MMT are proud to announce we have received a National Technology Award for Best Enterprise Tech Project. This award is a testament to the great work MMT has delivered collaboratively with _VOIS (Vodafone Intelligent Solutions) for Vodafone, developing an industry leading cloud solution.
Vodafone is going through its biggest transformation yet, from being a traditional mobile and broadband company, to becoming a legitimate tech company with software engineering at the heart of everything it does.
With MMT’s support, Vodafone has recently launched a bespoke stock data management and forecasting tool, Cavendish. For the first time, this tool enables Vodafone to surface data in a way that is ground-breaking to the business. The data captured through Cavendish has given Vodafone a previously inaccessible insight into new trends and new business opportunities, at a fraction of the previous costs.
To better understand how this enterprise cloud solution has transformed the business, we sat down with one of the masterminds behind Cavendish and other key parts of Vodafone’s digital transformation, Ashley Martin.
Join us for a conversation with Ashley, as we discuss how Vodafone, with MMT’s support in both consulting and hands-on capacity, has unlocked exciting growth opportunities to scale Vodafone’s global markets.
Q: Can you tell us a little bit more about Vodafone's transformation journey, where you are at the moment, and where you are headed as a company?
Vodafone is working on becoming a tech company through strategies like Tech 2025. We're focusing on improving customer experiences through our digital platforms and creating technical advancements like chatbots. These bots help us give customers quicker response times than waiting on the phone. We’re also exploring some exciting technical advancements as to how we look after our customers and what we can offer them. This is where Cavendish comes in – it’s enabled us to make a logistical change and align with Vodafone's vision to make us more agile in delivering technology solutions.
Q: What is your personal view on what makes digital transformation a success?
Digital transformation for me is about keeping up with today’s rapidly evolving technology. And the way I go about it in my work, I focus on two areas that offer the most growth potential for Vodafone: DevOps and cloud computing.
DevOps is about building the right team and best practices in digital product development that would allow us to build digital solutions at speed and with focus on quality. The other factor is establishing processes that keep engineering teams at the peak of their productivity, while ensuring they are motivated, inspired, engaged and satisfied in their jobs as a team and as individuals.
The cloud empowers us to build composable, secure and scalable digital ecosystems and digital solutions that enable Vodafone to respond to the needs of modern digital-first consumers quickly, with no compromise to quality. When moving to cloud with projects like Cavendish, we also saw significant cost reduction and better use of engineers’ time by automating some of the historically manual tasks.
It's about being able to respond and adapt quickly to the market, collaborate better within the organisation, and improve resilience and efficiency.
Q: Can you tell us about the Cavendish project you led on, and the software solution that resulted from this project which won an award at the National Technology Awards as well as the award for the Best DevOps Cloud Product at the Computing DevOps Excellence Awards earlier this year?
Our bespoke cloud-powered (and now award-winning!) Cavendish platform collects data from warehouses and analyses it. The data then can be securely presented back to the business and can be used for improving our services and keeping our customers as happy as ever.
One of the key targets with Cavendish is to ensure that the data is recorded securely, is usable by the business and ready to analyse for growth and, most importantly, to improve the experience for our customers. This includes quicker decision making and better management of supply and demand.
The platform has evolved over time, with investments made in building an in-house engineering team, getting processes right within the DevOps space, and looking at the architecture of the platform itself. As we move towards Microservices, the platform can be extended in a way that allows for the addition of atomic services that can communicate with each other via APIs. The platform has also been used for proof of concept for a forecasting application.
Q: Can you talk about the main challenges you faced and the biggest successes you had during the journey of developing Cavendish using Agile and DevOps?
One of the main challenges we faced was that we were a waterfall domain, so we had to transition to Agile and DevOps. However, we were able to overcome this and develop the product in an Agile way, writing user stories that adhere to a definition of ready.
We also transformed from having a backlog that barely held together to having a healthy backlog for planning and prioritisation. The biggest successes were in creating a team that is part of the Agile process, where people enjoy their work, feel psychologically safe, and adhere to Scrum principles.
In terms of DevOps, we were able to create a full DevOps mantra that serves our developers, making things as repeatable, easy, and reliable as possible. We plan to expand the use of the platform in logistics and retail across Vodafone globally and to reuse the microservices that we already have in Cavendish. Additionally, we hope to share our success with other teams at Vodafone and help them start their own journeys in Agile and DevOps.
Q: How did you leverage your partnership with MMT within the Cavendish project?
Initially, we brought MMT into the project to assess our existing tech stack and to audit our agile maturity as a team. This allowed us to focus on key areas of improvement rather than wasting energy on things that were already working well. Further down the line, MMT also provided talented resources, some of whom became inseparable members of our in-house team. We also valued the opportunity to have informal conversations with MMTs senior consultants and digital transformation experts, who provided invaluable advice and chats around soft skills, team building and agile best practice that were really useful.
The results of MMT’s work with Vodafone
We had a great time speaking to Ashley about the development and launch of Cavendish. It’s been an exciting project for the entire MMT team to work on, and we’re thrilled at the positive impact it has had on Vodafone’s business objectives.
By utilising our enterprise cloud solution, Vodafone are now able to unlock the full potential of Cavendish at speed and scale. We’ve even been able to quantify the effect that MMT’s work has had on Vodafone’s business, delivering exceptional cost-reductions across the board.
This includes:
Operational delivery & infrastructure cost reduced by 74%
Infrastructure-only cost reduced by 96%
Project cost reduced by 65%
Deployments are automated and can be triggered multiple times a day
As an industry-leading digital transformation agency, we can help you maximise the benefits of your existing tech stack, build an innovative enterprise cloud solution and unlock the value of your data. Book a discovery call to find out how we can help you implement cloud-powered software solutions, capable of transforming your customer experience, boosting profitability, reducing costs and gaining a competitive edge.
