else are. So we're all in competition with each other to secure these elements and these resources. So the search for citizen developers or soldier developers, sailor developers, air developers, what I wanna call them is the way that people are gonna bridge this digital divide. That's the only way. So we're start getting a strong foundation, which is what these guys did at the outset with Mike, is essential to the success of any program moving forward. And for assistant developer, the foundation is the right people, the right processes, and the right technology, which is obviously Pega. So the right people, sustainable approach to education and enablement, absolutely critical. You need to empower people and you need to give 'em the right tools to learn as they do. And co-production is a fantastic way of doing that. Sitting with the people, people like Ben and Ben's team working through this. Understand how Pega operates and then letting them go, letting, you know, like a proud dad wouldn't you? Letting 'em all run off into the forest.

- [Thomas] The forest?

- The right processes, properly qualified promoting scale, reuse of complexity. And you saw that from Alan's presentation this morning. The other bit to this is, being brave enough to change the processes and having the ability to change the processes, 'cause of the technology you've now brought in allows you to do that. Be brave and change the process. Just because you've done something for 10, 15, 20, 30, 40 years doesn't mean it's right and probably isn't and will not meet the demand that you're gonna get moving forward. So changing the processes, and Mike and Tom did that brilliantly over the project and also the fact they also aligned processes as well, which was amazing. So these two organizations that, you know, there's competitive banter between these two organizations at the best of times, but having to come together and work together to get this right was brilliant to watch. And then obviously at the right technology, a platform that truly sits at the center of your business and we've heard about center out earlier, it allows you to capture your process. So forget about your channel, forget about the front end, we'll worry about that later. Forget about the back end, the complexity of legacy. Forget about all that. These guys here wanted to focus on their processes, they wanted to focus on their business challenges. And I think Pega is a brilliant tool to allow you to just focus on what's important, which is the business and getting the right people and the right tools together and decoupling those two channel backends. So I think that's it. Just to add a little bit more. So Pega in the U.K. is a very proud member of the Armed Forces Covenant. This is our way of giving back to the military. We support our veterans inside Pega. We have veterans at Pega where it's a global tighter forum that everyone is part of and we share ideas and we share our stories and whatever else and we help each other out and Cindy does a lot of bringing everyone together around that. So we're very proud and we're Silver, we're now a Silver member going for gold this year as well. TechVets, we talked about enablement. TechVets are an organized charity in the U.K. that reach out to people that are leaving the service and offer them career paths into technology. And Pega is part of their curriculum. So the Pega Academy is part of what they do and we offer Pega skills to people that are leaving. We're trying to work a lot closer with the MOD as a whole around their whole education acumen from a center perspective. And the last one is REORG. So nothing to do with recruitment whatsoever, but I've put 'em on on here, because they're a charity in the U.K. that deal with PTSD and they are our U.K. charity from a Pega perspective. And they basically provide a reach out using martial arts. So they actually do charity to do martial arts and they reach out and help people get over PTSD. Right, we are actually out of time, I'm really sorry, we over ran slightly. When we were practicing this, we had at least 10 minutes left. So yeah, so I apologize for that. We are over time, but we will take questions outside of this forum and we, yeah, if anything you want-

- The bar.

- George says the bar, it's always a good place to do questions. And that's it. We're done. Thank you very much for you being here. Hopefully you found it useful. Like I said, this was only one angle. We could have gone down on this project, we could have gone down lots of different angles, but we decided to focus on people, 'cause I think people resonates with everyone. Resonates with the people. There you go, thank you.