Postcard from Barcelona - what we learned at the Gartner Symposium
John Seglias (Chief Digital and Information Officer) and Malcolm McKee (Chief Technology Officer) share their thoughts after attending the annual Gartner Symposium in Barcelona.
John Seglias (Chief Digital and Information Officer) and Malcolm McKee (Chief Technology Officer) share their thoughts after attending the annual Gartner Symposium in Barcelona.
John Seglias, Defra group Chief Digital and Information Officer, talks about the updated Greening Government Sustainable Technology Strategy to 2020.
Agile teams aim to release early and often, starting with a minimum viable product (MVP) and iteratively building on it. But choosing what to put in an MVP is hard. You don’t want to release something that delivers little or …
Back in October last year I wondered out loud why we couldn’t start funding teams not projects. At the time I rather naively thought that there was some senior person or group of people who just needed to be persuaded …
More than a year ago, our predecessor Sally Meecham wrote about Defra’s digital principles, saying how they acted as a useful way of setting out our approach to simplifying services and cutting out complexity. A lot’s happened since then. In …
The more steps Defra takes towards becoming a user-centric, service design-focused organisation, the more we learn about changing the way we work and collaborate. That’s made more difficult in an organisation like Defra, which despite our best efforts over many …
A few weeks ago we posted a blog about how we’ve simplified the waste permits service. We've also made a short film about the agile team working on the service and how they are continually improving it based on feedback from users.
Minimum viable products (MVPs) are a hugely important part of service development. By aiming to release as early as possible you reduce the risk of never releasing at all. You also get valuable feedback from users using the system in …
A few weeks ago, we were invited to speak at an internal event for managers in one part of Defra. The subject of our talk was "What are digital skills, and how do we develop them?" We think that good …
How do you help people in a large organisation find out about the benefits of agile ways of working? Where can people go with specific questions about agile and how they should use it in their role? How do agile …