Turning Insight into Capability

How H4MOD Transformed Equipment Failure Prediction in the British Army

By Major Alex Shand, SO2 ES Plans, 1st (UK) Division

The ‘Hacking for Ministry of Defence’ (H4MOD) course pairs MOD-sponsored problems with university student teams that work to solve them within 10 weeks as an ‘innovation sprint’. Since its initial founding in 2019, H4MOD has worked on 350+ problems and engaged thousands of stakeholders from industry, academia and government on Defence’s toughest challenges. Major Alex Shand has been involved with H4MOD since its inception and has supported its growth into the multifaceted programme it is today. In his current Army Logistics role, Alex sponsored a problem for a student team at Imperial College London, who formed a startup around their exceptional solution idea. 

A Problem Tolerated for Too Long

The challenge I brought to H4MOD was, in essence, the requirement to more accurately predict equipment failures across platforms within the First Division. Across the REME community, the approach was broadly the same: individual spreadsheets, figures drawn from the staff officer handbook, and a sprinkling of experience and gut judgment. It was unscientific, which we knew, but it kind of worked - or worked well enough that it had never been prioritised for a proper solution.

However, the operational cost of leaving this unresolved was real. Human beings naturally trend towards conservative estimates when predicting equipment readiness. Tell a Commander they will have 80% of their vehicle fleet available and they only see 60% - that is a far worse professional outcome than predicting 60% and delivering 70%. The bias towards caution is understandable, but the consequence is what I would describe as reduced operational momentum. Commanders plan from imprecise data, and that has a direct impact on decision making.

The Innovation Process in Practice

My practical involvement was manageable and, frankly, something I looked forward to each week. I had regular calls with the team for updates, responded to ad-hoc messages, connected them with key points of contact across the organisation, and arranged facility visits. I was intimately involved without being overburdened - the team drove the work, and my role was to keep the doors open for them.

Around week four, the team did something that genuinely impressed me. They paused. They recognised that what they were attempting to do - clean years of imperfect legacy data - was a task that would require significant resource and was not achievable within the ten-week module. Rather than press on regardless, they pivoted, and that decision changed our thinking. We have now accepted that the data we have is the data we have, and that cleaning it is a mammoth undertaking. The solution they built accounts for that reality, rather than pretending otherwise.

A Deployable Solution

The team produced an application that allows you to input equipment types and describe an exercise in granular detail - intensity, terrain, environmental factors - and generate predicted failure rates alongside estimated return-to-service timelines. It was built on dummy data, but the outputs were, as I put it at the time, scarily accurate to what we would expect with real data.

At the conclusion of the course, we had managed to unlock access to actual data for the team to continue their work. One of the students has established his own company – AlgoX - and rather than filing the solution away, we are now actively pursuing single-source funding to contract his company to deliver it formally. The ambition is to roll this out across the whole army, initially to all REME Planners, and ultimately for it to become the standard equipment availability planning tool.

That outcome - a funded, scalable product - is extraordinarily rare in the MOD environment. Getting anything off the ground here is very difficult. The fact that this has not simply ended at week nine, but has attracted genuine resource interest, speaks volumes.

What H4MOD Offers to the Broader Defence Landscape

As a bottom-fed organisation, the military is susceptible to groupthink. My experience is broadly the same as everyone else's at my level, and you could say we come up with the same solutions to the same problems because we have all walked the same path. That is not a criticism - it is simply the nature of how we are structured.

H4MOD brings something we cannot easily generate ourselves: diversity of thought. A team that has not spent twenty years in this organisation will see problems differently and will pursue solutions we have already self-selected out of consideration - often, it must be said, because of a degree of institutional pride in not wanting to admit that five postgraduate students might identify something we have missed.

They might not always deliver the definitive answer. But even a partial solution, a shift in perspective, or a step in the right direction has real value. In our case, the team delivered something far more substantial than any of us had anticipated.

Beyond the immediate problem, this engagement has created a tangible pipeline into the defence ecosystem. Several team members have been connected with defence organisations for employment. And AlgoX now has a clear route into the sector without having to navigate the full commercial contracting process from scratch - just ten weeks of work and a genuine problem to solve. That is a model the MOD should be deliberately cultivating.

A Word for Colleagues

If you have spent any time in the MOD trying to get a project off the ground, the most compelling argument I can offer is this: within ten weeks, this team produced a Minimum Viable Product that is now unlocking funding to be built into business as usual. That is not theoretical - that is what happened.

Teams right across defence should be competing for a place on the H4MOD programme. Every organisation has problems it would love to solve but does not have the time or bandwidth to tackle. This is the mechanism to start. Even if it moves the dial by one or two percent, it puts you on the right route. And as this case study demonstrates, sometimes it takes you a great deal further than that.

Want to get involved in our Hacking for programmes? Get in touch at info@commonmission.uk