A bespoke year for software

Although we lost a leader, his legacy had sparked so much in the team and we vowed to continue the year as he’d have wanted – by doing amazing things, being creative and innovative, and doing him proud.

So, this is what we’ve achieved in 2022:

• Welcomed four new people to the team, including a new department head in Mike Dent
• Promoted Rich and Danial to Software Team Leads for their outstanding contribution
• Worked on some amazing projects with new clients including Anchor, Galliford Try and iamproperty
• Won ‘Best Use of Data’ and ‘People’s Choice’ at the Dynamo Awards for our work with A Star Attendance
• Supported Durham University students by sponsoring DurHack and helping them develop all sorts of amazing innovations to tackle modern day challenges
• Allowed HomeGroup to roll out a totally different operating model for servicing their properties, allowing better quality of life for many particularly struggling in the current financial climate
• The school attendance system for A-Star improved the attendance of kids in school, particularly for those from a less advantaged background, which is the biggest investment that society can make in future generations. And from a tech perspective, it was really cool designing something to store such highly confidential information in a secure way
• Developing systems to help business schools achieve their ‘triple crown accreditation’ saving hundreds of work hours of manual submission process by academic staff and research departments
• Providing NatCen, Britain's largest independent social research organisation, a system to pay their thousands of interviewers’ wages and expenses in a hugely flexible way, improving efficiency and contributing to the incredibly important work that they do for social research
• Enabling Reed Boardall to get a clearer picture of what's going on on-the-ground through use of new software technologies and practices combined with AI
• Decreased financial risk and increased auditability with a leading international distillery
• General quality of life improvements on multiple development teams helping them to deploy safer, deploy faster, and reduce burnout

View our bespoke software development service.

“We've had a perfect storm of changing leadership, challenging clients and redefining our offering as a department this year.

“The team have been through some rough patches but now with the introduction of team leads and a clearer vision of the service we want to provide, together with some new opportunities on the horizon, we're excited for what the future will bring.

“We've implemented new technology stacks, new DevOps practices and integrated more security checks into our pipelines, and seeing the team challenge themselves in these areas - and how they pass on that knowledge to other teams - has been really interesting.

“We want to use capabilities and metrics outlined in the DORA State of DevOps research program to really challenge our ways of working and remain high performing software teams for our clients. We want to take this learning and partner with other development teams and communities to help them deliver high quality software quickly and safely.”

Mike Dent, Head of Bespoke Software