Red Badger | Customer Success

The Challenge

The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) sits at the centre of UK public health: the body responsible for making sure the medicines and medical devices people rely on are safe and effective.

The agency's responsibilities are unmistakably modern; the way it built digital products to deliver them was anything but. Three decades of outsourcing had left the MHRA with limited in-house digital capability, a release cadence measured in months, and no product in its history that fully met government accessibility standards.

As citizen expectations of public-sector digital services climbed, and as GDS guidelines set a high bar for what good looks like, the agency needed not just a better product, but a fundamentally different way of building products. The challenge was to evidence that a different way was possible, quickly enough to build momentum and credibility inside the organisation

Our approach

We started by building, not by writing strategy. Working alongside the MHRA, we launched a customer-facing MVP in eight weeks, small enough to be honest, useful enough to show what good looked like.

Alongside the product, we set up the foundations the agency would need to keep delivering at that pace: an in-house, cloud-native microservices platform built and owned by MHRA teams, replacing a 30-year reliance on outsourcing; a bespoke Agile Delivery Framework aligned to GDS guidelines, to raise the quality and speed of every customer-centric digital product that would follow; and continuous delivery practices designed to produce small, rapid feedback loops rather than big, infrequent releases.

The intent throughout was not to leave behind a hand-off, but to leave behind a capability

The results

The agency now has its first product in its history to meet accessibility standards, live, in front of citizens. The cloud-native platform underneath it is owned and operated in-house, ending a 30-year reliance on outsourced delivery.

The bespoke Agile Delivery Framework is the standard MHRA teams now use to build customer-centric digital products in line with GDS guidelines.

And release frequency has dropped from months
to hours, meaning improvements, fixes and new value can land in front of citizens at the cadence the work actually deserves.

CUSTOMER SUCCESS STORIES

Agile transformation in the public health sector

The Challenge

Our approach

The results

We solve complicated problems in complex places