In the delivery of a digital service, a discovery is a short period right at the beginning of the project to determine what the problem is and whether it is worth solving. Discoveries should be short, usually no more than a few weeks and should seek to provide just enough confidence to proceed or not. Discoveries are intense and its important that they focus on the right things to help the team progress....

A key part of agile delivery is working out what small changes can deliver the most value. It can be hard to get agreement on what is small enough to be valuable, getting this balance right is extremely difficult and context specific, hence why MVP’s (minimum viable products) are much maligned. There are two main approaches that can be used, you can either ‘slice thin’ deliver a small part of every step of the user journey; or ‘slice deep’ focus your effort on improving one part of the end to end service journey....

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....

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....

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....