Category: Delivery
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Talking Digital Transformation
It’s something that has come up a lot in conversations at the moment, what is Digital Transformation? What does Digital Transformation mean to me? I always joke that it’s my TED talk subject, if I had one; as such I thought why not write a blog about it? What is Digital Transformation? According to Wikipedia,…
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Agile Delivery in a Waterfall procurement world
One of the things that has really become apparent when moving ‘supplier side’ is how much the procurement processes used by the public sector to tender work doesn’t facilitate agile delivery. The process of bidding for work, certainly as an SME is an industry in itself. This month alone we’ve seen multiple Invitations to Tender’s…
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Agile at scale
What do we even mean when we talk about agile at scale and what are the most important elements to consider when trying to run agile at scale? This is definitely one of those topics of conversation that goes around and around and never seems to get resolved or go away. What do we even…
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Buy out, or buying in.
So, we’re ten days into Difrent being ‘bought’ by The Panoply group; people keeping saying ‘congratulations’, ‘how’s it working for a new boss/ company?’, ‘how do you feel about the buy out?’ So I thought it was a good opportunity to reflect on my thoughts about the acquisition. And the answer is, I’m feeling pretty…
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Do Civil Servants dream of woolly sheep?
The frustration of job descriptions and their lack of clarity. One of the biggest and most regularly occurring complaints about the Civil Service (and public sector as a whole) is their miss-management of commercial contracts. There are regularly headlines in the papers accusing Government Departments & the Civil Servants working in them of wasting public…
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Notes from some Digital Service Standard Assessors on the Beta Assessment
The Beta Assessment is probably the one I get the most questions about; Primarily, “when do we actually go for our Beta Assessment and what does it involve?” Firstly what is an Assessment? Why do we assess products and services? If you’ve never been to a Digital Service Standard Assessment it can be daunting; so…
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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…