What is this recipe? ‘Crazy Eights’ is a fast-paced brainstorming exercise designed to generate a large number of ideas in a very short time.1 It’s a core method from the Google Ventures Design Sprint. The recipe is simple: each person…
“Most blog posts about communities of practice cover the first couple of years. I had the unusual chance to lead one for six (the product management profession at the Ministry of Justice). That gave me a front-row seat to how…
“In government and the wider public sector, we’ve built our identity around “services.”Digital teams design them, measure them, apply the Service Standard to them. But most of what we call a service isn’t actually a service. More often, the work we label…
“Organisational policy is an important tool. It can help organisations be compliant, teams to behave consistently, and employees to understand what’s expected of them. But it’s also fundamentally limiting in character: all policy acts to constrain people’s actions in some…
“Part of India’s National Health Authority, the Ayushman Bharat Digital Mission was founded in 2021 to design, build, operate and scale digital public infrastructure for India’s health system. Among the products and platforms it is responsible for are the Unified Health Interface, which…
Many councils have made it this far by cutting back on their existing model of public service delivery – in some cases right to the bone. But what do they do when all the incremental cuts that can be made…
“Acceptance criteria (ACs) are a key part of user stories. They set the boundaries of what should be achieved – telling the developer when to stop, the QA how to test, and the product owner what to expect. Because they’re…
“There’s been a lot of work to define what a good digital service looks like (see for example the government’s Digital Service Standard). It’s less obvious what to do if you want to make your whole organisation digital, and there…
Business cases are lies. Not wilful lies usually, but they end up with the same results: misleading, misinforming and hiding reality. An archived PDF of this page can be downloaded if the original is inaccessible.
“Importantly, I want to emphasise that exploring new operating models entails fundamentally rethinking the role of a local authority and what it’s uniquely placed to do for its community.” An archived PDF of this page can be downloaded if the…