Ways of Working

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....

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....

I recently gave a presentation at the inaugural Tech Exeter conference called Practical agile: Lessons learned the hard way on our journey delivering digital products. In that presentation I claimed open plan offices are terrible team spaces, but didn’t really elaborate on why. Since then Neil Parker asked on twitter to explain why I thought open plan offices are bad team environments. So here is my totally unscientific personal listicle to explain why!...

I’m the scrum master for a small team developing a new service for a government agency. The team has been working in an agile way for 21 months. I have been with them for 16 of those months. Over the last few months I have been feeling more and more anxious about the sustainability of sprints as we enter a new phase for our service. We use Scrum as our methodology for delivering software....

I’m the scrum master for a small team developing a new service for a government agency. The team has been working in an agile way for 17 months. I have been with them for 12 of those months. One of the main parts of my role is to help the team visualise the flow of work from idea to delivered. If we can see where work is (and how long it is there), we can see where it is getting blocked and I can go to work with my big unblocking hammer....