Agile Project Management - What Actually is it?

The Confusion

Unfortunately, there is still a lot of confusion about agile project management and what it actually is. In many cases it is used as a term when in reality Scrum or DSDM is being used and there is no real project management happening. There is a difference between Project Management and Product Management which use these methodologies. Agile project management is project management done in an agile way, which still means it's about PID's, tasks, milestones, risks, issues, stakeholder management and budget control, and all the other tasks that you associate with a project manager. 

Where some of this confusion comes from is talk of agile methodologies. There is no actual agile methodology. What you must realise is that the starting point for much of this was the Agile Manifesto developed in 2001, or to give it its full name, the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Scrum, DSDM and all the other methodologies in use to build software are ways of delivering to the themes of the Manifesto. And it's a great starting point, but for agile project management you have to adapt these themes from product to project. 

Although there are now courses on Agile Project Management and Agile Prince2, I still read much confusion and crossover with Scrum. In fact, nearly all the agile project management books I own start to talk about Scrum and DSDM very early on and almost remove the project management element from the book. And if you’re developing a product then Scrum is an excellent way to do this and one I have used many times. However, project management usually sits a tier above this and as much as Scrum puts the emphasis on the team to deliver without a top-down approach, many of us work in industries where there needs to be the project management tier above the day-to-day delivery of the project to manage upwards reporting and governance. There are also many organisations that simply don’t have the resources to form full Scrum teams and the differing roles required.

So in true agile form, you have to adapt and look at the most efficient way of delivering projects, and not just product projects, your whole digital and transformation programme should be run on an agile project management basis. 

But what does this really mean?

In any project what you are really doing is managing time, resources, and deliverables. In most projects you have a really good insight into the deliverables and work out how much time and resource you need to deliver them. In agile project management you will know the resource and time and you work out the deliverables as you go. Well, that's the theory but in reality, you’re going to need to understand the outcomes to be delivered and for projects that have a legislative element you obviously need to understand this too upfront. I’d expect that to be part of any business case but as per one of the themes of the Agile manifesto - Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness change for the customer's competitive advantage.

Therefore, change is to be expected and encouraged in an agile project. And that needs to be managed, In Scrum that is through backlogs and prioritising features that provide the most value. In agile project management that means accepting changing requirements and documenting these in a simple and straightforward way, without having an overly burdensome change control process. Agin you can look at elements of the Agile Manifesto such as:  

Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential 

and 

The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation 

and apply these to project management. The same is true of the other themes of the Agile Manifesto. But you must apply these to your organisation, the project types you work on, the levels of governance your industry has, the resources you have and work out what interpretation works best for you. 

 5D Agile

Because of the confusion and there really being no simple way to define agile project management, I have created my own agile project framework called 5D Agile. Details of this can be found here https://ditchpm.co.uk/5d-agile. I use this framework to deliver all my projects with customers, including large programmes of work. 

I have taken the most useful elements of Scrum, DSDM, Prince2 and my own knowledge to create 5D-Agile project management. This gives project managers who want to manage projects in a more agile way a framework to base their project on. It simply breaks a project down into a series of timeboxes, that we refer to as Races, and each Race broken down into a series of Tasks. Tasks are allocated one of five categories, which are Discuss, Discover, Decide, Design and Deliver. Although I have my own version of what each task type means, PMs are able to give their own criteria to this. At the end of each Race, it is easy to see how many tasks have been completed or not, and whether you are having enough conversations, and full audit view of discovery sessions and decisions that have been made. This flexibility gives PM's the opportunity to amend 5D Agile as they see fit to work better for their organisation. (And not a Gantt chart to be seen anywhere!)

The best way to think about agile project management is to look at all frameworks and find what elements work best for your organisation. Even if you look at Scrum, it is just the bringing together the best elements of multiple other methodologies into a single one. There won't always be one size fits all, and so you have to look at all methodologies and create what works for your business. This will include trial and error and tweaking how you deliver your projects. Different industries will have different levels of governance and reporting requirements. You have to be agile in adapting what works for you. 

Once you find out how you want to work, you can then look at the tools available that help you deliver. You should not be buying a tool and then fitting your working practices to it. You find the tool that supports your work. We have developed ditch (https://ditchpm.co.uk/) to be flexible enough to amend and configure elements of the system to work for you. However, the core of the system, Projects, Races and Tasks is set, so if that works for how you want to work then it will work for you, and we can then configure it to your exact requirements. If this model doesn't work for you then it's the wrong tool. Don't go and buy the software first and then try to adapt to how the software works. 

