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.

Unordered Note 21/11/25

Continuing the effort of chucking down end of the week thoughts, as an attempt to keep up the weeknote habit, without talking about specifics of the day job. Week 2, go me! Things on my mind at the end of this week: Future of delivery management Heard this week that the BBC are getting rid of their entire delivery management function, which pissed me right off. But after a few days of feeling angry, I became more reflective:...

Unordered Note 14/11/25

I’m back at work this month, I’ve found weeknoting this year difficult due to balancing clients comfort with open notes. The situation is unlikely to change in the near future. The thing I miss the most about the process is getting things that are looping around my brain down on paper and in public, this is because: It gets it out of my brain before the weekend! Writing helps me order swirly thoughts People more intelligent than me usually chip in with ideas and answers I haven’t thought of!...

Thoughts on Responding to Change

I love the agile manifesto, one of the things that most drew me to it was “Responding to change over following a plan”. I’ve worked on enough projects to see the benefit in changing direction when it’s clear that your plan isn’t going to help you hit your goal, and the sheer grinding death-march experience for teams when that doesn’t happen. However the manifesto doesn’t say much about different types of change and how best to respond to them....

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....