Disclaimer: This post may not make me popular with my fellow freelancers and small business owners. Neither does it necessarily reflect the positions, strategies, or opinions of my clients. But you knew that anyway, right? On Monday MPs will debate the subject of tax reporting for small businesses and the self-employed. The trigger for this is a 100,000-plus signature … Continue reading A little and often
Yeah, we're user-centred! Who are the people most present when our service is delivered? Where are they, physically and emotionally, at that moment? What could each of them put into our service, and what could they get out of it? What are we doing to better answer questions 1 to 3 this week? How are those people taking … Continue reading So we think we’re a user-centred, agile team…
The Government Digital Service’s Design Principles have been widely praised, translated and reused. But there is a form of flattery higher than mere imitation. That's adaptation: the way other governments around the world have iterated the GDS principles to fit their local contexts. I’ve been wondering how my own city, with its unique blend of opportunities and talents, might pick up … Continue reading Design principles for an enterprising city
Over the past month I've been fortunate to work with some very capable senior leaders in organisations facing the amorphous challenge of "digital transformation". At first I struggled to nail this jelly to the wall. I had to account for why, if the change is driven by computers and the internet, the solutions so often … Continue reading Gotta catch ‘em all, or, a story about digital transformation in four movements
Who’d have thought it? Since the late 18th Century, moral panics have centred on the propensity for industrialisation and financialisation to turn people into machines. ‘You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both. If you will have that precision out of them, and make their … Continue reading Teaching to the test: weak signals from the emissions scandal
https://youtu.be/5o5DoNvtsY0 Soon after I joined Orange, in the dotcom dog days of 2000, I found myself in a series of meetings about "multimedia marketing" or somesuch. Looking back, those meetings were a fascinating front in the struggle between the free-as-in-speech-and-beer vision of the Internet and the fat margin, consumer protection nightmare of premium rate phone lines … Continue reading Solutions don’t scale, questions do.
Recently I've been thinking a lot about scale... ... but I struggle to get it all out as a single coherent narrative... https://twitter.com/blaine/status/624983244166049792 ... so instead I want to tell a short story. It goes like this... In order to supply my services to a large public organisation, I find my little company as a … Continue reading “I’m sorry, but we are a big company” – a fragment about scale
Dear headteacher, Welcome to your new role! As a parent of two children at the school with another still in primary school, I’m delighted to see your commitment to making ours an outstanding school in line with your new motto and values. The problem is the new logo. In the course of my annual visits … Continue reading Up the school! Or, a passive-aggressive letter to the headteacher on the occasion of the unveiling of a new logo
Still decompressing from an amazing 48 hours running Leeds GovJam 2015.
Stand-out moments for me (sorry if this is one of those “you had to be there” posts :)
- Seeing a full house for the Tuesday evening kick-off
- Ben Holliday’s powerful talk about doing user-centred design at DWP
- Stick-figure voting to organise the project teams
- Handing out new-style jam passports including 10 service design methods to try
- Watching the space empty out on Wednesday morning as teams headed into Leeds to do their first round of user research
- Sharon and Kathryn’s impromptu intervention to reinforce Doing Not Talking
- Seeing the space transform on Wednesday afternoon as the prototypes took shape
- Making global connections with new jams in Athens and Chelmsford
- Seeing teams solve differences of opinion by making, testing and iteration
- Watching project after project pop up on our global jam site
- The purposeful but calm way all the teams approached the 3pm Thursday deadline
- Seeing how much they all had done in just 48 hours
- Having James Lewis and Tom Riordan of Leeds City Council visit our show and tell
- Tidying up the space in record time thanks to everyone who stayed behind to help out
Thanks to all who made it happen.
We rocked the public sector!
We’re going to write more about Leeds GovJam 2015 over the next week or so, but for now you can see all the projects on govjam.org …
… and take a look at Lisa’s lovely photos of the event…
People we need to thank:
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Without exception, everyone I meet in the public sector wants to help make their service better. Most of them are in some way frustrated. The domain is massive and the activities disjointed. People engaged in any given service - from users and frontline workers down to managers and policymakers - can go for months on end … Continue reading Most of government is mostly service design most of the time. Discuss.
The night we kicked off Leeds Service Jam I sneaked away a little early from the post-theme-reveal dinner to a different pub on the other side of town. There I found an astonishing assortment of former colleagues from my time at PA New Media, Ananova and Orange - some of whom I hadn't seen for a good 10 years. … Continue reading Annual Report Number Three
I love that the working title of Martha Lane Fox's proposed new public institution is Dot Everyone. Yes, the "everyone" bit is like motherhood and apple pie. It's important, but it's not a strategy. But dots (and we all know that @ signs are so last decade, don't we?), dots are cool. Dots are so cool … Continue reading I ♥︎ Dots: Why I signed Martha Lane Fox’s petition
There's never been a more exciting time to be designing services in the public sector. But it can still be a lonely existence - in any organisation, a small number of advocates may find themselves trying to shift a large mass with plenty of inertia. The Service Design in Government conference that I attended last week has an … Continue reading 90% archaeology: my notes and reflections on Service Design in Government 2015
Re-posting from the Leeds Service Jam site. Now looking forward to GovJam 9-11 June :)
Thanks to our jam volunteers, Si, Ali, Sharon, Nick and Lisa, for making it happen in Leeds.
Thanks to the organisers of the Global Service Jam and our twin jam, Copenhagen, for the global theme and inspiration throughout the weekend.
Thanks to our supporters and sponsors, UKGovCamp, ODI-Leeds, Studio of Things and SD Leeds.
Jammers should soon receive our jam participant questionnaire from SurveyMonkey. If you’re one of them, please take the time to fill it in and help make the event better for everyone.
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I first wrote this as a comment on Joel Bailey's excellent blog post titled 'This thing called agile might kill us all' but thought it worth re-hashing and expanding here. For context, Joel writes about "working for a big high street bank. The brief is to redesign the ‘end to end mortgage experience’. The timescale is to reach … Continue reading The Last Target Operating Model You’ll Ever Need™
Matt Edgar writes here 