Digital by Default

Digital by Default

The challenge of ‘user driven development’

It has been 18 months now since we officially started the project to build a new ONS website — the most consistent thing throughout our initial discovery, the alpha and now the latter days of the beta has been a commitment to the principle of being ‘user focused’. Over the life of the project I have taken…

October 24, 2015
The challenge of ‘user driven development’

It has been 18 months now since we officially started the project to build a new ONS website – the most consistent thing throughout our initial discovery, the alpha and now the latter days of the beta has been a commitment to the principle of being ‘user focused’. Over the life of the project…

October 24, 2015
Don’t do Agile. Be agile. Or something.

I’ve read a couple of great posts about ‘agile’ in the last week or so – it is like 2008 all over again! First Paul Downey strayed from the topic of lists & registers to contemplate ‘scope creep’ and then Nik Silver wrote about ‘getting partial value from partial delivery‘. Both posts eloquently cover…

October 21, 2015
What do you [really] do?

That is the question isn’t it? My job title is Head of Digital Transformation. Yep I don’t know what that means either. Probably not what you think it does. The reality is my job title should have probably been Head of Beta.ONS for this year – because it has been pretty much all consuming. Where…

October 19, 2015
Pondering the Peter Pan Problem

There is a new Peter Pan movie* on at the cinema and thanks to the way my mind works I found myself looking up the idea of ‘Peter Pan Syndrome’ on Wikipedia. Turns out it is a ‘pop-psychology’ idea rather than something with more scientific grounding but ’puer aeternus’ (eternal boy) seems pretty well established…

October 18, 2015