Hi I’m Ian Ames

I have over 20 years experience delivering projects to a range of Government organisations including the Ministry of Justice, Cabinet Office, DEFRA, Dept for Culture Media and Sport, NHS Digital and TechUK.

I have experience of a number of agile practices such as Scrum, Kanban, Cynefin, Lean and DevOps. In recent years I have tended to specialise in the early phases of a service lifecycle. I enjoy working in small teams; being at the intersection of product, tech, and UX; and taking the seed of an idea and shaping it to achievable outcomes.

I have experience of leading co-located, distributed and fully remote teams. Clear communication and a shared understanding of goals is key, regardless of where your team is. I work hard to ensure teams are pulling in the same direction and are focused on the project outcomes.

I'm currently contracted at Defra until June 2024.

What do I do now?

I’ve never been much of a one for career planning, from reading the ‘5 minutes with’ series from Jon Rhodes that seems to be a common trait of delivery people, lots of us kind of fall into it and enjoy it, that’s certainly been my situation. The Amesy method of career development: For the last few years I have been contracting, this has been a great experience seeing how different organisations work, learning about lots of new problem domains, and hopefully making things just a bit better; I’ve kind of just taken the contracts that were available at the time and haven’t been overly deliberate when selecting work, I find myself getting frustrated by common patterns and want to address them....

Reflections on UKGovCamp 2024.

Despite a pretty awful journey home from UKGovCamp I’m still buzzing from it and thinking about it. I’m also horribly out of my blogging flow so you’ll have to put up with yet another ‘reflections on UKGovCamp’ post I’m afraid. Before I went. I’ve been thinking about my reflections (meta) and understanding the headspace I was in before I went is important to give context. To summarise it in one word: jaded....

A team icebreaker using Midjourney AI.

Yesterday the team got together to workshop how we move into the next phase of our project. Up until now we have mainly been in Discovery/Alpha mode, exploring the problem space and sketching out potential solutions. As we move to beta we’re onboarding devs into the team and so it was worth us think about our ways of working an how we communicate effectively between design/research and dev. At the beginning of the day I tried out a new icebreaker for the team....

Delivery tactics - Shaping Your Discovery

In the delivery of a digital service, a discovery is a short period right at the beginning of the project to determine what the problem is and whether it is worth solving. Discoveries should be short, usually no more than a few weeks and should seek to provide just enough confidence to proceed or not. Discoveries are intense and its important that they focus on the right things to help the team progress....

Delivery Tactics - Slicing thin or deep?

A key part of agile delivery is working out what small changes can deliver the most value. It can be hard to get agreement on what is small enough to be valuable, getting this balance right is extremely difficult and context specific, hence why MVP’s (minimum viable products) are much maligned. There are two main approaches that can be used, you can either ‘slice thin’ deliver a small part of every step of the user journey; or ‘slice deep’ focus your effort on improving one part of the end to end service journey....