The further reading links I suggested are:

The original DevOpsGuys post about anti-patterns:
http://blog.devopsguys.com/2013/02/20/twelve-devops-anti-patterns/

Niek Bartholomeus’ excellent presentation about introducing devops to a more traditional environment:
https://speakerdeck.com/niekbartho/devops-for-dinosaurs

The DevOps section of GDS’ Digital Service Manual:
https://www.gov.uk/service-manual/operations/devops.html

Anna Kennedy put together a brilliant list of resources after DevOpsDays:
http://annaken.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/devops-community-resources.html

DevOps Weekly newsletter: http://devopsweekly.com/

You might also be interested in Gene Kim’s The Phoenix Project, a novel about DevOps.

UPDATE: Thanks to Matthew Jones for reminding me that I mentioned DevOpsDays in my talk but forgot to include the link to them: http://devopsdays.org/events/

I was quite nervous about talking about agile to this audience, particularly since I’ve only really gotten good exposure to content strategy, design and management in my year at GDS. But they were a lovely friendly bunch and I’m really grateful to Sarah Richards & Graham Francis for suggesting me to the organisers.

Essentially I subtitled my talk “a magical mystery tour of Meri being an idiot” and talked through the various lessons I’d learnt about how agile is actually a pretty brilliant approach for content development.

The book I recommend at the end is an absolutely BRILLIANT summary/primer/refresher on Scrum — I heartily recommend you buy at least a copy for yourself and possibly one for everyone you know who needs more agile in their life. You can get it at Amazon or on Kindle (I promise you the Kindle version will be the best 77p you ever spend. Seriously.).

What is it?

A battery pack that you can charge other devices from. It has a micro-USB lead built in and two USB ports — one juiced appropriately for charging an iPad, the other normal mobile phone type devices.

How Does it Fare?

I’ve been very impressed with it. It will fully recharge my iPad, iPhone and Kindle on just one charge — and if I use it mainly for phone and Kindle it will do them each about 4 or 5 times before it needs to be plugged in itself. When I’ve just used it for my iPhone, I’ve managed to get up to 9 recharges out of it.

It weighs a little more than my iPhone, but slips easily into a bag or pocket — I generally just leave it in there and only take it out to charge it every week or two. To charge it up from completely empty to full takes a few hours, but the LEDs keep you apprised of progress and happily it charges off a micro-USB cable rather than bringing another custom cable into your life.

At the moment it’s still just £25 on Amazon — seriously good value. Being able to recharge wherever, whenever has been a great productivity boost, and after some friends were impressed with it today I thought it might be worth sharing

Though looking after the Delivery team (70 civil servants and an additional 70 contractors at times) was very rewarding (they are a group of vibrant & brilliant people), I missed being directly involved in products & programmes & strategy work a bit too much. I love managing people and improving processes to make workplaces a better place to be (and I think doing those things right is an incredibly important thing for any organisation), but found that doing PURELY that felt like the wrong balance – I’m a leader of technology organisations, not an HR specialist after all. I’m eagerly anticipating getting my teeth back into projects & programmes, operations & strategy again, in addition to growing a world class team.

Those who know me won’t be surprised to hear that I also found the opacity & pace of the Civil Service something of a culture shock, coming from a very efficiency- and delivery-focused corporate background. Frankly, I know many of my old colleagues at P&G are amazed I lasted this long I will say that I think things are changing and getting better, but the starting point is so fundamentally different that I admire the progress that has been made all the more.

So what next?

I’m in the lucky position of having rather a lot of holiday saved up, so I’m taking a six month sabbatical – both to travel and to write another book (didn’t know about the first one? Here it is: The Principles of Project Management, also on Kindle and available from Amazon). I’ll be visiting Austin, San Francisco, Amsterdam, various cities in the UK (home in Newcastle for a bit, London and likely Brighton) and then spending a month in Portugal, after which I’ll be going home to South Africa for a while too as my cousin is getting married.

