Author: Zoe Gould
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So, what is a Service Owner?
Before I discuss what (in my view) a Service Owner is, a brief history lesson into the role might be useful. The role of the ‘Service Manager‘ was seen as critically important to the success of a product, and they were defined as a G6 (Manager) who had responsibility for the end to end service…
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The art of Transferring Knowledge
One of the most common questions that comes up in Bid opportunities is usually some variant of “how do you transfer your knowledge to us before you leave?” This is completely valid question, and really important to both ask, and to understand, but also hard to answer well in 100 words without risking looking like…
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Doing your best vs. achieving the goal
The Agile Prime Directive states “Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.” This is a wonderful principle to have during Retrospectives, in order to avoid…
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From Colocation to Remote First
Changing how we work, to ensure we can still deliver. One of the big tenants of agile working has always been about the importance of colocation, and there are a million blogs out there on why colocation makes a big difference. The first value of the Agile Manifesto states: Individuals and Interactions Over Processes and…
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Why SME’s are important, but shouldn’t be the Product Manager
Along time ago in a land far away; well four years ago and sat in a very cold office in trafalgar square; Ross Ferguson , Alex Kean , Scot Colfer and I plus a few others sat discussing the DDaT capability framework for Product Management. The discussions we had at the time focused on “how…
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The people getting left behind
Why ‘in the era of remote working we need to stop thinking about ‘digital services’ as a separate thing, and just think about ‘services’. Last night when chatting to @RachelleMoose about whether digital is a privilege, which she’s blogged about here, it made me remember a conversation from a few weeks ago with @JanetHughes about…
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How to change a culture
When delivering digital or business transformation, one of the things that often gets overlooked is the cultural changes that are needed to embed the transformation succesfully. There can be many reasons why this happens, either because it’s not been considered, because it’s not been considered a priority, or simply because the people leading the transformation…
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Delivering in a crisis
One of the key personal aims I had when I joined Difrent, just over six months ago, was to work somewhere that would let me deliver stuff that matters. Because I am passionate about people, and about Delivery; After 15 years, right in the thick of some pioneering public sector work, combining high profile product…
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Where is this meeting anyway?
Gone are the days of wandering round a building trying to find the meeting room your next meeting is meant to be in. Now a days, in the new world of working from home and virtual meetings I seem to be wandering round the internet trying to find my next virtual meeting host. One minute…
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How do we determine value?
And how do we make sure we are delivering it? In a previous blog I discussed the importance of understanding the value you are trying to add, and how you measure cost vs vale. How we measure value and ensure we are delivering a valuable return on investment is one of the ‘big’ questions at…