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.

So you're thinking of becoming a delivery manager

A few months back Neil Vass asked in the Agile in the Ether slack channel for advice for people looking to move into Delivery Management roles. I posted a bunch of replies, others did too. Before slack deletes all the replies I thought I would turn them into a blog post. What is a delivery manager? When I first started working as a delivery manager in 2015, job searches for the role mainly returned delivery driver and pizza delivery type roles, over the last 9 years the role has become much more established in both the public and private sector....

Monthnote September 24

I’ve been a bit naff keeping up the weeknotes cadence in September so attempting a Month note. PD has a bibliography of common phrases, one of them is “laptop in the pond” that feeling when you get to the end of the week and just want to not look at a screen for a while. That’s partially why my cadence has dropped off,publishing to my blog is a bit of a faff....

Weeknote 02/08/24

So funemployment is over. I’m back doing work and it’s straight in at the deep end as the client engagement kicked off this week too. This week has been all the usual things of getting a large project moving, meeting people, establishing ways of working, chasing accounts, setting up how we’re going to track all the things we need to do. My role is delivery lead (not engagement manager) as I stated last week, so I’m working out how to balance myself to support the 4 teams that are merging on the project, help them to be successful, and keep track of deliverables we’ve signed up to....

Weeknote 26/07/24

Monday My z fold 4 has been playing up for weeks. Since upgrading to the latest version of android, wifi hasn’t worked, on Monday it stopped charging and is pretty much now a brick, just when I need a phone as contract conversations heat up. I dug out my old oneplus 6t, a 6 year old phone and it worked well, and is noticeably quicker than the Samsung with all its bloatware....

Weeknote 19/07/24

Monday Freya had an inset day, Han and I couldn’t figure out the logic of having an inset day on the Monday of the last week of term. On Sunday night as we sat down to watch the Euro’s final with the kids it dawned on us. Well played Mr West, well played! I was looking after Freya’s friend Martha too, I had planned to drive up to Bude to meet Darwin and go surfing (well mainly pushing the girls on their boards) It was a 3 hour round trip for around 40 minutes of surfing in the rain, but it was fun nonetheless and good to catchup with Darwin....