If you’d like more information on 5D Agile or ditch, then please do not hesitate to contact us. 

Local Authority - Stop calling Residents Customers

There has been a growing trend in local authorities over the last decade to refer to their residents as customers. We’re now seeing more and more Customer First strategies coming out. Unfortunately in referring to residents as customers we are setting the wrong mindsets in how we deal with them.

Taking a definition from Investopedia, a customer is:

“An individual or business that purchases another company's goods or services. Customers are important because they drive revenues; without them, businesses cannot continue to exist.”

Customers are important to commercial organisation’s as they are the ones purchasing goods and providing the cash for that business to operate. It therefore makes sense that they look after their customers as much as possible to ensure that they are repeat customers. There is an obvious return on investment in ensuring that customers are happy / delighted with the goods or service that they’ve received.

Conversely a resident is:

“A person who lives or has their home in a place”.

A resident is not a person buying goods or services, and even in the odd circumstances where they are, a local authority is not competing with other local authorities to win or retain that customer.

This is important as it defines how you need to view your residents in order to serve them well.

As a commercial organisation, they can afford to spend as much as required to deliver exceptional service based on the increased cash flow that repeat and satisfied customers give you. At a local authority you have a limited amount of money and you should serve your residents as well as you can afford to. If you are currently delivering a 6/10 service then the cost increase to deliver an 8/10 service might not be affordable and does not bring extra reward into the council.

For a commercial company going from a 6/10 to a 9/10 may make financial sense due to increased revenues. For a local authority it does not.

Therefore, we need to see residents for what they are, and that is residents. No resident is going to be offended by being called a resident. Once you have established the right mindset to treat residents as well as you can afford to then the second most important is moving from a Customer First model to a Resident Second model.

Now, I don’t actually expect anyone to publish a Resident Second strategy, that might open a few doors for complaints, but it is actually the way to go.

As we’ve already discussed, your residents aren’t customers, there is no financial advantage for you to treat them like customers. They have no choice where they shop, unless they choose to move. However, in the vast majority of cases, I’m sure the customer services of a local authority is quite far down the list of reasons to move in or out of an area. So your residents are you residents. If they want a council service they have to come to you. Improving that experience might make them a bit happier, but if they want a repeat service, they still have to come back to you. And financially you’re no better off if they do. In fact in most cases you’re worse off if they do.

So why Resident Second? Let’s look at the complete end to end process, maybe making a Planning application as an example. How much of the process is undertaken by the resident and how much by the local authority? In most cases, once the plans have been submitted that is the resident's tasks completed. The local authority in this instance is probably doing 90% of the work. This is repeated across multiple services multiple times. Therefore to create efficiencies we have to focus on the department, or in simpler terms, Staff First. Saving 10% of 90% of the process is a lot better than saving 10% of 10% of the process. And if you can save time and efficiency of the back office process then you are actually improving the resident experience at the same time. Now build in some touch points, automated updates and ease of application and you have a set of happy / delighted residents.

I recently ran a poll on Linkedin that asked the question as to whether a resident would rather complete a paper form and have an immediate answer or an online form and a two week wait. Which lets face it is what happens the majority of the time.

The response was roughly 60:40 to the paper form, which shows that for residents, speed of service is rated higher than ease of access. Local Authorities have spent huge amounts of money on the ease of access side, making portals and customer accounts and forgetting that the real win is to turn round the service quicker. Service Design generally starts with the customer, but we actually need to work backwards to them. What is the outcome they want to achieve and how quickly can we do it. The focus has to be on the back office service. This will ultimately mean less failure demand calls, less chasers, and less enquiries into customer Services (or Resident Services as we now need to think of them). 60% of respondents to the poll were happy to fill in a paper form. Remember that as you continue your crusade to build everything into an online form or design services to delight customers.

Another consideration here is to remember that 80% of your residents probably only contact you once or twice a year. They are the silent majority and they cost you the least amount of money to service. When they do contact you it's important to them and should be dealt with swiftly and efficiently.

20% of your residents probably contact you frequently, it's highly likely that they cost you 80% of your budget to serve (using the Pareto principle). They are the residents that need exposure to you and your services, but they still need to be dealt with efficiently. It is also unlikely that this 20% are online users of your services, much preferring face to face contact.

Again these are not customers. They have no choice. They need you and they need your help. They are residents of your borough. You need to serve them as well as you can within the budgets that you have. Improving their customer service does not make their need go away or increase your budgets. Treating them as residents and improving the resident service you provide to them, might help their needs reduce, but your budget is what it is.

