I joined the New Zealand Ministry of Social Development as a Junior Technical Business Analyst in January 2020, two months before the country’s first lockdown, and was redeployed onto the hardship response for most of that year.
- Delivered self-service capability letting clients apply for benefits without breaking lockdown.
- Delivered straight-through processing, routing simple client cohorts, being single, working age and without dependents, to the benefit payment system with one button instead of the standard complex manual process.
Both had heavy emphasis on user flows. My user stories focused on the flow itself and on what needed to happen in the background alongside it.
Pace
Urgent changes went out in days or less. Less urgent ones were tested across multiple environments and placed on release trains, but that was not the majority of it. There were many emergency change paths and release teams worked around the clock.
To be accurate about my level: I was not at change control meetings and I was doing the work rather than making the decisions. It was grunt work, and there was a lot of it.
The processes I helped deliver sat in the path of the 2.66 million hardship applications the ministry handled during the response. That figure is the volume the country put through the system, not a number I produced.
What it did for me
I was treated as more than a junior and thrown in the deep end. The work spoke for itself and I stepped up to an intermediate level quickly with minimal hand-holding. Junior analyst in a national emergency at one end of that tenure, heritage lead on a platform migration at the other.