How Motability Operations went from deploying >1x/week to 2000x/week with Atlassian DevOps tools

Challenge: Motability Operations needed faster, more agile development processes to support UK residents in leasing accessible transportation.

Solution: Engineering implemented a continuous deployment cycle by adopting Jira Service Management Assets and expanding their use of Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket.

Impact: With Atlassian tools, Motability Operations has transitioned 90% of their workload to continuous deployment, increased dev autonomy, and freed up 16 engineering work days a month.

An accessibility leader brings modern development practices to traditional sectors

Motability Operations connects 770,000 UK families to mobility solutions through the Motability Scheme, enabling residents to lease accessible vehicles with their government allowance. As the UK’s largest car fleet operator, MO buys 10% of all new cars sold from 5,000 dealerships. Each day, 2,000+ customers lease vehicles online with insurance and maintenance included, while 1,500+ employees across tech and business teams use Atlassian cloud tools to build and enhance these services.

Motability Operations has been an Atlassian customer since 2008, with Jira and Confluence acting as the essential foundation for their DevOps processes. Lloyd Jones, Agile and Engineering Practice Manager, knew teams could get even more value out of their toolset. 

MO was using a prescriptive, disjointed deployment process that only allowed them to ship code anywhere from one time per week to one time per month. To enable an agile, continuous deployment cycle, Lloyd and MO’s DevEx team decided to elevate their use of Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket, while adopting Jira Service Management Assets for process documentation. 

The transition had to be handled carefully. Motability Operations’ products handle personal information, financial data, and a high volume of valuable transactions every day. Fortunately, the new process delivered the results their Atlassian users deserve, enabling them to continuously improve the platform based on feedback and better meet customer needs. 

Since expanding their use of Atlassian cloud tools, Motability Operations is shipping 90% of their production workload on a continuous deployment cycle, even hitting a new record of over 2,000 deployments in a single week. By eliminating manual code approvals, they’ve freed up 16 engineering work days each month. 

Beyond the metrics, the shift has brought Motability Operations’ DevOps processes in line with their culture: collaborative, communicative, and centered on security and quality above all else.

Evolving development processes to better meet users’ mobility needs

As the UK population grows, Motability Operations will need to keep serving more and more people. They’re also finding new, innovative ways to help people keep moving. For example, Motability Operations is currently working to break down barriers to electric vehicle ownership, helping users save money on fuel costs and reduce their environmental impact. 

As MO looked to the future, Lloyd’s team envisioned Engineering transitioning to a more agile, autonomous way of working. They wanted teams to be able to experiment easily and ship constantly based on customer feedback, instead of being constrained by the rigid, legacy deployment cycle and manual processes that had not drastically changed for nearly a decade. 

There was no connection between the dev, pre-production, and production areas of Motability Operations’ pipeline.“Basically, we’d bundle up our new code, document it in a load of Jira tickets, and link it to the appropriate Confluence page to provide evidence,” says Lloyd. 

Each deployment demanded time and attention from an engineer. "The process required devs to commit code, then log in elsewhere to start a deployment,” says Lloyd. “Even if approval is just one click, that’s talented people not doing their true job of solving problems and improving our product.” 

For years, this deployment process happened just once every three months. While the engineering team had worked hard to speed up deployment to a weekly or biweekly cycle, they wanted to move even faster. Not only was the imposed structure on their workflow frustrating and limiting, but the cognitive load of batching and shipping all the code at once also took mental resources away from other tasks.

When the old ways “just weren’t cutting it,” continuous deployment paved the way for greater productivity and protection

“We started to see a clear desire from our teams to be autonomous and go at the pace that worked for them,” says Lloyd. “The prescribed cycles and manual processes just weren't cutting it."

Leadership was interested in a new approach, but understandably wanted to be deliberate and thorough to minimize risk. Lloyd knew continuous deployment was actually better aligned with Motability Operations’ culture and goals, so he faced the challenge of gaining buy-in head on. 

“I spent a lot of time with our stakeholders and technology leaders, showing them how continuous deployment was a lower risk, more transparent, more secure way of working,” he shares. “It’s actually preferable to ship just a few lines of code at a time, instead of large batches.”

Doubling down on what’s already working: optimizing and expanding with Atlassian cloud tools

"Jira has been in the Engineering Team as long as I've been here,” says Lloyd. “It's at the heart of what our teams do and how we operate." To reach their goals, Lloyd’s team chose to adopt a new Atlassian tool, Jira Service Management, to use Assets along with their well-established Jira and Bitbucket products in even more optimized ways. 

These tools are complemented by Confluence, which MO now uses primarily for team and technical documentation instead of approvals.

