12 months at GDS
I have been at GDS for one year as a delivery manager, and wanted to write about my experience here. This organisation,The Government Digital Service, in the words of Tim O'Reilly, is 'the bible that all open government should follow'. It is leading the digital transformation of government.
Within GDS I work for the Performance Platform, which is a tool for government to answer the question ‘how are we doing?’. This has been a very special project for me, because it came as close as possible to a perfect agile implementation. Of course there is no such thing as a perfect agile team - instead, it is all about an ever-improving team.
The two critical success factors in my mind that make our team special are culture and process.
Culture
We have a working culture that values its people and embraces experimentation as key to success. For example, we have a regular ‘firebreak’ at the end of 3 months’ roadmap work. During the week-long firebreak, every member of the team is given total freedom to work on a project they are enthusiastic about.
The team decide for themselves what they will be working on, who they are going to work with, and how they are going to do it. Only one rule applies: People who sign up must show the results to the company at the end of the firebreak.
We got some amazing outcomes from our firebreak. We built scripts to automate the creation of 700 dashboards for government transactions. And we created cheapseats, an automated functional testing suite that ensures data integrity across the Performance Platform’s hundreds of dashboards.
We do other small small things well that made our team a fun place to work. There is a team biscuit tin (with a rule that it should never be empty), mission patches for big launches, lego avatars, cakes for every birthday, Friday burritos, etc.
All these things are small but create room for chats within the team. I found myself in a team of self-managing members who shared a vision and were genuinely committed to upholding GDS’s culture and values. They are team players, don't take themselves too seriously, and know how to have fun.
Process
The other thing that I have found makes GDS special is the processes we use.
We always focussed on user needs, constantly seeking feedback from real users. The business understood the benefits of agile and were enablers by constantly removing blockers. The mantra of the whole organisation is ‘show the thing’.
In our team, we used automated and functional test frameworks to reduce the time taken to create a single dashboard from 45 days to 1 day. We used emergent architecture and continuous delivery - the team’s definition of ‘done’ is when a feature is deployed to the live site, not before.
We used other techniques including lean startup approaches (minimal viable product, continuous delivery, continuous feedback), behaviour-driven development, constant refining of the backlog, and design thinking.
To sum up, the team always dreamt big, got things done and had fun at work. At the nexus of these three circles are the people I most enjoy working with. I'm extraordinarily grateful to have had the opportunity to do that every day in my 12 months at GDS. I look forward to do ‘a GDS’ to other organisations :)