If you’re in one of those cities, we should hang out! Drop me an email / DM and I’ll let you know when I’ll be in town (or the details are on Dopplr if we’re connected there). During this sabbatical time I also have some limited availability for short engagement work – so if you’d like to work with me, let me know.

I’ll announce what comes after that in due time. I have to say I’ve been impressed at how flexible the organisations I’m talking with have been willing to be – it’s been a very pleasant surprise to see companies ranging in size willing to accommodate time off to travel before starting a new role.

Here are five things you can do to quiet that chittering and to have an altogether tidier start to the new year.

1. Sort out your passwords

We all know the best practice that we should have good strong passwords, unique to each site that we use. But how many of us can really claim it?

Solutions like Lastpass (cloud solution, premium account gives you mobile apps) or 1Password (cloud and device-only options) or KeePass (open source, device-only) are all worth looking at. It depends on your own tinfoil hat comfort level which will suit you best, but certainly anything that helps you have more unique passwords can only help!

2. Pull together all your insurance documents

Home insurance. Car insurance. Bike insurance. Travel insurance. Pet insurance.

Do you know where all those documents are right now?

Go find them, put them all in one well-marked folder. It’s a simple thing, but you’ll be surprised how satisfying it is to know exactly where your important documents are when you need them. And when you don’t.

3. Put your passport somewhere safe AND memorable

You know what an awesome place to stash your passport is? In a click-lock box like one of these.

Seriously.

It’s harder to lose than anything flat, can’t accidentally get trapped between paperwork or folders, and can be stashed somewhere REALLY memorable. Like in the cupboard behind the tea bags, or in your underwear drawer, or behind a much-watched DVD boxset. You’ve probably got either all of West Wing or Buffy or Battlestar Galactica up there, right?

4. Sort your backups out

If you don’t already have an automated, incremental backup solution sorted, then spend a little time to pick one and sort it out. I favour Crashplan personally, but there are a plethora of options — some to the cloud, some to another computer in your network or to an attached external hard drive (CrashPlan can do all of these).

Also don’t forget to occasionally back up everything in your Dropbox or similar!

5. Be nice to your future self

Remember the half hour lost untangling Xmas lights? Or ferreting out decorations? Finding your menorah? Be nice to yourself, 11.5 months from now. Pack your winter festival stuff away sensibly, in a big box that a present arrived in, or something. Stash it so all you have to do next year is find ONE BOX. Next year you will be Proper Grateful.

Simple things, seemingly not that important, but try it. I think you’ll find the small sense of relief is palpable. 

After speaking at AgileTeaCamp, I thought I would share how people management has evolved in the GDS Delivery Team.

What you get for free with agile

Agile product teams are self-managing. With the users’ needs in mind, the product manager defines what needs to be done and the team itself decides how to achieve it. This is instantly a more motivating approach. You’re trusting people to design the best solution to meet the need, rather than handing down a ‘solved problem’ to be implemented. You’re also making the most of the smart, talented people you’ve worked so hard to find.

The approach we’ve taken at GDS is to create high-performing multi-disciplinary teams.  These teams consist of designers, developers, user researchers, content designers, technical architects, delivery managers, product managers and experts in customer insight, web operations and product analytics. These people all work together to build digital products and services. Managers are no longer expected to tell people what to do and how to do it.

So what do the people managers do and do we still need them?

How the role of ‘manager’ has evolved

The role of the manager now focuses on:

• looking after people (what used to be called ‘pastoral care’)
• matching people to challenging, engaging work (ie understanding what someone’s skills and interests are and then matching them to an appropriate team and opportunity)
• personal development and training (discussing with folks whether they want to deepen their specialism or widen their skill set, and helping them plan how to make that happen)
• career guidance (coaching, mentoring and helping people find out what the opportunities are)

Communities of practice

Most of our managers are specialists in their own right and they’re extraordinarily good at what they do. They act as head of the specialism and they line manage the specialists in their area. They arrange training and regular meet-ups, and they create opportunities for work to be shared across the different product teams.

