Understanding the problem
To facilitate NMP purchasing, Defence have established, or through Shared Services have acquired, a number of systems, being, Access Databases (six), Microsoft Excel Spreadsheets (six), Microsoft Word (one) and Defence Group Mailboxes (nine). These specific ‘systems’ are utilised by individual Directorates and accessed by staff within the Directorates to record and manage their workloads. The primary issue is that these systems are disparate which means there is no centralised reporting or management. The original problem statement was to improve visibility of procurements and workflow processes for Defence staff and ultimately greater reporting capability for all Defence Services.
Ideation & research
The initial operating capability (IOC) was designed to assess the business case and whether Defence would derive enough benefit from s the disparate systems.
With less than 3 weeks to go until the IOC date, a major design decision was questioned by the business. Projects were split into 2 types - Off Panel and on Panel. The business needed a third project type that blended functionality of both types. In traditional human developer built projects, this would have been 8-12 weeks development time. By using Codebots , the Business analyst was able to take the Codebot formatted design specification and run it through the bot. In less than 1 hour all the necessary code for the 3rd project type was generated and ready to test. The IOC date was easily met.