The Government IT Self-Harm Playbook
“No matter how well intentioned, when it comes to IT government has an awful habit of messing things up.” An archived PDF of this page can be downloaded if the original is inaccessible.
Localise
Experiments in roadmapping at GOV.UK
“Roadmaps can be a powerful tool to communicate the vision for a product’s development, unite teams of makers around common goals and let stakeholders know (roughly) when they can expect the improvements they care about.” An archived PDF of this…
There is no ‘digital service design’
“Service design will never be effective if it’s only seen as ‘digital’ or given the remit to work as ‘digital’.” An archived PDF of this page can be downloaded if the original is inaccessible.
Governance – there is a better way
“Teams using lean and agile ways of working often rub up against traditional modes of governance which can slow them down or demoralise them. Governance can become a blocker.” An archived PDF of this page can be downloaded if the…
‘We’re not leaving this bar until we’ve come up with such a great idea that I can’t sack you’
“The third list I’m going to tell you about very quickly is the BBC iPlayer, which of course is nothing more than a list, presented well. A list of telly programmes and radio programmes. I thought I’d tell you the…
Boring magic
“Recently I’ve been working on a team thinking about what digital government services might be like in the near future. Conor, our interaction designer, summed up the last 9 years rather well. ‘We essentially create boring magic.’” An archived PDF…
Everyone loves a roadmap
“In agile programmes people prefer to talk about roadmaps rather than plans. This post is about the reasons behind this and the benefits of using a roadmap rather than a gantt chart to manage pure agile, or mixed methodology programmes.”…
A guide to agile communication
“The traditional approach to comms is to do a lot of planning up front. Many teams will embark on a “comms strategy”, or perhaps write a set of “comms principles”, and then set about filling a calendar or grid with…
The team onion
“I get frustrated when I see Agile teams that are essentially siloed off from the wider business (for many reasons). This causes dependency and communication issues and means they just aren’t able to deliver anything very quickly.” An archived PDF…
Comparing service design and business analysis
“As I’ve spoken about service design over last few years a number of people have told me that they are business analysts and that they do the things that a service designer does. I’ve especially heard this a lot working…