At GDS, these communities are at various stages of maturity. One of the best examples is our design team. Ben Terrett, head of design, holds regular ‘design crits’ in which designers share their work and receive feedback from other designers. The design team visit relevant exhibitions and attend design-related events.

The advantage of this approach is that most people can learn from their line manager, who is a specialist in their field. People also have the opportunity to work with colleagues with different skills and viewpoints. This diverse mix generates excellent solutions to challenging problems.

The future

We will of course continue to evolve our approach. We’re eager to hear about other people’s experiences of agile and their views on how traditional people management is changing. What needs to be preserved and what is no longer necessary?

The event was interesting, but I found a lot of the quite corporate and masculine language off-putting. That reaction was evident in some of the other attendees too; it doesn’t (generally) sit well with women to be given advice that they hear as “use others to get ahead”. Now, I don’t REALLY think that’s what the speakers were trying to get across, but sometimes style can injure substance in unintended ways.

The Q&A at the end was excellent, the panel including Aimie Chapple (MD Accenture UKI) and Jacky Wright (VP at Microsoft) who along with the speakers had amusingly diverse answers to the questions posed by the audience.

Most Interesting Insights

• Having a career sponsor corresponds with career & trajectory satisfaction
• Currently, men in senior leadership are 50% more likely to have a sponsor than women at the same level
• Sponsors pick you: work hard, don’t limit who you talk to and don’t reject it when someone helps or advocates for you (See also Performance, Image & Exposure*)
• A sponsor isn’t the same as a mentor, role model, boss — they’re someone who can be of help to your career in a specific way (opportunities, advocacy, championing, defending)
• Ideally you want a portfolio of sponsors — not everybody does which is why you sometimes see a senior leader leave a place and a bunch of folks follow like trailing ducklings…
• All the women on the panel had at some point not even realised that someone was sponsoring them!
• Sometimes if you don’t tell your own story, others will jump in — but they may tell it in a way you’re not comfortable with

The single most useful thing I heard? A sponsor probably won’t be a role model. This is where most women struggle, IMHO. We assume our sponsors will be women and more specifically women we will look up to. Once you accept that you can be sponsored by anyone who thinks you’re talented, then the probability of it happening increases significantly. And realistically, while there are still so few women in senior leadership positions, finding a female role model who can also sponsor you is fairly unlikely!

I have also posted my full notes of the career sponsorship event if you’re interested in the blow-by-blow.

* Which can basically be summarised as: people are going to have opinions about you and expecting everyone else to come look at the detail of your actual work before forming an opinion ignores the reality of human nature … and is a kinda arrogant, no?

We talk a lot about agile here at GDS. We use agile methodologies to focus on our users. The faster we can build a functioning product, the sooner we can get it in front of real users and start iterating based on their feedback.

This has a number of implications for how we organise our projects and manage our people, and I wanted to explain how that affects they way we work.

Multi-disciplinary teams

In practice, we group our people into small, multi-disciplinary product teams. These teams will work closely throughout the day, often meeting first thing for a stand-up, a very quick recap of previous day’s work and a round up of what they have planned. If an area grows too large we break it out into smaller teams again — no one wants to be in a stand-up of 30+ people!

A typical product team will have a product manager (defining the vision for the product and how it will meet user needs), a delivery manager (agile project manager with a focus on making things happen), a technical architect and then a mix of developers, designers, web ops and content designers. We also have folks focused on understanding our users, including customer insight, user research and product analytics.

Transition team stand up

Matching people and projects

We have chosen to organise all of our “makers” into a flexible pool called the Delivery Team which currently has over 70 people. As requests for skills come into this team, we look at what is needed and then match to someone with the right skills and interest in that area.

