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Adam Maddison
Head of Agile Delivery
Government Digital Service
@dog_bytes
Scaling agile at the
Government Digital
Service
GOV.UK:
a brief history
*GDS
*GDS
*GDS
*GDSGDS
*GDSGDS
GOV.UK is big
GDS
But it hasn’t been like that for long
GDS
GOV.UK was already pretty big
GDS
It grew very quickly
GDS
It was already pretty complex
GDS
There was another very
big task ahead of us
GDS
All within another fixed deadline
How would we
motivate our people
to deliver?
GDS
It’s increasingly clear
what motivates people
to do good work
We had a
clear purpose
We knew having
autonomy was a
good thing
GDS
GDS
“Autonomy without transparency
doesn’t work as we’d set people up to
make random decisions.”
@pawelbrodzinski
GDS
We needed to be clear how we
were going to achieve our goals
GDS
We needed to be able to see how we
were progressing - at all times
We knew visualising
was essential
*GDS
*Adam Maddison GDSGDS
*GDS
*GDS
*Adam Maddison GDSGDS
*GDS
And then we talked
to each other
*GDS
GDS
The conversations were
very open, and very honest
We hit the deadline!
So:
what did we learn?
GDS
Large teams took more
effort to manage
GDS
Visionary leadership was vital
GDS
The conversations between the teams
were the most important feature
But...
GDS
Although the best architectures,
requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organising teams
GDS
We ended the year supporting
78 applications
Conway’s Law
GDS
Now we can look at the common
attributes of those applications
GDS
We’re now using a
Publishing Platform approach
GDS
On any large programme,
do research early to find
those common attributes
Government
as a Platform
GDS
So, what’s our approach to
scaling agile at GDS?
Do not scale
The GOV.UK model
GDS
Not everything in GDS has
scaled in the same way
GDS
Our Communities of Practice
have been vital
GDS
We haven’t ignored
scaling frameworks
Trusted,
empowered
teams
Common vision
and goals
Clear visualisation
Open and honest
communication
People and
interactions over
processes and tools
Thanks!
Adam Maddison
@dog_bytes

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