Product Evolution
ITIL managed service at extreme scale. 99.99% availability. 227 million requests during the 2022 rail strikes handled with negligible impact on response times.
What this service is
Go-live is where the pressure on a product changes, not where it ends. The project closes, the delivery team moves on, and the backlog doesn't. Improvements you know the service needs never quite justify a new procurement exercise, so small items pile up while the service stands still.
Product Evolution removes that friction. It adds retained monthly product improvement capacity on top of an active Run and Optimise engagement: feature development, UX improvements, technical debt reduction and integration work, delivered by the same team and under the same change and release governance that runs your service.
The managed service keeps your platform healthy. Product Evolution keeps the product itself moving forward: what it does, and how well it does it.
What we do
The improvement retainer
An agreed number of retained days each month, from five upwards, delivered as a planned slot in the month rather than scattered hours. Capacity scales up or down at service reviews, and unused days roll into the following month.
Run-grade delivery
Improvement work goes through the same Change Advisory Board, testing and release management as everything else on your engagement. The work lands on a production service with the governance a production service demands.
A clear boundary with the
managed service
Defects and incidents are covered by your Run and Optimise SLAs and never draw from retained days. Retained days are for improvements, and where a backlog item outgrows the retainer, we scope and price it as a separate piece of work rather than letting it crowd out your month.
A proactive improvement backlog, owned by CDS
A named improvement lead maintains a prioritised, sized backlog of proposed improvements, fed by the run side of your engagement: monitoring and event data, analytics, incident and problem trends, performance and accessibility findings, and user feedback. We review and re-prioritise it with you every month, and it always holds more sized work than the month's capacity. You never have to think of what to do with your days. Our job is to arrive with the proposal.
What you get
A service that improves every month as well as staying up. A monthly improvement report alongside your service report, covering what shipped, what it changed, and what's proposed next. A visible improvement roadmap you can put in front of your own stakeholders, and a standing answer to the question every service owner gets asked: what is the support budget delivering beyond keeping the lights on?
Who it's for
Heads of IT and service owners whose platform is on managed support but has stopped improving. Product owners who lost their delivery team when the build project closed and still have a roadmap. The natural fit is a service CDS built or already runs. For platforms we've inherited, we start with a fixed-scope technical assessment of the codebase, pipeline and platform, so we never commit to improvement work on a system we haven't seen.
The pattern behind the package
This is how our largest managed services already work. The teams behind National Rail Enquiries and Single Online Home combine ongoing service management with continuous development of the product, by the same people. Product Evolution packages that pattern so any client on Run and Optimise can buy it.
Why run with CDS?
One team, one backlog, one governance model: Your improvement work is delivered by the team that runs your service, through the change and release process that protects it. No handoffs between a support supplier and a development supplier, and no arguments about whose change broke what.
We bring the proposals: The improvement backlog is our responsibility, built from what the run side of the engagement tells us about your service. You direct the priorities; you don't have to generate the ideas.
Full lifecycle, one accountable team: We advise on, build, secure and run digital services. Product Evolution is the piece that keeps a service developing after the build project ends.
See our proof
We work with clients across central government, emergency services, health, financial services and national-scale consumer digital. The common thread is that the services they run can't afford to fail.
Single Online Home
24/7 managed service for a national policing platform serving 43 forces. 100% uptime since 2022. 50 million malicious requests absorbed monthly. Zero service impact.
National Rail Enquiries
ITIL managed service at extreme scale. 99.99% availability. 227 million requests during the 2022 rail strikes handled with negligible impact on response times.
Speak to our experts
Get in touch with our team today to see how we can help your organisation.
