I work a lot in the public sector, helping teams do transformational delivery — either replacing legacy systems with modern, digital products and services or working with Policy teams to help deliver user-centred policies and innovative citizen-facing services. One common observation, our internal product users - people working inside government…

I’m a big fan of Impact Mapping — a technique I use to help teams reach agreed goals and identify options for achieving those goals. …

I was reading the other day about a government team that had compressed their Beta down in time to 12 weeks. It got me thinking about the factors that might enable you to compress or might require you to extend the duration of your Beta work. In government, and elsewhere…

I’m often asked to help teams kick off their Discovery projects — to help set them up for their first week or so of work — and I usually do this in one or two kickoff workshops where we have some getting to know each other and some getting to…

I’ve been working with a few government teams to help them create Playbooks capturing how they do things in their team, project, programme, community or organisation. In simple terms a playbook is a manual for how (some) things get done in those bits of an organisation. They can cover single…

I was thinking today, as consultant’s sometimes do, about how to increase the visibility of me and my work — I thought I’d do a quick anti-problem to get some insight: What could I do to become as obscure as possible over the next few years? I could leave social…

What is an ‘enabling mindset’? In large organisations, like government departments, product (delivery) teams work with a wide variety of supporting teams, like finance, HR, estates or PMO. I call these enabling teams (or sometimes ‘corporate services’). I’ve previously talked about: examples of enabling teams what enabling teams do what happens when there’s no alignment…

In an apocryphal story, Grigory Potemkin, lover of Catherine the Great of Russia, is said to have built fake portable villages to impress Catherine during her visit to Crimea in 1787. Crimea had been annexed by Russia from the Ottoman Empire in 1783. Devastated by the war and with the…

I like film and a I like talking with others about films. When I lived in Cambridge I used to be a regular at film classes run from the Arts Picturehouse and we used to go see films together and discuss them afterwards. …