We want everyone to have challenging, rewarding work, using their current skills well and stretching them to develop further in their chosen specialism (or in a new area if they desire).

Since we may well move people from one team to another based on the needs of the project, we deliberately keep line management separate from project assignment. Some worried that this would be confusing but in practice it has worked well. Each individual can turn to their delivery manager for project specifics and has their line manager as sounding board and for career, personal development and similar topics.

Harmonising not standardising

Over the past few months we’ve also tried to do things in a similar way across products where it makes sense. For instance, having the same sprint timings makes it easier to move people from product to product; encouraging all our delivery managers to use terminology in a consistent way has also helped us to communicate better.

Don’t do it all by yourself (you can’t)

At the moment we have a number of product teams all running in parallel to build GOV.UK as well as a number of other projects.

In order to meet all the short term demand, we have added to our core staffing with a number of contractors from a range of small and medium sized businesses. They’re working on projects with very specific time-limits, and they’ve help make make sure our core staff have the flexibility & agility to respond to changing needs. They’ve also brought us some external perspectives and practices, which have been helping us to meet user needs in the best way possible.

I was delighted to speak (along with the passionate & entertaining Eleanor McHugh) at the recent joint Sci-Fi-London and London Girl Geek event, celebrating the anniversary of the ZX Spectrum.

The slides don’t make a whole lot of sense on their own, so here’s a summary of what I said:

I wasn’t lucky enough to have a ZX personally: my first computer was an x86 that I hacked and soldered together from a number of broken ones thrown out by my dad’s work. I often joke that the permeating scent of my childhood was solder and the soundtrack the sound of bloody Gideon falling off the path on the trek up the mountaintop to the wizard’s castle in King’s Quest III. But since I was growing up in South Africa (where everything arrived a few years late), there were certainly some highly prized Spectrums around, and some of us were very jealous of the folks who had BASIC as a third language.

I think the culture the Spectrum created shaped the experiences of a couple of geek generations. Something (relatively) affordable, that you could code your own programs on and share them (though a couple of folks in the audience highlighted that writing to tape in no way guaranteed your ZX would ever read it again…) really was revolutionary. And there is something special about first interactions with computing being about CREATING rather than just using or consuming. I’ve done a lot of training redesign in recent years and this need to move away from consumption to creation in order for adults to really learn has been a key theme.

The (again relative) openness of the ZX Spectrum was important too. Partly since there had been an “assemble it yourself” version, circuitboard diagrams were available, and though Sir Clive probably didn’t approve, the vast proliferation of personal “build from scratch” grey copies and manufactured (cheaper) copies, especially in places like the old Soviet Union, contributed to the number of people building things, and so the sheer scale of programs being written and shared. The fact that much could be shared in written form (computer magazines printed code!) speaks to a more innocent age … and the storage medium being a normal audio tape meant that code could be broadcast over the airwaves (this is the Channel 4 logo piece on lesson #4).

Removing barriers, both reducing cost and making it easier to create & share programs (especially games!) was key to the success of the Spectrum. I remember being taught Java at university and how for those of us who could already program, we were appalled at how many lines of Java it took to get a simple “Hello world”. For those who this was their first introduction to programming, no surprise that they were lost. Many left the course, or really struggled through the next few years. There is great power in something simple enough that a kid just a few years old can write and get something to run — it’s why I’m a fan of Python as a teaching language, since you can get something that DOES SOMETHING in just a few lines.

And so, I have great hopes for the Raspberry Pi. We need another generation of kids that play WITH computers as well as ON computers/Playstations/Xboxes. Some people have criticised the Pi coming as just a circuitboard, but I think this is part of the beauty of it. Understanding the hardware is important, and much as I love my iPhone (and iPad!), it kinda sucks that you can’t break them open and have a bit of a look round.

We build better stuff if we understand it from the circuits up, and we all learn more if we create rather than just consuming. So viva la Raspberry Pi!