Forward deployed engineers plan
Overview
The Forward Deployed Engineers plan aims to accelerate digital delivery by providing short-term, on-demand, hands-on technical resources to digital teams, helping them solve complex problems which require extra skills or capacity.
It was created in response to support requests from digital teams and Deputy Directors, and is currently at the Experiment stage.
Use cases
Skill gaps
Helping to solve short term problems/improve implementation where product teams don't have a short-term requirement for a particular skill-set (DevOps is a good example).
Platform and capability adoption
Helping teams consume internal capabilities effectively.
- strategic hosting adoption
- DevOps maturity improvements
- observability implementation
Discovery and experimentation
Requirements for hands-on technical staff that aren't currently on the team.
Examples include
- prototyping an idea before committing funding
- technical feasibility assessment
- Proof of Concept (PoC)
- spikes to reduce uncertainty around a delivery approach
- evaluating "buy vs. build" decisions
Critical problem resolution
- skilled engineers engaged to solve difficult problems
- major production incidents
- chronic service instability
- system performance bottlenecks
- scalability issues
- technical debt blocking delivery
- security vulnerabilities requiring rapid remediation
High-risk delivery support
When teams need extra capacity to hit a critical deadline (e.g. regulatory/compliance deadlines government commitments). The maximum project time should be 6 months.
Important: This approach is not to be used for filling general resource gaps in teams.
Initial resourcing profile
All engineers will be hands on technical engineers who will write code and support teams, not management engineers.
Software engineering
- Principal Developer
- Senior Developer
DevOps engineering
- Principal DevOps
- Senior DevOps