Bluesky
Weeknote 19 - 23 July 2021
On shared provocations, developing agile leaders and anti-racism policies.
Local Government
Weeknote 5 - 16 July 2021
On visiting an office, audits and virtual training.
Weeknote 28 June - 2 July 2021
On interim roles, trade-offs and looking outside my “woke” filter bubble.
Weeknote 21 - 25 June 2021
On new starters, public sector sharing and race equality in Cornwall.
Weeknote 24 May - 18 June 2021
On apprenticeships, testing and some large and small achievements.
Weeknote 10 - 21 May 2021
On growing our team, cost of delay and a book you must read.
Weeknote 4 - 7 May 2021
On a busy short week, local elections and COVID in India.
Weeknote 19 - 30 April 2021
On flexing, failing and basic needs.
Weeknote 5 - 16 April 2021
On introducing agile, single source of truth and responding to more shootings in the US.
Weeknote 22 March - 2 April 2021
On our new website and second-order agile.
Weeknote 15 - 19 March 2021
On too much work-in-progress, more agility and vaccinations.
Weeknote 8 - 12 March 2021
On growing our team, using tech for good and the awful news about Sarah Everard.
Weeknote 22 February - 5 March 2021
On conveyor belts, living up to our values and International Women’s Day.
Weeknote 15 - 19 February 2021
On public cloud troubles, race equality and #JamFirst
Weeknote 8 - 12 February 2021
On agile experiments and coaching new developers
Weeknote 25 January - 5 February 2021
On roadmap wrestling, real performance development and tech for good.
Weeknote 1 - 23 January 2021
On UKGovCamp, tough times in a transformation and being a practical ally.
Weeknote 14 - 18 December 2020
On getting things done for sure, positive project boards and white men in advertising.
Weeknote 7 - 11 December 2020
On habit-breaking training, learning to code and loads and loads on money and people systems.
Yearnote 4 November 2019 - 27 November 2020
On a year in Cornwall Council.
Weeknote 9 - 13 November 2020
On always changing things, better priorities and remembering.
Weeknote 2 - 6 November 2020
On the day-to-day work of running systems, hackathons and coaching new coders.
Weeknote 26 - 30 October 2020
On all the roadmaps and an animated, LED pumpkin
Weeknote 19 - 23 October 2020
On interim operating models, pressure and free speech.
Weeknote 12 - 16 October 2020
On organising for a complex product team, cyber attacks and tinkering with Xmas lights.
Weeknote 5 - 9 October 2020
Mostly back-office systems with a sprinkle of other things
Weeknote 28 September - 2 October 2020
On back-office systems, exciting administration and Black Voices Cornwall.
Weeknote 21 - 25 September 2020
On bots, onions and virtual good byes
Weeknote 14 - 18 September 2020
On continuous improvement and being a BAME ally.
Weeknote 7 - 11 September 2020
On broadcast communications, our new website, turning problems into lessons, roadmaps and cross-government collaboration.
Weeknote 1 - 4 September 2020
On user needs, Troika Consulting, scaled agile and being a BAME ally.
Weeknote 10 - 14 August 2020
On innovation allies, always learning, fighting for flow and more shared learning.
Weeknote 03 - 07 August 2020
On Bob the Builder, balancing the books and assurance without certainty.
Weeknote 27 - 31 July 2020
On more tweaks to our agile ways of working, getting comfortable with a 20% success rate and shared learning.
Weeknote 20 - 24 July 2020
On unlocking great ideas, project epilogues, fragmenting systems and wheelchairs by the sea.
Weeknote 13 - 17 July 2020
On the many faces of progress and virtual privilege walks
Weeknote 29 June - 10 July 2020
On an exciting future for Cornwall, reducing the cost of indecision and talking to white people about race.
Weeknote 22 - 26 June 2020
On pushing boundaries, technical frustrations and race science.
Weeknote 15 - 19 June 2020
On drinking your own champaign and mentoring.
Weeknote 8 - 12 June 2020
On transforming through a crisis, small continuous improvements and the value of communities.
Weeknote 1 - 5 June 2020
On ending things well, iterating agile, grand plans and the killing of George Floyd.
Weeknote 25 - 29 May 2020
On learning by doing, situational leadership and mentoring.
Weeknote 18 - 22 May 2020
On agile roles, documentation, shared infrastructure and mental health.
Weeknote 11 - 15 May 2020
On virtual Mexican waves, crossing invisible silos, the downside of agile backlogs and the benefits of traditional project management.
Weeknote 4 - 7 May 2020
On not wasting a crisis, morning routines, kids coding and the National Grid
Weeknote 27 April - 1 May 2020
On home offices, generic capabilities and insensitive language
Weeknote 20 - 24 April 2020
On “zoombombing” and getting “forward” to normal. Do not post links or codes for online meetings (e.g. Zoom) in public!
Weeknote 14 - 17 April 2020
On the endless stream of video calls.
Weeknote 30 March - 9 April 2020
On making trade-offs, when information systems do not mean IT, when numbers are not facts and when probability is meaningless.
Weeknote 23 - 27 March 2020
On business-as-usual when everything is different, enormous satisfaction from tiny successes and helping each other through all this.
Weeknote 16 - 20 March 2020
On a face-to-face tech event (remember those?), closing projects in an agile way and fixing ink jet printers…or not!
Weeknote 9 - 13 March 2020
On business cases, fine tuning teams, jazz fusion, the RSA and COVID-19’s impact on the climate
Weeknote 2 - 6 March 2020
On Cornwall Geeks, agile forecasting and risk management, scrum-of-scrums, product roadmaps and a first weeknote mention for COVID-19!
Weeknote 24-27 February 2020
On spreading too thin, agile infrastructure, part-time teams and diversity in tech
Weeknote 17-21 February 2020
On financial approvals, learning together and package-free shopping
Weeknote 10-14 February 2020
On being caught between storms.
Weeknote 03-09 February 2020
On resident experience, collaboration and trade-offs, privilege and diversity.
Refining your backlogs
My previous update on Backlogs provided an introduction to the term. This post provides a little more detail on how to work with Backlogs.
Weeknote 27-31 January 2020
On making connections, agile training and recycling sticky notes.
Estimating in an agile way
People would love it if we could predict the future. We get this all the time in our work: How much is the project going to cost? When will it be finished so that we can go live? We are really busy so how much of Dave’s time do you need next month? We only get the actual answers to these questions after the work is done (occasionally years later) but people need estimates, forecasts and indications to help coordinate people and activities. Agile ways of working do not immediately remove these needs but techniques like Scrum can help avoid some of the common pitfalls.
Weeknote 18-24 January 2020
On UK Gov Camp 2020, Scrum Master training and working with agile teams.
Getting started with user stories
Think about the last time you bought something at a shop or online: Did you care what brand of vehicle delivered the goods? Probably not! In the Cornwall Council IS team, our products exist to help people get things done and they, in turn, are helping other people get on with their lives. Often, as long as these people can do what they need, the details of how our products work do not matter very much to them. User stories are a way of capturing the needs of our users and leaving out the rest of the details. They are very efficient, easy-to-use and have become the typical way for agile teams to define their products in the product backlog.
An introduction to backlogs
In this post, we’re taking a closer look at another agile term: Backlog. The dictionary definition is: an accumulation of tasks unperformed or materials not processed In agile working, backlogs are a list of things that a team still has to do. If you are struggling to get started, brainstorming a list of what a team needs to do is a good first step.
So, what exactly is a sprint?
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.
Living the dream
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?
Getting shared services to work
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 ↩
Will shared services ever work?
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.