By treating them as residents of your borough, you are thinking of them as a person, by thinking of them as a customer you are treating them as a commodity. You are trying to improve the lives of your residents, not improve the experience of your customers.

And as a resident the processes that occur within the service are the ones that matter the most.

For the 80% they may appreciate online services, but only if the service behind it can match that. If you look at the commercial world then it’s quite clear that the customer is now expected to undertake about 90% of the work themselves. In a local authority it's almost the exact opposite. The balance of this needs to change for local authorities to be able to afford sustainable services.

Take the focus off trying to delight the customers or improving customer service. Focus on the staff and the services you provide. Make these as efficient and effective as you can. Make the resident do more of the work. Make your internal processes the first thing you fix. Fix the way that your staff work first Then you can work out the best way of serving the Resident Second.

Writing your local government digital strategy

This blog is a video blog. Check out the video below and let me know your thoughts.

Top Tips for Choosing a CRM

Which CRM?

One of the most common questions that I am either asked directly or that I come across in the business groups I am a member of is, “Which CRM should I use?”

It is a very straightforward question, but one without an actual answer. Well at least not without doing some groundwork first. In the business groups that I am in then it seems everyone has an answer. That answer being the CRM that they currently use. This answer, although helpful in general terms, fails by not asking any relevant questions to establish what the CRM is to be used for.

This really is the most critical point of choosing a CRM. What do you actually want to achieve from it?

Unfortunately, CRMs by their nature and acronym tend to get lumped together into one big category. There are hundreds of different CRMs for all types of different uses. Some that suit one business type will be completely irrelevant to the next.

In a business environment you may be looking purely at a CRM for Sales, you might want one for Service, or just one for general contact with clients. You may be B2B or B2C and have different needs. You may have hundreds of small customers or very few large customers. These are all things that need to be taken into consideration. There are CRMs for non-profits and charities. You might need a rich dataset from the CRM. You may want to automate your marketing. In fact, when you think about everything a CRM can do for you then it can become quite daunting.

This is before we have even looked at the costs of these and weighed up the different styles of licence. Some charge per contact, some per user, some per business. Some are free, at least at the basic level and some are very expensive. There really is something for anyone and everyone.

Why choose a CRM anyway?

Let me quote you a text I received from my friend Jim:

“We turned on Active Campaign this afternoon… Holy shit! Amazing piece of software, working with Zapier, Stripe, Xero, Outlook and our Wordpress site. The automation has saved us so many hours. I wish we had done it years ago.”

Not only did it save him hours of work it also led to more sales through automating a lot of the sales and follow up process. Particularly with those that needed more time to decide on his company being the right fit. So whichever CRM you find works for you, you want to be like Jim. You want more time, more sales, more automation, and less hassle.

How do you become like Jim?

Let us start with what a CRM is. The acronym stands for Customer Relationship Management. It is slightly outdated now as a CRM is so much more than that, but at its heart it is your database of your present customers, future customers, and past customers. In the old world, you might have had a Filofax jammed full of business appointments. The back of the holder is full of business cards swapped at meetings. Reminders to call people are written on certain days. You may have also had a rolodex on your desk, maybe a separate diary too. A CRM basically brings all these paper-based systems into a digital system that allows you to see all the information on a single customer in one place. Once this information is held in a central database it is possible to do much more with it than before. And it is how you use this information that is key to what CRM is going to be the right one for you.

Whilst every customer I speak to has different requirements, they all go through the same process when it comes to selecting a CRM. (And if you are smart, you will realise this works for all software).

The process I follow with customers takes in the first three steps of my Be The Five methodology. The methodology works at multiple levels within a business and in this instance, we can use it for software selection.

Be The Five

1. Discuss

Every project should start with a conversation. Most do, but often they are the wrong conversations. Often a CRM conversation will start and end with IT. Sometimes it starts with Marketing, and they speak to Sales. Sometimes they involve IT. Often they forget about Finance or the wider team. And by conversation, I mean a proper conversation about what it is the business wants to achieve with the CRM. I think of these conversations much like I think of a strategy with four key components:

• What is the outcome we want to achieve?

• Where are we today?

• What is stopping us from hitting the outcome?

• How is a CRM going to help us bridge the gap?

By bringing all departments around the table for the initial conversations we can be very clear on what the outcome is that we want to achieve. For Jim this was about giving him more time back in his week. For a customer of mine in the not-for-profit sector it was to increase donations by 10%. Even if you do not have a real figure then you can put a hypothesis together on this. Jim could have said, “I need a CRM that saves me at least ten hours of administrative tasks a week”. This is important as the questions that follow help us to work out exactly what type of CRM it is that Jim needs. For the not-for-profit, it really narrowed down their focus on possible solutions.

