Dave Briggs – Page 26 – An online notebook

Monday, 7 June, 2021

Do you need a digital programme?

The mechanics of making digital change happen in an organisation can be really complicated. What works in one place may well not stick in another. It all depends on strategy, structures, politics and personalities.

One common approach is to have a clearly defined digital programme. In many ways it makes perfect sense: you have a strategy in place, and a programme to implement that strategy. Having a programme helps you bid for some (most likely capital) money to help make it happen, you get a clear timescale to work to, and some benefits (savings!) to realise – not forgetting a programme board to report back to the big-wigs on how you’re progressing. What’s not to like?

Let’s look at the pros:

Unlocks money ✅
Allows you to recruit people ✅
Buys technology ✅
Clarity of purpose ✅
Clear governance ✅

Sounds pretty good! But wait, there’s cons too…

Capital money will disappear ❌
Those people you recruit are only there for the length of the programme ❌
Have you set aside time and money to ensure your new digital products are transitioned to BAU support? ❌
What are you going to do about continuous improvement? ❌
How are you going to keep those big-wigs excited about turning up to your board, two years in? ❌
The admin overhead can be significant if you aren’t careful – who is updating the programme plan, and generating the highlight reports? ❌
You’re on the hook for those savings – are they really in your power to deliver? ❌

The last point is crucial and getting consensus on this early is vital. Capital funds for programmes are usually given on the basis of a business case – in other words, for every £1 invested, £3 is expected to be saved. But, whilst the money is funding digital activity, the savings won’t be coming from the digital team – they will be created within the departments where services are being redesigned. As part of a programme, there must therefore be absolute clarity on what savings are coming from where – and a willingness to offer them up when the time comes.

A digital programme brings focus, and resources. It will get you going for sure. The danger is that it is temporary and they rarely allow for the planning and investment needed to maintain a new digital estate in a business as usual situation.

They can also become real pressure cooker environments, causing stress, anxiety and burnout – so you do have to make sure you look after yourself and your team, especially in the run up to board meetings.

Sounds like I am pretty against digital programmes. Perhaps I am – my preference would always be to build a permament team to do this stuff. Make digital change the business as ususal! It takes out a lot of the stress and anxiety, and makes it far easier to embed digital ways of working, and the core concepts and culture of agile, user centred design and so on.

However, in the real world, creating a digital programme is a mandate to get things done, as well as a shortcut to funds, which means people and new technology, if you need it. If you do go down the programme route, then the two most important things to get in place, for me, are:

agreement and clarity on savings and where they come from
a plan for the transition to BAU for the new digital services, and a properly funded regime of continuous improvement.

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Monday, 31 May, 2021

Creating good, simple user stories

User stories are the strongest way you can capture requirements for your digital service and are another key component in taking a user centric approach to design.

Rather than the old way of doing things, of producing a specification document outlining every single feature that a product needs to have, user stories focus on the needs of the users of that product, and specifically on their outcomes.

This focus goes a long way towards producing services that are usable and deliver end to end, rather than breaking down halfway through because a feature ‘works’ technically, but doesn’t do what is expected or needed.

Additionally, user stories can be a great way to bring a product to life when describing it to stakeholders. It really demonstrates a new way of talking about digital services and technology, and can be very meaningful to non-technical folk, giving confidence that you’re doing the right thing.

In a multi-disciplinary team, the user stories are usually the domain of the product manager, written with the input from the rest of the team. If you don’t have all the roles in your team, then do try to have a single person responsible for the compilation of user stories – and try to have someone non-technical doing it, to avoid the temptation to leap into solutionising too soon.

Writing a good user story follows a certain format:

As a…
I need to…
So that…

For example:

As a new, and busy resident who drives to work in the town centre
I need to apply for a parking permit online
So that I don’t run up loads of parking fines

That’s quite a high level example (often referred to an ‘epic’ story), so we can probably come up with a more granular user story:

As a resident who has applied for a parking permit online
I need to be proactively kept informed of the progress of my application
So that I don’t need to keep contacting the council

Note that the user story doesn’t explicitly state here what the solution is. The focus is on the outcome that the user needs, not the technology that will enable it.

