Link library

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. The first suspicion of disbelief is the idea that you can plan a two or three year programme and deliver certainty of process and outputs from the start.

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 with government organisations in the UK. I’ve also seen service designers working more like business analysts which doesn’t always help the teams or organisations they’re working with.

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.

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 expected messages at expected times. Most of these are unnecessary when doing comms for agile work and agile teams.

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.

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.’

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 story of how we came up with it in the very, very first place, before it was a list.

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.

Service design will never be effective if it’s only seen as ‘digital’ or given the remit to work as ‘digital’.