One of my long held ambitions is to write a book. I’ve blogged about it before and floated a few ideas but they never really amounted to anything and I lacked the discipline to see things through anyway.

I’ve decided 2017 is going to be different. I, like Baldrick before me, have a cunning plan. Well not that cunning really. Not much of a plan either if you want to get down to brass tacks but it is better than nothing.

So here is what I am going to do. I am going to take everything I learned during my time at ONS and since, all the blogposts I wrote, all the advice I got from folk smarter than myself, all the mistakes I made and all triumphs I observed and I am going to write one chapter/essay a month (on here) in the order below before wrapping it all up into a tidy ebook. I’m also going to make each chapter available on Google Docs for comment.

Some of it will be recycling and remixing things I’ve written or spoken about before. Some of it will be new. All of it will lack originality. Still when has that ever stopped anybody.

This is my proposed chapter list — what do you think?

1. Making the (business) case 
2. Procurement vs Commissioning
3. Hiring 
4. Team culture (including working with suppliers)
5. Being agile vs Doing Agile
6. Placating the powers that be (i.e. governance)
7. Product propaganda vs Making things open
8. Discovery is for life not just for Christmas
9. The Art of Alphas
10. Building Betas Better
11. Launch is day one
12. Tl;dr