The technology is likely to be mentioned in the second main element of a user story, which is the acceptance criteria. These are descriptions of what done looks like for this story. The GOV.UK Technology blog shares a nice method for writing good acceptance criteria, based on the pattern ‘Given… When… Then…’.

Additional information for a user story might include the prioritisation of that story, so the team know how important it is to get that story completed, and also the size – how much effort is likely to be needed for the story.

Here’s some tips for writing good user stories:

Keep them small. If they start getting to wide in scope, treat them as an epic and break them down into smaller stories
Avoid the temptation of repeating your ‘I need to’ in your ‘So that I can’ – which is a really common error. For instance – ‘As a manager, I need to access my team’s performance dashboard, so that I can view the perform dashboard’
Don’t treat individual technical pieces of work as user stories. They might be important to the project, but that doesn’t mean they directly contribute to meeting a user need, and doing so can clog things up and spread confusion about what the outcome of the project is intended to be
Try following the INVEST (Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, Testable) formula for producing good user stories. It’s a handy framework to ensure your stories are what you and your users need. Read more about that here.

To make life easier, here is a simple template for writing user stories. Feel free to amend it any way you like!

Hope it’s useful!

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Thursday, 18 February, 2021

Interesting links – 18 Feb 2021

I find interesting things to read, bookmark them, save a chunk of text as a quote, and then occasionally copy and paste it all into a blog post, so you don’t have to.

Digital Inclusion Toolkit: now live

Leeds and Croydon Councils recently won central government funding to create a comprehensive and collaborative how-to guide for digital inclusion.

Link

Delivering and accelerating in a pandemic – DWP Digital

Within DWP Digital our Technology Services team designs, builds and operates that platform, and in the last 10 months has ‘moved mountains’ to keep those services going.

Link

Working Smarter Field Guide

Learning informally and socially means connecting our individual work with our teams, communities, and networks. It requires honing our curiosity and seeking out different perspectives and ideas. It takes more than individual sensemaking to understand complex situations, so we have to find others to challenge our assumptions and learn at the edge of our professional abilities.

Link

The tiny video toolkit

People ask me [Coté] how I do the tiny videos. I hope to do a screencast at some point, but in the meantime, here are some notes.

Link

Announcing our new digital skills training offer – MHCLG Digital

We’re inviting local authority staff to apply for one of 10 certified courses with FutureLearn, covering a range of topics such as accessibility, design, decision-making and leadership. We’re testing the water with a small number of licenses and courses, but if we get enough positive feedback we’ll look to purchase more and make it an ongoing thing.

Link

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Monday, 15 February, 2021

A CDO chat with Kit Collingwood

As part of an occasional series, here’s a video of a conversation I had today with Kit Collingwood, Deputy Director for Digital and Customer Services at the Royal Borough of Greenwich. Kit shares some great insights and has some really interesting views on digital transformation in local government, so I really do recommend you watch the whole thing!

If you’d rather listen to it, you can grab the audio-only version here.

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Friday, 12 February, 2021

Monthnote February 2021

February is a short month, of course, but this one seems to have lasted for ages! Perhaps the impact of lockdown.

The month started with snow, and we had a good amount here in south Lincolnshire, enough for Ruth and I to make a pretty good effort at a snowman. It’s interesting, I think, that there were none of the histrionics that normally accompany heavy snowfall in this country. Most people were at home anyway, so it was fine. Turns out that’s probably what we ought to do every time there is heavy snow – just stay home and get on with things as best you can. It doesn’t last long.

The end of this lockdown appears to be approaching, but for those who are missing their social life, I Miss My Bar is a fun website, providing some ersatz pub-like atmosphere for wherever you happen to be.

I’ve had to start house hunting again – my hopes for being settled in one place for a while were dashed when my landlord put a for sale sign up outside my house! Charming. Hoping I can find somewhere where I can just be for a little while and give me a chance to save up properly for a deposit so I might buy myself a house in the future.

