Cartoons are a great way to help your colleagues identify with your users, and you don’t have to be an artist to make them work. I recently wrote a post on this topic for the GDS User Researchers blog. Like many …
Chance to reflect Last Wednesday (17th December) we held our first Agile 'giant' retrospective. It gave us chance to look back at our Agile projects over the past 12 months and discuss what had worked well, what needed to improve …
2014 has been an important year for the Agency. We've moved from a 'monolithic' supplier to a new tower model with Service Integration and Management (SIAM) and a Service desk running across the towers. The tower model moves organisations away …
We can work anywhere anytime It’s been quite a journey – from steam power to warp speed. We have genuinely transformed our end user technology profile in a roll out of only 7 weeks. Oh and at the same time …
Meeting the needs of Assisted Digital users is something that the ‘find an apprenticeship’ exemplar team have worked really hard to address. Although we have only seen Assisted Digital needs in 5% of our users, we have addressed these needs by …
Moving to agile development methodologies has created a whirlwind of change for people. Out with the old and in the new. But the focus on iterative customer-led developments has meant that we are less comfortable nailing down requirements in advance. …
In my previous post I talked about the way that the UK is open to people switching careers. This will only happen, of course, if we set out to learn continually. There are so many ways to learn; from the people around us, …
A major part of the Skills Funding Agency activity is promoting and funding apprenticeships. I spent time recently at The Skills Show where I saw some of the country’s most talented apprentices competing in the World Skills competitions.
The Skills Funding Agency has been a hugely exciting place to work over the last year or so. We have torn up the old rule book, putting our users at the heart of everything we do, adopting agile techniques and bringing …
Well, the Apprenticeship Applications exemplar has now been given official approval to go into public Beta after passing the GDS service assessment last week. It’s been a challenging couple of months; as well as preparing for the assessment, we’ve also been …