Blog
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My User Manual 2021
As we leave lockdown and hopefully begin to put the pandemic behind us; I’ve realised that my job isn’t the only thing that’s changed; my working preferences have too. As we move forward into a more hybrid working world updating my user manual seems like a smart idea. Here’s a link to the one I…
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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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Touchdown
So this week is my first week in Kainos. I’ve landed. Hurrah! I’m never generally one for week notes, as I can never manage to remember to write a blog a week, or even remember everything I’ve done in a week to blog about it; but I thought given it’s my first week in a…
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Delivering Value for yourself and others
Just short of two years ago I accepted the role of Director of Delivery at Difrent, a big move for me as I’d only worked in the Public Sector, but a good opportunity to see how things worked on the other side of the commercial table; and a great opportunity to work with some fantastic…
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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…