Work continues to be a challenge – there is almost constant change happening, and this brings with it the need for a lot of organising, adjusting, explaining and planning. It is exhausting, particularly when in the context of the pandemic. The (non-covid related) death of a member of the team this month hit many of us hard, especially those that were close to him. A reminder of the important things, and of how fragile life can be.

I’ve not blogged much this month, but have a few ideas for things to write about – and the fact that I have now finally discovered how to write posts in WordPress using the old classic editor might help me a bit! Not a fan of the block editor that has come in recently, so being able to avoid it is great for me.

I published the ‘CDO Chat’ with Kit Collingwood, which at the time of typing has over 550 views, which is amazing given its length and subject matter!

I shall have to find a willing victim for another soon!

I’ve also got my first coaching group organised, and we started things up yesterday. Technically that’s in March though so I shall say no more about it for now.

Book-wise, I thought it had been a slow month, but on checking it turns out I did ok:

Judgement on Deltchev, Eric Ambler – pretty good espionage thriller, set in a fictional Eastern European country after the second world war
The End of the Affair, Graham Greene – absolutely superb, obviously
A Room with a View, E. M. Forster – had a lot of fun reading this, nice to follow the Greene with something rather lighter
Asylum, Patrick McGrath – I love McGrath’s unreliable narrators, and this is a classic example. Fantastic writing. Rather oddly, my paperback was missing the first 13 pages of the story (!) so I had to read the start as a free sample on my Kindle!
The Anglo-Saxon Age, John Blair – an Oxford Very Short Introduction, a series I love. I’m a bit obsessed with Anglo-Saxons and early English history at the moment (blame lockdown!) and this provides a gloriously concise summary.

This month in movies…

The Grand Budapest Hotel – almost too whimsical, but some great performances amongst an amazing cast
Hail Caesar! – great fun
Inside Llewyn Davis – literally nothing happens, but it does so beautifully
The Lighthouse – utterly bonkers. I have no idea what happened in this film
The Ides of March – a slick political thriller, very engaging

I’ve also really been enjoying the US version of The Office on Netflix, and Channel 4’s Great Pottery Throwdown. Continuing my current obsession with medieval English history, I can also thoroughly recommend 1066 – A Year to Conquer England, which is entertaining and informative, even if it employs some slightly odd and distracting techniques at times.

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Need volunteers for an experiment in group digital coaching!

I am looking to recruit a small group of digital doers across local gov to help me test an idea I have had – for a virtual coaching group.

What I think this looks like is maybe a group of 6 people working in local government on digital ‘stuff’ in one sense or another. I don’t think specific roles, experience or levels of seniority matter particularly – in fact a mix will probably really help the group dynamic.

Involvement will be some online conversations, sharing problems, frustrations, ideas and solutions with each other through a mix of text chat, video calls as a group and one to ones. I’ll be in there too, adding whatever experience I might have.

This really is just an idea for now, but it will be interesting to test it to see if it has benefit. If you would like to join, or know someone who might benefit, please let me know by filling in this short form.

Photo by Nick Morrison on Unsplash

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Tuesday, 9 February, 2021

Interesting links – 9 Feb 2021

More nuggets spotted online, shared for your edutainment.

5 tips on running virtual events – DWP Digital

One of the biggest learning points for the events team was that you can’t take a plan for a physical event and simply run it virtually instead. It just doesn’t work. You need to create a way to engage attendees remotely, while they’re having to do most of their work through their screens, from their home. However, virtual events have a lot of opportunities for being inclusive and allowing people to join in regardless of whether they can travel to another location.

Link

Retail, rent and things that don’t scale — Benedict Evans

Part of the promise of the internet is that you can take things that only worked in big cities and scale them everywhere. In the off-line world, you could never take that unique store in London or Milan and scale it nationally or globally – you couldn’t get the staff, and there wasn’t the density of the right kind of customer (and that’s setting aside the problem that scaling it might make people less interested anyway). But as the saying goes, ‘the internet is the densest city on earth’, so theoretically, any kind of ‘unscalable’ market should be able to find a place on the internet. Everyone can find their tribe.

