Adam Maddison – NO SHOW
Head of Agile Delivery, Government Digital Service, United Kingdom
Comment from organizer: Adam has cancelled presentation on very short notice (less than a week) for reason of „low ammount of women among speakers“. We consider cancelling speaking engagement on such a short notice for any reason extremely unprofessional and violating speaking agreement. This was second incident of this type from Cabinet Office UK. We advise other conference organizers to be careful when inviting Adam or anyone from Cabinet Office UK.
Bio:
Adam has worked in IT all his career, from junior developer to heading Agile Delivery at GDS, where he helps the UK government understand why agile working enables delivery of what users really need.
Presentation
At the UK’s Government Digital Service we build and maintain some big and important products and services, like GOV.UK, the single government website, and GOV.UK Verify, the new way to prove your identity when using digital government services – both of which are now part of the UK’s national infrastructure.
These complex products necessarily have large, multi-team, multi-discipline programmes supporting them. We know that autonomy is vital for motivating people. So we strive to maintain the team-level autonomy we believe is necessary, even when faced with the size and complexity of the products we need to support and deliver.
I will talk about how GDS successfully delivers these large programmes while adhering to the principles of the agile manifesto and our own design principles. We do this through focussing on effective communication and constant collaboration, rather than dogmatically following any particular scaled agile process or framework.
We’ve learnt a lot (sometimes the hard way) but, true to our values, we keep iterating and improving how we organise ourselves and our work. I will talk about the tools, practices and structures we’ve used, what we’ve learnt and how those tools, practices and structures have necessarily evolved to meet our needs. And I will talk about how features such as good leadership, a platforms approach and communities of practice, are vital to enabling this scaling, not just within programmes but across the whole organisation, and indeed the whole of the UK government. The lessons we’ve learnt, we hope, are valid for any organisation trying to deliver complex programmes that need to be responsive to change.
