What’s wrong with business cases
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.
Delivery
Delivery is all about how work gets done, whether projects or ‘business as usual’. A good digital council will be confident in a range of approaches and techniques. These will be well documented and communicated, and staff will be aware of them and regularly putting them into practice.
The council will run a mixed pipeline of agile and waterfall projects, with the right approach assigned to the right type of project. It will be clear to everyone how work is prioritised, and when new work must take precedence.
Overall digital projects will have a good reputation for successful delivery of outcomes. Where things go wrong, they are learned from.
The Importance of Product Management in Government
“…the approach taken to build and deliver digital products needs to evolve to take advantage of modern software development methods including agile iterative development, human centered design, and continuous delivery.” An archived PDF of this page can be downloaded if…
Funding product teams, not projects
Over the last year Defra has started making the transition from focussing on projects to focussing on teams. The results of this have been great. More stability has meant work gets done more quickly, meaning we can deliver more great…
How we use OKRs on GOV.UK
“Objectives and key results (OKRs) is a simple tool to create measurable goals for agile teams. It provides a framework for defining objectives, how teams will achieve those outcomes, and tracking their progress. It’s a light-touch way of setting goals…
Delivering digital services: this much I have learned
Matt Edgar shares the things he has learned delivering digital services, so that you don’t need to learn them the hard way yourself. An archived PDF of this page can be downloaded if the original is inaccessible.
Product Management Handbook
“A white label product management handbook for government digital services.”
What, exactly, is a Product Manager?
“In his book Inspired, Marty Cagan describes the job of the product manager as “to discover a product that is valuable, usable and feasible”. Similarly, I’ve always defined product management as the intersection between business, technology, and user experience.” An…
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…
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.”…
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…
Big programme design and the willing suspension of disbelief involved
“Whenever I have been involved either as part of the delivery or an observer of Big Programmes – usually in local government – I have been struck by the willing suspension of disbelief that participants have to sign up for.…
A Roadmap Readme
“In the dying days of 2022 I started to crowdsource a collection of roadmap examples to help land on a format and approach we could consistently embrace at the day job. I was looking for something that needed to walk…
Agile or not, it’s all about your worldview
“What do you believe about how the world works? Do you believe it works like a machine, that a cause always leads to an effect and that makes the world predictable? Or do believe it works in random ways, where…
Introduction to OKRs
Roger Swannell’s excellent introductory talk about Objectives and Key Results: “OKRs aren’t about recording and tracking all the work your team is doing, only the most important work, the stuff that contributes to the big strategy and priorities.” An archived…
Running a design sprint about consent: lessons and challenges
Some great practical experience and advice from the Essex Digital Service on running a design sprint to quickly prototype solutions to a specific problem. An archived PDF of this page can be downloaded if the original is inaccessible.