Link

Being Human – Catherine Howe

Bureaucracies are designed to protect themselves from harm – they have formal complaint routes and escalations and a hierarchy that is there to maintain the status quo. And when you look at a wider context you can see some of the drivers for this – the more we see a world based on risk and blame the harder it is for us to be human and authentic in our interactions.The first time fix of customer services is allowed for simple questions – to go there with more complex stuff brings levels of risks that most bureacracies are not comfortable with as it takes you to the place of difficult choices and trade off – the messiness of complexity.

Link

The Real Novelty of the ARPANET – Two Bit History

Today, the internet is a lifeline that keeps us tethered to each other even as an airborne virus has us all locked up indoors. So it’s easy to imagine that, if the ARPANET was the first draft of the internet, then surely the world that existed before it was entirely disconnected, since that’s where we’d be without the internet today, right? The ARPANET must have been a big deal because it connected people via computers when that hadn’t before been possible.
That view doesn’t get the history quite right. It also undersells what made the ARPANET such a breakthrough.

Link

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Thursday, 4 February, 2021

Tuesday, 2 February, 2021

Setting up my new Mac

So, I got an unexpected refund from the Student Loan Company (bonus!) recently and spent it on one of the new MacBook Airs. It’s a beautiful machine. Apple seem to have fixed the keyboard issues they were having a little while ago, it’s lightning quick, and the screen is gorgeous.

I’ve not had a Mac for a few years now, relying on my work-supplied Windows laptop, and a Chromebook for other personal bits and pieces. I must admit, I didn’t think I had missed it much – but I’ve found myself realising that, actually, I had just learned to put up with a load of frustrations!

So what software did I put on this thing?

Browsers – it comes with Safari as default, but I added Chrome and Edge. I’m logged into Safari with my personal Gmail account and use that for day to day browsing. Chrome I use with a G-Suite account, to keep that tidy and in one place, and Edge I use for an Office 365 account for the school I help govern. I know there are many ways to create standalone apps from websites, which is an alternative way to keep all these account separate, but I’m happy with this solution.

From the Mac App store I installed some stuff I bought years ago, but are still perfectly good for my needs:

BBEdit – I use the free version of this veteran Mac app as a simple text editor
Pixelmator Classic – good enough for the image editing I do, although there is a new, Pro, version out
Evernote – still the best way to capture notes of all kinds, I’ve tried others, like OneNote, Bear and Notion but keep coming back to this.
Omnioutliner – not something I use a lot, but sometimes using an outliner to plan thoughts is a really helpful method, and I’ve not come across a better tool that Omnioutliner.

Stuff I installed from the web:

Transmit – a great, easy to use FTP client. Mostly used to help managed websites
Zoom – well, duh
Microsoft Office – I don’t actually use it that much these days – Google Docs does the business most of the time, but occasionally the MS suite cannot be avoided so it helps having it on here. Also it comes with Teams, so…
NetNewsWire – previously, I used Reeder for my RSS aggregation (yes! I still do that!) but on this Mac I went ‘back’ to NNW. I put ‘back’ in quotes because it’s an entirely new, open source application these days. It works great.

I also took out a subscription to SetApp, which gives access to a whole host of useful Mac apps for a tenner a month:

