The Met Office was originally established as a service to mariners almost 170 years ago, going on to provide forecasts to newspapers and information to the Ministry of Defence after the First World War. Today, its world-leading app is used by millions of people every day.

With all of its rich history, scope for innovation and clear alignment with our People, Place and Planet focus, we were absolutely thrilled to be approached by digital agency and public sector technology delivery experts, Made Tech (upon recommendation!) to partner on a bid for the Met Office app. 

We got to work quickly to develop a rapid prototype and accompanying pitch. The subsequent win resulted in Made Tech becoming the official digital services partner in September 2022 and Calvium being in the driving seat for the Met Office’s mobile app provision for the next two years.

The project team comprising the combined forces of Calvium and Made Tech has since come to be known as ‘Techvium’, which is testament to how well the two teams have blended together. Here, we explore Techvium’s journey, share what we learned along the way and what made this collaboration a win-win for everyone involved.

Mutual partnership benefits

This partnership is an example of our favourite kind of collaboration: when you bring together a mix of skills, specialisms and experience in a way that is conducive to rapid innovation and offers plenty of opportunities to learn from each other and grow.

How Made Tech benefited

There has been an increasing push for the public sector and partners to collaborate with SMEs and level the playing field, with SMEs winning more than £15bn of the £50bn worth of public contracts on offer in the most recent UK government reports. Small and medium-sized enterprises are seen as key to offering value for money, innovation and agility, and a vital way for governments to deliver efficient, effective public services that meet the needs of citizens.

As a perfect example of this, Made Tech believed partnering with Calvium would add expertise in mobile app technology to their public sector and web application portfolio, strengthening the bid.

In addition, we brought the agility of an SME and innovation experience to the partnership. In recent years, Made Tech has seen rapid growth from a team of dozens to a team hundreds strong. Like many companies experience when they upscale very quickly, this often means they need to develop processes to quickly form high functioning teams with new people. Our shared high performance standards and flexibility meant we could easily blend in, to help them speed up innovation.

How Calvium benefited

First and foremost, Made Tech have been great to work with. We have previously delivered work for the Department for Transport and NHS, but working in partnership on a large/longer-term public sector project provides very different, very valuable, experiences and opportunities.

So this partnership has been an excellent opportunity to broaden knowledge, gain experience on bigger bids and build up our public sector portfolio. This is a key area of interest for us and we are excited to be learning more from a big player in the digital public procurement area, and take that next step of growth.

We are always looking at ways to streamline, improve and make things better, and so this has been a great period of learning for us to understand opportunities for more agile innovation – for example, the complexity of legacy systems, choices of tech stack, optimisations in the way things can be rolled out or developed. While being a smaller organisation generally means you can be leaner and keep communication tighter, it was great to see Made Tech is still delivering on many of these benefits, even as a much larger organisation. This is especially reassuring given our own ambitions for growth. (While we’re here, we’re hiring!)

Having the chance to develop government and other accreditation has of course been a bonus, too.

Why the pairing works

It became very clear very early on that we both had similar working cultures and our values aligned – particularly around wanting to make a responsible and positive impact on the world, and doing meaningful work for the public sector.

From the earliest meetings, it was established that we are both companies that encourage people to say what they think rather than shy away from it, and take great pride in having good, competent people in our teams and an open, transparent and high-performance culture.

The Made Tech team has been incredibly supporting and inclusive throughout, which has really helped to cement our partnership bonding and made it much easier to take those leaps of faith which can seem a bit daunting at the start.

What next?

The Met Office are real champions of user voice, user testing, and embracing innovative use of digital technologies. We are excited to contribute our expertise to the continuous evolution of the existing apps, and to explore potential opportunities in digital innovation for them and others in the public sector.

In particular we see clear opportunities for the Met Office to benefit from digital placemaking – particularly around the use of locative technologies and needs of different users. For instance, their aspirations could be informed and supported by digital placemaking frameworks, innovation workshops, and inclusive approaches looking at people, place and tech holistically, as we have been with the NHS NEL project.

It is still early days and we’re excited to think about what the possibilities might be – both within this project and with more public sector projects in future.