Combining Jira, Assets, and integrations for fast, secure, and flexible workflows

With Jira and Bitbucket, Lloyd and his teams have built a faster, more agile development cycle, leveraging deep integrations between Jira, Bitbucket, and other development tools like Jenkins and Snyk. 

Now, each team follows their own test-driven development cycle. Teams commit code into Bitbucket, where at least two employees review and approve it together. Through Bitbucket’s Jenkins integration, code is deployed continuously, without any manual effort. At this point, the user story in Jira is also linked to the deployment and test results are attached to the issue.

As the code is deployed to the lower environment, Jenkins automatically creates a Jira ticket for tracking the release. This integration has enabled dev teams to automate end-to-end documentation of every deployment cycle by eliminating the manual administrative work they had to do previously. "With Jira, Bitbucket, and Jenkins integrated, we're able to bring code from commit to deploy with no one touching it, while still evidencing that it's been through all the stages of our pipeline,” Lloyd explains. 

Lloyd says his teams especially love Jira's development panel and the real-time pipeline visibility it provides. "As they’re working, devs can just look over and see build and deployment status right in the side panel,” says Lloyd. “They can see right away what’s coming next and whether they’ve missed anything.”

During deployment, Jira documentation tickets move to Jira Service Management, where Motability Operations uses Assets to create a complete, centralized system of record. "Assets have essentially become a really accessible reference for our services and their components," Lloyd shares. This enhanced documentation is crucial for Motability’s security-conscious culture.

While this workflow is the basic formula, Lloyd loves how the Atlassian cloud platform gives teams the flexibility to adapt it to their own preferences. “We want our teams to be as autonomous as possible,” he says. “We love that they can flex Jira however they need to, to improve their processes and speed.”

Bringing culture and processes into alignment

Since rolling out more modern processes and expanding Motability Operations’ Atlassian platform, leadership has seen the impact of an autonomous, fast-paced development culture. “We were really able to show the value of this new method by rolling out and proving things slowly, with small groups of users and dealerships,” says Lloyd. “It's been so much easier with Jira’s highly visible tooling, which enables incremental change.”

In particular, leveraging Jira for continuous deployment has enabled teams to pay even more attention to security. “The analyst on one of our teams loves the Jira security dashboard. She lives in there all the time,” says Lloyd. “This shift has elevated our ability to engage with her on a level playing field.”

From two deployments a month to 2,000 a week

Since embracing more modern practices and expanding their use of Atlassian cloud, Motability Operations is using continuous deployment for over 90% of the production team's workload. They even set a record of over 2,000 deployments in a single week when they introduced automatic code upgrades. 

"We wouldn't even have been able to launch these automated upgrades without our Atlassian tool stack,” says Lloyd. “Every single one of these deployments is self-documenting, tracked in Jira, Bitbucket, and JSM Assets."

Reclaiming 16 engineer workdays per month

Engineers are no longer manually updating Jira tickets, uploading test results, or creating release documents. Freeing up a half day's work for all 16 teams, for each biweekly deployment, has saved Motability Operations the equivalent of 16 work days every month.

Thinking big, working more efficiently, and shipping ideas faster

This new way of working has enabled a transformation that’s quickly expanding from tech teams to the entire organization. "Our culture has always been collaborative. I love how Atlassian accelerates that instead of slowing people down,” Lloyd continues. 

Teams are not only experimenting with ideas more, but they’re also bringing them to life much faster. For example, one of Motability Operations’ product managers proposed a new, more efficient engine for pricing vehicles at scale. “The first bits of code were written within a day, and it went to production and was done within a week," says Lloyd. "Historically, that would have taken weeks in ideation and prioritization alone."

A bright future for Motability Operations — and users’ mobility — with Atlassian cloud tools

Looking ahead, Lloyd’s team and Motability Operations’ leadership are excited to bring more departments into the Atlassian ecosystem. “We have other teams, like Marketing, wanting to use Jira,” Lloyd explains. “Through working with tech teams, Marketing can see that it gives them a level of control and visibility that other options don’t.”

MO is also adding Jira Product Discovery to their Atlassian suite to more efficiently integrate strategic goals and customer feedback into day-to-day work. They plan to start using Jira Align for executive prioritization and roadmapping as well.

What’s more, these internal optimizations are trickling down to external impact. Now, Lloyd and the teams at MO are able to apply customer feedback to improve the organization’s platform in almost real time.

Agility, speed, and security are especially important for a mission-driven organization like Motability Operations. When their dev teams ship quality code faster and smoother, it means people with mobility differences across the UK get the transportation they need faster too.