PowerPoint Presentation

Government Digital Service

James Stewart Technical Architect

@jystewart

Anna Shipman Developer

@annashipman

1. Background context
2. What we wanted to achieve
3. What we tried
4. Something that succeeded
5. Something that failed
6. Something that surprised us
7. Six months on...

ANNA

1. Background context

2. What we wanted to achieve

ANNA

Mike Bracken 'we exist to make public services digital by default, and we are relentlessly focused on user needs.'

Tom Loosemore: ' aim is to deliver simpler, clearer, faster services for users and savings and innovation for Government.'

Jamie: One of the principle objectives for this project was to demonstrate that an agile approach can work.

Showing Government a new way of working

3. What we tried

ANNA

1. Followed Agile methodologies.

Not strictly Scrum or Kanban following a loose methodology Someone said: Customising and changing the process as necessary was a winner. Ive seen teams consistently failing every time they tried to apply the letter instead of the spirit of the law and blindly followed some development process - talk about our loose approach.

Jamie Be agile with agile

All teams had a wall, all teams had stand-ups. Time of stand ups varies.

Sprints start on Wed finish on Tues, and at 4pm on Tues show & Tell for all teamsSprint length varies between teams

Show and Tell even in crunch time. Retrospectives.

And some kind of XP...

Pairing. TDD. CI. GitHub. Code reviews.

3. What we tried

ANNA

2. Scaling Agile

Stand up of stand ups Delivery Managers

Pivotal tracker - Most teams used a scrum methodology and split their work into releases (or milestones), epics and user stories.

By tracking these we generated verifiable data about progress, scope completeness and forecasts of delivery dates.

Image is of the Kanban wall to 'manage the portfolio'

We gathered Product Managers, Delivery Managers, the Head of Design and the Head of User Testing around this wall every two weeks to manage our portfolio of projects and products. The process forced us to flag dependencies, show blockers and compromises

But there was a moment when the management team asked for a list of risks and issues and pointing them at a wall was not the best answer so we set up a weekly risks and issues meeting (aka the RAIDs shelter) and recorded them digitally. This forum discussed which risks, issues, assumptions and dependencies were escalated. By the book it fits least well with the agile meeting rhythm but it gave us a focal point to discuss concerns, plan mitigation and fostered a blitz spirit.

4. Something that succeeded

ANNA

Focus on people

When I started using agile, someone said me, when things get tough and you want to go back to old ways, go more agile, not less. This has stuck in my mind.

- Jamie's human processes, trust, passion, colloaboration,

Doing the right thing

Redirector, something that matters, a11y...

5. Something that failed

6. Something that surprised us

ANNA and then James

Caring about people not quite sure yet how I'm going to phrase this... (and then James can add his point about people going to him with concerns about colleagues, bonds etc)

Give people the chance to do the right thing

Last slide

You can change the pic if you like :o)

Not quite sure how we're going to play this one, or who is going to say what, and not sure about the title either (any thoughts?) but our point is, hire a critical mass of the right people and then give those people a chance to do the right thing.

7. Six months later...

Simpler, Clearer, Faster

Government Digital Service

James Stewart Technical Architect

@jystewart

Anna Shipman Developer

@annashipman

05/01/13

GDS

05/01/13

GDS