I don’t think the people behind Scrum and other agile methods participated in sports very much. They seem to have borrowed a lot of sporting terms but haven’t used them very wisely. The phrase “Sprint” is a good example of this. In athletics, a sprint involves individuals trying to run faster than everyone else over a short distance. This might be how your team feels at the moment, but it probably isn’t a good picture of where we would like to be.
Today is a big deal for me. For the last few years I have had a ball with colleagues at NTT DATA; working on digital and agile transformation whilst learning and sharing with a group of really smart and friendly people. From today, I am going to be working on digital and agile transformation whilst learning and sharing with a group of really smart and friendly people. So what’s changed?
In my last post1 I mentioned that I was going to make a pitch about the UK Government Shared Services Strategy2 at UKGovCamp. In the end I didn’t need to pitch as @lexij got there first with a great title: The Shared Services Strategy - OMG! Let’s fix it. This post is a personal reflection on what was discussed but the raw notes from the session are also available online3. Blog post: Will shared services ever work? ↩ UK Government Shared Services Strategy ↩ Raw notes from the UK Gov Camp shared services session ↩
Last week the UK Government launched a new strategy for shared business services (common things such as finance and human resources). The general reaction seemed to be quite negative, at least in my filter bubble. Most of the criticisms are probably reasonable but that may be because there are so few examples of sharing successfully at this scale in other countries or sectors. I am hoping to join a discussion about all this at UKGovCamp at the weekend and some in Government are keen to hear what campers think. Now that would be really helpful. I can't go but would be really grateful if you could raise this.— Liam Maxwell (@liammax) January 14, 2018 In the meantime here are some potential challenges and responses to consider. Most of these are relevant for sharing business services in any sector.
If you can only spare 30 seconds skip to the test at the end of this blog post. During the recent ransomware crisis it was quite understandable for people to be upset about disruption to businesses and public services. It is also understandable that leaders of these organisations rushed to announce actions to make their systems secure. This is all understandable but, in some ways, it is also naive. More cyber-attacks will come and will cause more damage than we have seen so far. We need to take a more nuanced look at the problems and some practical responses.
