Inside NSW's impending new "world-class" jury system

Overcoming traditional processes of government

The new JMS on a mobile device.

It may sound well-mapped out and organised, but the significant jury management system replacement project did not come without its challenges.

Confronted with the time-consuming and cumbersome processes of government, Huxnam was forced to find new ways of working to ensure the project didn’t run over time.

“The challenges across government, from a delivery point of view, pose immense challenges and we struggled with the procurement model approach as well as traditional provisioning that is used to getting services set up,” he told iTnews.

“Everything government does is through a procurement path and if you want to scale up your architecture or you need high availability you have to go through the procurement process - every time you want to do something it’s five weeks wait for the business case to be approved, another six weeks for ordering etc, and then it blows out and you’re waiting months.”

Huxham decided to set up his own autonomous development environment. The team bought their own servers and set up an entire development environment they could use at their will.  

“We have now successfully done over 3780 automated builds in the last year. If we had to rely on the traditional middleware approaches the number would probably have been less than 40 builds over a year. It would have materially impacted our project,” he said.

“We effectively set-up our own dev, quality assurance and test environments utilising open-source tools and a Maven framework with the composite Atlassian tool suite. 

“When we wanted to conduct our specific prototype testing with users — and we were going to be impeded in having our pre-production environment setup — we obtained approval to go to the cloud and host this training environment on the Amazon RedHat Openshift platform.”

Huxham said had he not done so, the team may have missed its deadlines. 

“The capital funding only lasts for two years, and the project has to end 30th June next year. We have to be ready, and we will be.”

The department was keen to purchase an off-the-shelf software solution and customise it. Huxnam managed to convince them such a package would not support the business use case. 

“With off-the-shelf you are always in danger of falling off the upgrade path, users don’t value what has been delivered and support and maintenance are always high,” he said.

“You are also beholden to the APIs that change as part of the vendor's revenue plan — and training costs are always high.”