From Stretched Thin to Strategic Focus
This Department is one of the most citizen-facing departments in this state's Government. From renewing licences and booking driving tests to planning travel and accessing public transport updates, their digital services support millions of citizens every year.
But internally, the team was stuck in survival mode. Sitecore upgrades were taking over a year to complete. Deployments required scheduled business-hour downtime. Change requests sat in backlog for years. Worse, up to 75% of the team’s time was going into patching, load balancing, and troubleshooting platform issues, not delivering services.
The department knew the mission was bigger than just keeping the website online. They needed to transform how digital delivery worked, from the infrastructure up.
A Platform That Was Slowing the Team Down
The complexity of their Sitecore environment was dragging down velocity and creating operational risk:
- Infrastructure was not highly available, causing frequent site interruptions.
- Support was internal and reactive, requiring 1.5–2.5 FTEs weekly to manage Azure.
- Due to predicted downtime, releases occurred outside of business hours, creating deployment friction.
- A backlog of up to 4 years had accumulated due to limited capacity and lack of automation.
- All changes required board approval, introducing heavy governance delays.
- Only 7 releases were achieved in 2024, despite growing demand from stakeholders.
The platform was focused more on maintenance than delivering value to the state, with a delivery model that couldn’t meet business demand, and a digital team caught in the weeds of platform infrastructure.
Transformation Became Non-Negotiable
If nothing changed, the department would continue to miss delivery targets for critical citizen-facing services while operating with growing technical debt and business frustration. There was a risk of failing to meet compliance and accessibility obligations, affecting stakeholder confidence.
In a department where digital is increasingly the front door for citizens, the cost of inaction was too high.
Requirement for reliability, velocity & innovation
The department launched a broader digital transformation initiative to bring their platform, practices and public experience in line with modern government standards.
They were looking for:
- A zero-downtime, multi-region Sitecore environment
- Full CI/CD automation with secure, compliant infrastructure
- Improved accessibility and alignment with the Government's Digital Design System
- A reliable partner to reduce operational overhead and increase confidence
They chose Dataweavers to deliver the transformation, leveraging Fusion for Sitecore.
Delivering at Velocity with Reduced Overhead
In partnership with Dataweavers, the department turned a high-risk, high-friction platform into a streamlined, fully automated foundation for innovation.
- Release velocity increased by 25% in just 6 months, with 22 releases in the H1 of 2025 alone.
- Sitecore story point velocity grew 25%, from 214 in 2024 to 268 in just H1 2025.
- Four years of backlog cleared, thanks to doubled throughput
- Zero-downtime deployments - teams now deploy live during business hours
- CI/CD pipelines implemented across environments
- Multi-region Azure failover for resilience and performance
- 24×7 monitoring and maintenance were transitioned to Dataweavers, freeing internal FTEs.
- Full accessibility uplift and design system compliance
