Oct 17, 2022What is Impact Mapping?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’ve given away about 1500 copies of the Impact Mapping book to people who come to my conferences and others and it’s rarely long before…Impact Mapping4 min readImpact Mapping4 min read
Aug 18, 2022Forecasting the length of your BetaI 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…Government3 min readGovernment3 min read
Mar 28, 2022Boldly going where no one has gone before? — creating a Discovery backlog.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…Discovery Phase10 min readDiscovery Phase10 min read
Feb 15, 2022The Playbook Playbook — or How to create your first PlaybookI’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…Government9 min readGovernment9 min read
Published in Create/Change·Dec 6, 2021How to be obscureI 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…Consulting2 min readConsulting2 min read
Published in Create/Change·Oct 14, 2021What is an ‘enabling mindset’?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…Transformation8 min readTransformation8 min read
Published in Create/Change·Apr 26, 2021Stop building Potemkin Villages!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…Management4 min readManagement4 min read
Apr 24, 2021How (not) to pitch your film at film club…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. …Film3 min readFilm3 min read
Published in Create/Change·Oct 5, 2020Organisational Design for a Service LineI first came across the concept of a service line when consulting in government 3 years ago and have used the concept ever since. It’s a good organising principle when thinking about sets of related services. What is a service line? A service line is simply a set of services…Government5 min readGovernment5 min read
Published in Create/Change·Oct 2, 20204 metrics for Enabling TeamsI’ve talked before about some of the work I do with Enabling Teams (Finance, Commercial, Estates etc.) One thing I often find is that the outcomes set for these teams don’t line up with the outcomes for the delivery teams they serve. Enabling teams are often measured on whether a…Agile2 min readAgile2 min read
