2019 at dxw

Well done, team!

As you might have seen from some of our #dxwDaysOfChristmas tweets, 2019 has been a great year for dxw. I wanted to reflect on the team’s achievements, as we look forward to 2020. We hope to do even more next year to help improve the lives of people who use public services.

On the work side

One of our ambitions for 2019 was to do more work with clients outside central government. This year, we’ve worked with more diverse clients than ever before, helping more teams to do better things. That’s included working with a number of local authorities like Croydon, North Lincolnshire, Barnsley, Hackney, and Southwark.

Some things we’ve done

We officially opened our office in Leeds and have worked with several organisations in the north of England including the Department for Education in Manchester. We’re working with them to build and operate an online service that makes additional payments to teachers as part of the strategy for teacher recruitment and retention. That’s something we’re particularly proud of and we’ll be blogging about what we’ve done in the new year.

This is just part of our continued support for the education sector. At Ofsted, we worked to help them get better feedback from parents and the Crown Commercial Service (CCS) to help schools find supply teachers and other agency staff. At CCS we also built a new system for suppliers to report billions of pounds worth of spending through government procurement frameworks.

We’ve just finished a piece of work with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government on helping local authorities do more and better digital collaboration. And a first for us was working internationally as part of the Global Digital Marketplace project. We visited Indonesia, Mexico, Colombia, Malaysia, and South Africa as part of 2 discoveries on digital, data and technology services and supply chains.

Things we’re still doing

There’s lots of other work that we started this year that’s still underway, including:

Well done, team!

On the people side

We carried on recruiting in Leeds and London so by the end of 2019 we’ll be a team of 70 people plus a few specialists from partners like Content Design London and Paper.

Poss, our COO, talked about some of the challenges of growing so quickly earlier this year. But having more people means we can do more good work and have a greater impact. It’s also the right time to rebrand to reflect the kind of organisation we are now, and move offices in London, so 2020 is going to be a momentous year for us.

We looked at the people stats since dxw started 11 years ago. In that time, only 32 people have left us. That feels pretty good. We also had a couple of people firsts. We welcomed our first person on our returners’ programme and created a programme for junior developers which we advertised last month. We had an overwhelming response for the junior developer roles (over 150 people applied) and we’re looking forward to welcoming them in the new year.

Living our values

As a business with strong values we’re acutely aware of our environmental impact. We have a group that works on how we can reduce our carbon footprint as a company, and we also measure and hopefully reduce the environmental impact of our transformation work. Expect to see us talking about some substantial things next year on what we’re doing to lessen the effect of our work on the planet.

So 2019 has been quite a year. As the managing director of dxw, I’m truly humbled and incredibly lucky to work with such a talented and committed bunch of people. I can’t wait to see what we achieve together in 2020.