I turn to one of the agile manifesto principles – perhaps the most surprising to people who misinterpret agile as “doing waterfall only faster.”
“Agile processes promotesustainable development.The sponsors, developers, and users should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.”
This is how we expect consumer tech to work.
The major operating systems and digital service providers are moving away from big, highly disruptive releases, with lots of new things to learn at once. The best digital services just work. Updates are very frequent but come with a low burden of learning and adaptation.
And that’s how we’re changing the way we deliver digital products and services in NHS England.
Away from timebound programmes with big, risky release dates at the end.
To sustainable products and services that deliver for the organisation, are sustainable for the teams that work on them, and critically, respect the capacity of frontline services to absorb change.
This month we’ll release the integration of 111 online into the NHS App across 100% of England. But we started small – with just 5% of areas, scaled to 30% then 60%, learning and checking the impact at each step.
https://blog.mattedgar.com/2023/10/22/the-humans-of-digital-transformation-a-talk-for-digital-government-north-and-reprised-for-the-gds-speaker-series/