HM Government | Agile

The other week I was pointed to a report by National Audit Office called Governance for Agile delivery. It’s a really terrific piece of writing and I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to understand the concept of agile governance, or who wants to help others understand it. Aside from anything else it’s good to [...]

The Government Digital Service (GDS) has dropped  BS 8878, the British Standard for accessibility for its web portal GOV.UK. It plans to use a “leaner, more embedded approach”  to accessibility which embraces agile practice. Here is a link to the story: http://www.ukauthority.com/NewsArticle/tabid/64/Default.aspx?id=3843 I wonder if a more agile approach would be to use volunteers from [...]

Here is a link to my video blog in the Agile Journal on the topic of Agility, Transition, and Government. I recorded this in response to the IfG’s System Error report: bit.ly/Nrp3J1        

“Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position”. – Mahatma Gandhi Introduction In May this year Michael Carew asked the following question of this group: “This is a question I often hear and enter into discussions on. Agile [...]

Faster, better, cheaper! These are the some of the words you’ll see used on Agile delivery in the Government ICT Strategy. Critics say Agile delivery lacks structure and clear lines of accountability. But surely if the private sector has been using Agile delivery for years, and getting good results, there must be something in it? [...]

Years ago an article appeared in Project Manager Today which elaborated upon why projects so often fail. It certainly ties in with my own experiences of process dysfunction and the symptoms I have learned to identify. Basically the article says that the true project management life cycle goes like this: Initial Enthusiasm Dawn of Reality [...]

I increasingly believe that the single most important critical success factor for an effective team is colocation. The primary reason for the strength of this belief is empirical – I have found it to be so. Having worked with many teams that are lucky enough to be collocated, I find there are just so many day-to-day [...]

Malcolm Lowe (the Agile lead for the ICT Strategy) recently posted on the GCloud website to announce the availability of GCloud as an easy way for the civil service to get access to specialist companies who excel at agile working and product development. As Malcolm’s post explains, this is part of GCloud Lot 4 (Specialist Cloud Services). You can [...]

People use jargon and terminology in every walk of life; we only have to look at the medical profession as a case in point. Terms are a shorthand for more complicated ideas and technical details; this is the power of terminology, allowing people in the know to communicate, debate and advance their understanding in a [...]

  When I talk about teams in this post I mean any group of people such as a team, a project, a programme, a department or a company.   Special thanks The feature image for this post is courtesy of Benjamin Mitchell (@benjaminm on Twitter) who saw this at his child’s primary school. The questions [...]