Category: Leadership
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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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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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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…