Bartender – helps keep my menu bar tidy. Inessential but nice.
Capto – a fairly easy to use screen recording app. Screenflow used to be my default choice in this space on the Mac, but as this was included in SetApp’s bundle it saved me money to use this
CleanMyMac X – tidies up the crud that builds up on any computer over time
Cleanshot X – an improvement on the default screen grabbing tool
Gifox – makes simple animated GIFs
Marked – takes documents written in Markdown and exports them to various formats. Useful when it is needed, which isn’t all that often
MarsEdit – the grandaddy of desktop blog editing apps, every post I write starts off here
MindNode – mindmapping tool that’s a joy to use
Paste – a clipboard manager. If you’ve never used one before, you don’t know what you are missing. Keeps a record of everything you copy, so you can paste it at any time in the future
PDFpen – for wrangling with PDFs
Prizmo – turns scanned documents into editable text (OCR type stuff)
Rocket Typist – like Paste, a tool you don’t know you need until you try it, then you can’t live without it. This allows you to set system wide shortcuts that automatically expand short snippets of text into longer ones. My personal favourite app in this space is TextExpander, but this works well and doesn’t cost me any more money.
Ulysses – an app for composing longer form writing projects. It uses markdown and presents a pretty minimalist writing experience. This is an app I felt I ought to download but haven’t actually used for anything yet.

I also invested in an Anker USB hub thing, to make up for the lack of ports on the laptop. It’s an elegant design and seems to work very well.

Photo by Thom on Unsplash

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Monday, 1 February, 2021

Monthnote January 2021

A new year, a new attempt to return to semi-regular blogging. I’m trying to post little things often, rather than getting trapped into writing long posts that never get finished or published. You may have noticed I posted a video from Janet Hughes and a note on using CloudReady to bring an old laptop back to life.

The photo adorning this post was taken on my phone on the fens near The Wash at Gedney Drove End, near the RAF bombing practice site. Yep, it’s as bleak as it sounds. Beautiful in its way though.

The start to this year has been interesting, continuing the carnage from 2020. Having been in a ‘tier 4’ location before the festive break, the new lockdown barely affected me. I’m pretty used now to the limited world I inhabit.

Work has been challenging and the issues at Croydon are fairly well documented. Even people not existing in the bubble of local government are aware of it, so it must be bad. However, we keep on keeping on, making things a little bit better everyday whilst dealing with some of the more unpleasant cost-cutting measures that are being introduced.

One of the good things about lockdown is the sheer amount of cultural stuff I’ve been consuming. 2020 was a bit of a record in terms of book reading for me, 58 books read in total. In January 2021 I got through five, which is a good start:

Our Game, John Le Carré – classic Le Carré: middle aged bloke reads things and thinks. Gripping but I have no idea how he makes it so
An Introduction to English Poetry, James Fenton – a wonderful introduction to reading poetry, makes it all seem so simple
A Very British Coup, Chris Mullin – fast paced thriller, no Proust by any stretch but it rattles along
The Dancer at the Gai-Moulin, Georges Simenon – another brilliant Maigret (last year I started reading them in order – this is number 10 of 70 odd)
The Hatred of Poetry, Ben Lerner – interesting book length essay, the main thrust of which is that poems always fail because they aim so high

At least three of those are very short, you may notice, which certainly helps with the numbers. But it also helps with the flow – too many long reads one after the other does affect one’s motivation to read, I find. Also a weird mixture of thrillers and literary criticism. Hey ho!

Music-wise I have been utterly obsessed lately with Taylor Swift’s two albums from 2020, Folklore and Evermore. Have had them on almost permanent repeat for the last few months. Special mentions though to the re-release of the KLF’s better known tracks, and Four Tet’s Parallel.

Lockdown is also great for watching films. This month I saw some really good ones, most for the first time:

Synedoche, New York – absolutely baffling, I have watched so many YouTube videos explaining what this is all about, but I still am not really sure!
Frances Ha – nice, short, heartwarming and quirky
The Royal Tenembaums – I’ve never watched this all the way through before and I am pleased I put the time into doing so. Lots of whimsy but the time passed by very quickly and there were a fair few laugh out loud moments
Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri – Overall I really liked it, had the feeling of everybody knowing what they were doing. I found the Damascene conversion of one character a little hard to take though.
Away We Go – slightly smug, somewhat whimsical, but fun overall
Burn Before Reading – a brilliant way to absolutely waste an hour and a half. A tale of idiocy in which nobody learns anything.

All in all, a decent start to the year on various fronts.

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