10 things I learned about Delivery Management from learning to navigate very large Ships.

25 years ago a young and naive me went to university to study Marine Navigation, My hope was that I could use the skills I learnt to travel the world and get paid whilst doing it. To my horrow I learnt fairly quickly that the reality is that most ships are in port for less than 24 hours and most time is spent at sea. After university I found myself in the crazy world of IT and since digital delivery and product management....

July 3, 2022 · 10 min · Ian Ames

Product Prioritisation is triage

Triage is used in medicine when acute care cannot be provided for lack of resources. The process rations care towards those who are most in need of immediate care, and who benefit most from it. More generally it refers to prioritisation of medical care as a whole. I have some personal experience of using triage from my time as a mountain rescue volunteer. We would often train for scenarios where the number of casualties was more than our capacity to treat them all....

February 9, 2022 · 7 min · Ian Ames

Weeknotes NHS Digital Episode 5

I’m on the train back from Leeds after kicking off Patient Encounter History with the team. My brain is a bit mushy and so this weeknote may be incoherent and full of typos, apologies! It was lovely to meet everyone in person for the first time, build relationships, work through our understanding of the project and what we hope to acheive in the next 8 weeks. I still haven’t found a better way to start new peices of work (or anything with high levels of uncertainty) than face to face workshops to be honest, for me its the last remaining part of remote work that isn’t quite as good as face to face....

July 16, 2021 · 8 min · Ian Ames

Weeknotes NHS Digital Episode 4

This week has been a good one, our discovery team is starting to form with one of our user researchers joining, and the other one due to start on Monday we are starting to get our plans together for discovery. In some ways the slight delay in starting has been useful as its given me and the PM (who’s also new to this space) the opportunity to really start to understand the context of the area we are exploring....

July 2, 2021 · 5 min · Ian Ames

Weeknotes NHS Digital Episode 3

Been a while since the last weeknotes, its been pretty busy we’ve been getting going on a new Discovery which has been filling my brain up as Disco’s always do. I’m going to use this weeknotes to capture what I understand so far, quick reminder that weeknotes are for me to reflect what I know, this doesn’t mean that this is exactly correct, there are holes in my knowledge, the NHS is a vast complex system, I probably understand about 1% of it, writing stuff down helps my understanding though....

June 27, 2021 · 7 min · Ian Ames