Blog
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What does good Leadership look like to me?
Over the last 6 months or so I’ve been percolating on what good leadership looks like, at least to me, and how I can make sure I am acting like the good leader I would want to see. There’s been lots of good thought pieces and conversations happening about good leadership over the last year…
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Reaching out.
A blog for #MentalHealthAwarenessWeek 2019 It’s mental health awareness week, and I’ve seen lots of things about “I’m always here, reach out to me if you need help”, or “show you care, support those around you by reaching out to them and seeing how they are doing”. And I wholeheartedly love both these sentiments. We…
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Service Standards for the whole service
How the service standards have evolved over time…. Gov.uk has recently published the new Service Standards for government and public sector agencies to use when developing public facing transactional services. I’ve previously blogged about why the Service Standards are important in helping us develop services that meet user needs, as such I’ve been following their…
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Scrum Master or Delivery Manager – what’s in a name?
Are the roles of Scrum Master and Delivery manager the same? Continuing on my recent musings on the different roles within Agile multidisciplinary teams, today’s blog focuses on the role of the Delivery Manager, or the Scrum Master, and whether these roles are really the same thing. This is a conversation that came up a…
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Producing Code or Fixing Problems?
The role of Developers in user centric design. I’ve been working with Developers of different flavours for almost a decade now, and in that time I’ve worked with some amazing Devs, and some frustrating ones; the same as any role it depends on the person. I’ve also encountered a lot of stereotypes about Developers, primarily…
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What is the role of Business Analysts within agile?
Analysisng the role of the Business Analyst. When we were looking at the Digital, Data and Technology (DDaT) roles and capabilities back in 2016, one of the roles we really struggled with was the role of the Business Analyst (BA). Not because we didn’t agree that it was a role (because we absolutely did) but…
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Round and round we go.
In other words Agile isn’t linear so stop making it look like it is. Most people within the public sector who work in Digital transformation have seen the GDS version of the Alpha lifecycle: Which aims to demonstrate that developing services starts with user needs, and that projects will move from Discovery to Live, with…
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Why focusing on productivity isn’t productive.
One thing that comes up time and again from senior managers is “My focus or priority is improving Productivity”. Early on in my career I worked on a number of ‘productivity improvement inniatives’ and sometimes they would seem to make some improvments, sometimes they wouldn’t, but they never really solved the issues and there always…