Digital

Reflections on the Warm Scottish Welcome programme

May 15, 2025 by Stewart Hamilton No Comments | Category Content Design, Data, DDaT Profession, Digital Scotland

Blog by Robbie Fergusson, Senior Product Manager, Design, Digital and Data team (Warm Scottish Welcome programme).

I worked on the Warm Scottish Welcome programme for nearly three years as part of a mixed team. We were responsible for delivering applications to help match Ukrainian guests with host families in Scotland, who offered their flats and houses to help home them. Having (nearly!) completed the handover of our matching applications to the Ukraine Division and having tentatively moved on to my new project, our newly disbanded Digital Data & Design (DDD) team has been taking stock of what has been achieved in the course of the Warm Scottish Welcome programme.

I know from my own experience, as well as speaking to my former colleagues, that working on something as important as a refugee crisis was an extremely motivating thing. The pride in doing your job well when you could see the real world impact you could make always gave me a reason to learn, and knuckle down when decisions and delivery needed to be made at speed. Feedback from other teams have been very kind on our impact on policy implementation and operations, and I know my colleagues enjoyed working with these areas as much as I did. We even had a former host of Ukrainian guests join the team as a business analyst – this was a passion project.

I asked my fellow engineers, business analysts, and user researchers what they thought was the most important part of successfully delivering in a crisis in the way the DDD team achieved. The overwhelming theme was the sense of “safeness” that the team had – yes, we worked in a high pressured environment, but people felt safe to learn from mistakes and pulled together accordingly. The “no blame culture”, that allowed us to regroup and reprioritise allowed us to get the best out of the skills of the people we had on the team. We all felt like a team, which is easy to say, and harder to create. People felt empowered to speak up and challenge decisions, and influence the ongoing development.

We also talked about what lessons we’ve learned that we can take into our next projects – immediately trying to apply our learnings elsewhere. Here our perspectives diverged and looked different things depending on our professional Digital, Data, and Technology (DDaT) family lenses!

Getting on top of data management early, and setting out our requirements came up a lot – as did properly defining your pared down minimum viable product (MVP) to put in front of your users. For me personally, being flexible but defined in your workflow was key. We worked with so many different contractors at our partner supplier Leidos. This involved progressing work across our board from design to development via testing, and done in a manner that everyone could understand was how we met deadlines. Many of these deadlines came at us fast, owing to the need to comply with policy changes and the reality on the ground.

Picking a single highlight from our time at DDD is impossible – but the recurring theme was the professional and personal bonds that were built during the programme, not just within the team but with our colleagues in Ukraine division (nee directorate!), with COSLA and our Local Government stakeholders and with our partners at Leidos who were a massive part of achieving everything we were able to in such a short space of time. The approach taken to deliver two applications, and a data platform to support the transformation of home office data into a series of user friendly outputs, and latterly, a feed into the apps themselves, required a monumental effort from everyone to unpick a really complex series of requirements.

Delivering in a crisis – what could have been a poisoned chalice was a wonderful experience, personally and professionally. The ability to make a difference, and to do it in a supportive atmosphere while also developing my professional skillset was one I know I will always take with me for the rest of my career. And for all the technical ins and outs, and the ways of working, the tools, and the unique challenges, the biggest takeaway of all was how important it was to have a supportive, creative, and motivated team, pulling in the one direction – even if we had to right the ship a fair few times along the way!

Read more about Delivery in a crisis on the Digital Scotland Service Manual.

Tags: Digital Data & Design, scottish government, Ukraine, Warm Scottish Welcome programme

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