Tag Delivering digital

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.

Here’s the recording of the workshop I ran this morning which looked at using a simple template to find out more about the service we are looking to digital redesign. We used the example of reporting fly tipping, as well as having a general chat towards the end about how best to engage with service managers when embarking on transformation work. As well as watching the video, you can: Download the slides Find the template on Google Drive See our fly tipping example Read the chat notes from the session If you have any topics you’d like to be covered…

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.

Even if we adopt Tom Loosemore’s definition of digital – and we should – it’s still necessary to interpret it in the context of the service you are looking to digitise. I’ve worked out a really simple framework for thinking about this, by dividing the options into three distinct levels, or approaches to, digital change. None is necessarily right or wrong, but it’s always likely that one is more appropriate to achieving the outcome you desire for a particular service, in a particular context. Moreover, they shouldn’t be seen as fixed – instead, you can evolve a service through the…

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.

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.

This is a nice and easy framework to use when you find yourself needing to do a quick service discovery to find out some basic details about a service and how it can be transformed. The point at which you might want to use this is right at the start of your digital work, when you either: need to identify a service to work with or have decided which service to work with already, but need to gather some up front information on what you’re dealing with Whichever way you use it, you’ll find it a really helpful way to…

Matt Edgar shares the things he has learned delivering digital services, so that you don't need to learn them the hard way yourself.

"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 and focus.