Digital by Default

Tag: agile

  • Designing the mod(ern) squad

    squad /skwɒd/nouna small group of people having a particular task. Background I recently wrote about our new Squad Manager role(s) and wanted to just dig in a bit to how we see our squad model growing and evolving. Like many companies and organisations we follow Spotify in referring to our agile delivery teams as ‘squads’.…

  • What the Forking Here* is a Squad Manager?

    https://media.giphy.com/media/3o6fJ8baw3aDgUQnJu/giphy.gif I’ve learned a lot in my first year working for Notbinary — the nuts and bolts of it is pretty well covered in this post from Sean Tubbs about making the switch to consultancy life. A big lesson however is that some of the key positions in the ‘squads’ we provide are a little different from…

  • Ways of working (in progress)

    This is an attempt to write down the approach we are starting to formalise around our ‘squads’ — it is a work in progress but is starting to make sense. It is inspired by working practices I witnessed or experienced at Defra, mySociety, ONS and elsewhere → We work in the open by default — if something needs to…

  • An alpha alpha approach

    Mr Downey spurred a bit of conversation on Twitter about the idea of ‘alpha’ stages in the GDS delivery cycle. One of the responses was from Martin — which I liked up to a point but it also didn’t totally work for me and part of that was the terminology — unfortunately MVP has attracted so much baggage at…

  • Sloganeering for stickers

    Shit I say…and why I think this was Paul Downey’s laptop If I was to do a series of stickers (why stickers?) I think this is what they would say (and why)→ 01. Minimal viable bureaucracy — I’m not one of those JFDI people. I believe that is the fastest way to get something done that will not stick.…