MXA was engaged to develop a Release Management Framework to support the Department of Defence’s End User Computing (EUC) On-Going Support (OGS) program.

Leidos is a key partner to the Department of Defence (DoD) in managing the largest government End User Computing (EUC) platform in Australia. Leidos required support and the development of a best practice Release Management framework for use by the EUC Ongoing Support function.

MXA employed its proven and efficient Design Thinking approach for this engagement. This approach clarifies and identifies problems that may or may not be known to the client and ensures designed solutions are user-focused and address the identified problems.

This approach consists of five steps including:

• Empathise – we conducted interviews and workshops in order to capture the needs, opportunities and sentiments of key roles to identify the drivers for change.
• Define – the gathered information is subjected to analysis where issues become clear and core problems that need to be addressed can be identified.
• Ideate – the team conducted brain-storming sessions to create and discuss different solutions. The viable solutions were further validated within the team before being presented to the clients for their feedback and acceptance.
• Validate – a draft Release Management Framework was developed and tested with key stakeholders across Leidos and the DoD to ensure it catered to the needs of both organisations.
• Recommend – the findings and recommendations developed in the previous stage were finalised and documented in the final products.

Additionally, MXA proposed theuse of both business process and technology automation tools for release management and provided recommendations for best fit and use.

MXA delivered a best practiceRelease Management Framework which has allowed Leidos and the DoD staff to perform their roles in a more effective and optimised manner.

MXA produced Role Maps that enabled clear communication of each stakeholder’s role in the process, the larger context for that role, key relationships, and the measures used to define their role’s success. These posters were pivotal in achieving staff engagement across multiple service delivery towers.

Implementation of the Framework enabled:

• The structured processing of rolling system​ updates to over 100,000 end-points.
• The facilitation of engagement with thousands of business system owners to support continual release updates for applications and infrastructure in a co-ordinated and planned fashion.
• Supported of the DoD’s management and delivery of capability across Service Towers.
• The enforcement of integrity into the Production environment.