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.

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....

Weeknote 12/07/24

Another week that’s felt like I haven’t done that much, but on reflection I’ve done quite a bit, I think it’s more of a case that I’m doing lots of disjointed things wily-nily rather than having a coherent purpose to anything. I dunno, probably overthinking it. Monday. Wet and horrible day, I didn’t do a great deal, polished up my contracting post, went out for lunch with Han, that was about it....

So you're thinking of becoming a contractor

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve had lots of chats with people thinking about contracting, so I thought I would try to distil some of that advice into a blog post. It’s a chunky post so here’s an index: First of all some context Pro’s of contracting Con’s of contracting Getting started Finding contracts Budgeting Conclusion First of all, some context. There are many different types of contracts and contractors, so advice may vary....