Category: Leadership
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Product vs Service vs Programme?
How we define a product vs a service is a debate that comes up regularly; as proved by Randal Whitmore (Deputy Director of New Propositions at the UKHSA) today on Twitter: In fact, it comes up so regularly, I could have sworn I’d blogged about it before; but if I have, it isn’t on here!…
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Is it time for Flexible Working to actually become flexible?
Does the Public Sector need to embrace Hybrid working or risk loosing its workforce? The majority of job adverts within the Public Sector (and beyond) feature the phrase – “We offer flexible working” as a benefit. However, this flexible working is limited on how flexible it can be; generally its telling you they don’t mind…
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‘The question is who… are you?’
Why being a Leader doesn’t mean not being yourself. Chatting to a friend over the weekend, she mentioned her work had been encouraging her to go for more leadership type roles in the last year; but she hadn’t done it so far as she was worried she could never ‘fit in’ or be seen as…
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Service Owner vs. Programme Manager vs. Product Lead
What’s the difference? Does the name matter? Over a year ago, following an interesting chat with David Roberts at NHSBSA, I got to thinking about the role of the Service Owner; and why the role wasn’t working in the way we intended back in the dawn of the Service Manual. This in turn (as most…
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How to be a Product Advocate
Why you need a Product Person in your team. Since joining Kainos a few weeks ago, I’ve had a number of conversations internally and with clients about the relationship between Delivery and Product; and why I as a Product Person moved over to Delivery. My answer to that question was that, having spent over 10…
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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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Talking Digital Transformation
It’s something that has come up a lot in conversations at the moment, what is Digital Transformation? What does Digital Transformation mean to me? I always joke that it’s my TED talk subject, if I had one; as such I thought why not write a blog about it? What is Digital Transformation? According to Wikipedia,…
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We need to talk about salary
A massive pet peeve of mine is when I see roles that don’t advertise their salary clearly; and I’m aware they are plenty of others out there who share my annoyance. So why aren’t we as employers better about being open about pay? I think ‘growing up’ in the civil service spoiled me when it…
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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…