MOF Skyline

Ministry of Finance

Streamlines the Development process by implementing Azure DevOps. Significantly reduces bugs. Better meets business requirements.

Industry

Government Administration

Country of Origin

Kuwait

In Business Since

+

Employees

+

Developers

Ministry of Finance

Background

The Ministry of Finance (MOF) of Kuwait is one of the entities within the ministerial structure of the state's administrative apparatus, entrusted with the comprehensive executive management of public finances in the State of Kuwait. This includes overseeing the public treasury, state assets (both public and private), international economic cooperation, monetary investment, and compensation deals.

MOF also provides essential services for public hospitality, housing for state employees, integrated financial systems, public warehousing and procurement systems, and other automated development systems for all financial sectors within the state's agencies. Furthermore, it is responsible for preparing draft public budgets and final accounts, establishing and monitoring their implementation, and overseeing state revenues, including taxes and stamp duties, and expenditures, all within its designated jurisdiction.

Business Needs & Challenges

MOF’s internal development teams are tasked with building and maintaining mission-critical applications that support both internal operations and citizen-facing services. However, the Ministry faced several challenges:

  1. Lack of standardized development workflows across teams.
  2. Delays in deployment cycles due to manual handoffs.
  3. Difficulty in tracking progress across multiple parallel projects
  4. Limited collaboration between development, operations, and quality assurance teams.

Characteristics of a viable solution

Obviously, MOF needs to address the following needs:

  1. Streamline the process of DevOps:
    1. Adopt an iterative, sprint-based approach to software delivery with clear role definitions (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer, Tester, Release Manager).
    2. Automate build, test, and deployment workflows to accelerate time-to-value and reduce human error.
    3. Enable cross-functional teams to work concurrently on shared code bases with real-time visibility.
    4. Ensure traceability, version control, and structured promotion of releases across environments.
    5. Empower testers to validate features in isolated builds and report issues directly to developers.
  2. Perform Release Management on solutions ready to be released or already released.
  3. Manage source code, while keeping proper versions for backup purposes.

Solution

MOF Partnered with Sharper Software to implement a comprehensive DevOps Platform, in addition to the SharperSkills Azure DevOps Training in order to establish a culture of DevOps. Starting as early as the Requirement Gathering stage, up-to and continuously improving Release Management, Ministry of Finance selected the Agile DevOps Process as the Process Template of Choice.

Development Team Skills Assessment

Sharper Software met with the members of the Development Team and performed one-to-one interviews to arrive at the current skills of the team. Sharper Software delivered a report to MOF's Management, showing the gaps in the required skill-set and the suggested assignment of roles and responsibilities. This approach helped beat the one-resource-per-project challenge.

The Microsoft DevOps Platform

Sharper Software installed and configured Azure DevOps Server on a server platform, as well as Visual Studio on every development team member's computer. Development Team member computers were configured to connect to and use Azure DevOps Server. This provided the Development Team members with the latest and coolest tools necessary to perform their jobs with high productivity.

Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment CI/CD Pipelines

End-to-end pipelines for automated testing, integration, and deployment across staging and production environments.

SharperSkills® Training

The Development Team attended the SharperSkills® Azure DevOps Hands-On Training to learn how to use Azure DevOps as the DevOps platform. Using a Virtual Machine, the team acquired a practical knowledge of the features and capabilities of Azure DevOps, without the bore, hassle and theoretical approach of traditional training. Now, the MOF team is ready to use Azure DevOps for everyday DevOps.

Benefits

Shorter Wait Times

Your customers, patients and/or employees will spend less time waiting for you to process their data.

Data Accuracy

Information is guaranteed to be correct and authoritative, as it's provided by the Public Authority for Civil Information.

Data Consistency

Data is consistent across your systems. If a centralized Master Data is used, it is possible to feed it via this solution.