Category: Digital Government
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Partnership
The good and the bad. At Difrent we always talk about our desire to deliver in partnership with out clients. To move beyond the pure supplier and client relationship to enable proper collaboration. One of my main frustrations when I was ‘client side’ was the amount of suppliers we’d work with who said they would…
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Digital Transformation is still new
We’re punishing those who are less experienced, and we need to stop. In the last few weeks I’ve had multiple conversations with clients (both existing and new) who are preparing for or have recently not passed their Digital Service standard assessments who are really struggling to understand what is needed from them in order to…
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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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And this is why we test with users…
A blog on the new National Careers ‘Discover your skills and careers’ Service As I sit here are ten past ten on a Wednesday night watching social media have a field day with the new National Careers service, I’m yet again reminded about the importance of the Digital Service Standard, especially Standard Number One –…
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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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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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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…