User Manual of Me

User Manual of Ian Ames I’ve used Cassie Robinson’s User Manual of me template a number of times when starting projects with new teams, its a great way to quickly introduce a team to how everyone likes to work and to discuss how best to work together. It also works well in remote organisations as a way to quickly learn about colleagues you may not see on a day to day basis....

April 21, 2021 · 3 min · Ian Ames

10 Things I Learned From Remote Working

This post was originally published on the surevine blog. 3 months ago, I took the next step in my career and joined Surevine as a Team Lead. There were many things that first attracted me to the company, but one major benefit was that it’s totally remote, and so learning how to work collaboratively whilst remote was a challenge that really interested me. Sureviner’s are spread all over the country, and my team alone covers a geographical area that stretches from Durham to Plymouth....

October 16, 2019 · 6 min · Ian Ames

Story Crowdsourcing Game

Emily Webber recently asked if I could run an 8-minute workshop to energise people at the beginning of her regular Agile in the Ether remote meetup. (It is a very friendly meetup and well worth checking out). This is the detail of the game I facilitated: Objective Tell a story that develops iteratively and everyone in the group contributes to. Instruction Each person adds a sentence to a story, but has to repeat the preceding sentences first, then nominates the next person to go....

February 26, 2019 · 2 min · Ian Ames

Improving 'Find' for the Find Property Information Service

Find Property Information is a GOV.UK service being developed by HM Land Registry which aims to provide a simple summary of property information. Recently we have improved our ‘postcode search’ functionality. Why did we do this? Our first iteration of searching was developed over a year ago, we knew the limitations of it, but it was ‘good enough’ for the early stages of the service. This allowed us to move onto developing other features....

January 31, 2018 · 8 min · Ian Ames

How Our Digital Team Works

I’m the Delivery Team Lead for a small multi-disciplinary team in government. We are developing the service in an agile way following the digital service standards developed by our colleagues at the Government Digital Service (GDS). We recently added the ability to keep a copy of the title summary (basic information about a property). It’s a great example of what this way of working looks like in practice. Because we can continually develop the service, we aim to deliver the features that deliver most value quickly, rather than waiting for the whole service to be finished....

October 6, 2017 · 5 min · Ian Ames