Hidden Plymouth, Route 1 - Stoke to Mutton Cove

This route starts at Stoke Village Car Park, which is free to park. It then climbs to what was once the highest point in Plymouth, before descending to sea level and back again. I have mapped the route on Strava so you can download it to a GPS, or print out the map. I have also run the route so you can see a fly through below: Relive 'New phone' Points of interest Blockhouse Park Before the city expanded toward Roborough this was the highest point in Plymouth and the 360˚ view from the Redoubt is one of the best in the city....

<span title='2018-01-15 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>January 15, 2018</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;8 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;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....

<span title='2017-10-06 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>October 6, 2017</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;5 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;Ian Ames

5 Reasons Open Plan Offices Suck for Agile Teams

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!...

<span title='2016-10-13 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>October 13, 2016</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;4 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;Ian Ames

Are Sprints Sustainable?

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....

<span title='2016-09-15 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>September 15, 2016</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;8 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;Ian Ames

User Research Is the Most Frustrating Thing Ever

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 20 months. I have been with them for 15 of those months. Our team is made up of user researchers, a designer, a BA, developers and testers. Dealing with users isn’t new to me, before joining my current team I worked in IT operations and service management, dealing with angry and frustrated users was a day to day part of the role....

<span title='2016-08-16 00:00:00 +0000 UTC'>August 16, 2016</span>&nbsp;·&nbsp;4 min&nbsp;·&nbsp;Ian Ames