Helping you thrive.

Discovery

Answer works with clients to take a vision, idea, or problem through an inclusive and robust approach to discovery and shape it into a solution. We ask big questions. None bigger than 'Why?'

We strive to understand the user, their problems, their needs, and how we can resolve them. We creatively design experiences and technology solutions with quality at their core. We collaborate, building great teams together. We plan, we agree on 'the how?', and we always focus on the outcome. We take you forward on a journey to achieve your goal, and our ethos is all built on delivery and success.

Agile Governance

Answer will take you through your digital journey. We are agilistas and proud of it. We will take you through end-to-end delivery from discovery to go live and beyond, supported by a strong team of pragmatic leaders and team players.

We recognise that governance must resonate with the environment in which it is used. We simplify our approach, using data to offer insight and answer the question 'Why'. Why are we doing it this way, and is our approach right? Technology development and adoption are two sides of the same coin, which we understand, and our services are designed with this in mind. We provide the right skills and experience to help enable digital transformation.

Delivery

Answer has tools and techniques to guide you through your digital journey. Proven tools and techniques which we have finessed over decades of implementing digital solutions and software across the country. No one size fits all, and we have learnt to change our approach as technology and its application changes with us.

We are digital engineers. We are consultants. We are technologists. But more importantly, we are one team working with you on the discovery, development, and automation of your digital solution.

Answer has extensive experience in DevOps, Service Management, testing, Live Services and more, and these components are always weaved into our overall service and deployment models.

Quality assurance is at the core of everything we do because a poor-quality product is never an option. Through our extensive technology infrastructure, including cloud, CI/CD and more, we can design, build, test, and deploy software that is scalable, performant, and secure. We have total assurance of quality.

Strategy

We develop an array of APIs that allow integration and interoperability across health and care whilst navigating through national NHS Digital architectures, aligning local priorities with local needs. Our extensive technical knowledge of NHS digital infrastructure, supported by local, regional and national projects, places us as one of the leading digital agency across the public sector.

Answer has many other capabilities, too, including integration and DevOps expertise, providing clients with a unique opportunity to work with some of the most experienced people in this space, where we can share the principles of what works well and what doesn't. This gives you the benefit of our hindsight, so your ideas and solutions are always one step ahead.

This, coupled with our business consulting capability, provides you with a unique agency with a unique set of skills, experiences, and expertise.

What is integration?

Integration is the act of bringing together smaller components into a single system that functions as one. Integration is harder to achieve, the greater the number of systems that are involved. This includes interoperability between systems where two or more systems can exchange data across multiple databases through an integration engine.

Systems, suppliers, and protocols all have their own ways of doing things. Integration is the middleman who allows these to talk to one another by exchanging data and data models.

The unification makes it easier to draw insights from data that, when acted upon, can deliver faster, more meaningful business growth.

What is DevOps?

DevOps is the combination of cultural philosophies, practices, and tools that increases an organisation's ability to deliver applications and services at high velocity:

evolving and improving products faster than organisations using traditional software development and infrastructure management processes. This speed enables organisations to serve their customers better and compete more effectively in the market.

What is a business consultant?

Business consultants provide management consulting underpinned by deep domain expertise to help organisations improve their performance and efficiency.

Business consultants can often provide invaluable constructive criticism on a huge range of areas from finances (where to save and where do we put that saving) to influencing, inspiring and mixing up an organisation's culture.

What is QA?

Quality Assurance (QA) is making sure that something works as intended. Having a QA process is critical to the success of a company and customer satisfaction.

QAs are often the gatekeeper in determining whether or not the feature is ready for release. While testing is a part of QA, it is not the whole picture.

How does it fit in?

Testing traditionally happens at the end of a process; however, at Answer, we have adopted a shift left approach.

It means QA is an important part of the Agile team throughout the project life cycle, whereby automated test scripts are agreed upon and written upfront and alongside development. By doing this, QA becomes a mindset of the whole team and catches issues early on.