The size of your company is also irrelevant at this point. If you are a one-man band or 1,000 strong company it is still these important questions that you need to be asking. It sometimes helps to use a third party to aid in these as long as they are technology agnostic, especially for the smaller businesses.

I would strongly advocate that you only have one outcome that you work towards. You need to decide what is the one outcome that is above all others. The focus is then on that and only that. There will be secondary outcomes and benefits that will come with most projects, like Jim who increased his sales, but his core focus was on time saving.

The key reason we undertake projects in this way is because it gives a different way to approach the market. Gone are the days of writing requirement specifications and sending them out to a tender platform. Sitting and waiting for suppliers to contact you with a proposal. These requirement lists are always very generic and anything mandatory will automatically be ticked by the supplier. Instead, we are going to approach the market by asking them how their system is going to help achieve the outcome and bridge the gap from where we are today to where we want to be. And that leads us nicely into the second phase.

2. Discover

Now we know what we want to achieve, we can start to look at the market. Here is where you may want to ask friends, colleagues, business groups to find out what other people use. Now though, instead of asking which CRM they use as a generic question you can be more detailed with what your outcome needs to be. Your other tool in this phase is Google. Use it to help you identify potential CRM’s. Make your search more specific than just CRM, “best CRM to increase sales” or “best CRM to automate marketing” will bring back lists that are more useful to you. You have a list of problems from the Discuss phase so spend the time to go through these and find solutions. Most CRM websites will have a lot of detail on functionality and will either have a free trial or a demo video. Take a look and start to build a matrix of systems vs problems being solved.

Personally, I ignore most CRM websites that do not tell me the price, I find this an unnecessary hassle to request quotes when many are very transparent. If you are a not-for-profit, then look to see if they offer discounts. Many do, but they may also lack the functionality you require. Do not make price the key differentiator. It is important but only to a point.

To give an example, then we can say we want the outcome to be that we increase donations by 10%. This takes donations of £1m a year to £1.1m a year. If the CRM costs £10,000 a year, then you have increased donations by a net £90,000. If you choose CRM that costs £1,000 a year but it does not have the functionality you require to get the 10% and you only increase by 5% then donations have only increased by a net £49,000. This is why we focus on outcomes. The cost is semi-irrelevant if it delivers the outcomes required, and even less so if it surpasses them.

On a side note here, the success of a CRM project is not that the CRM is live. The success of a CRM project is hitting the outcomes. If you want to undertake a benefits assessment of the system, then you must have been using the CRM in a live environment for at least six months. The project does not end at go live.

There is an element here that I often hear of, “Can’t you just tell us the answer?”. And I could, it is my job to understand the market. But this approach does not benefit you in the long term. You need to see what the options are. You need to have a demo or free trial to see how easy you can use it or navigate around it. Ultimately though, you need to take ownership that the CRM you have chosen is the right one for you and that you are fully invested in it. Having a consultant tell you to use a certain CRM does not give you that. I may point you in the direction of several systems, but I will never choose one for you.

You may find that you now have staff that are excited to be moving forwards with a new system that they believe will help you unblock the problems that have stopped you achieving your desired outcomes previously. I’ve seen companies, who have scored CRMs, award nearly double the number of points to a new system having gone through this process than their current supplier (yes, I always make you assess your current supplier if there is one). Imagine knowing that the system that has been holding you back all these years is being replaced with a modern system that has been chosen by you to achieve your outcome. You have got to be excited by that!

3. Decide

The third step is probably now the most important. Deciding which system to go ahead with. Hopefully, you have built up a good matrix of systems and can easily apply a scoring methodology to it. It really is as simple as that. The hard work is completed in the Discuss and Discover phases.

Guiding Principles – ICE

To help steer you in the right direction I work to a set of Guiding Principles that are designed to help you achieve the best outcome from your system. It is useful to be able to test your choices against these principles as well as your outcomes.

Integrated

Integration relates to not only the integration of software tools, but also of teams and working practices. When looking at CRM’s you should consider what levels of integration are needed. Are two different teams going to be using the data in the CRM? It is important that integration is considered, and that it is the right level and type of integration is approved. In some cases, this may be only a small amount of data, in some cases a full record. Where you can start to integrate systems and data, you will also be able to look to automate repetitive tasks. The purpose of this principle is to ensure that integration has been considered, not that there is integration.

Let us go back to Jim and his quote, “We turned on Active Campaign this afternoon… Holy shit! Amazing piece of software, working with Zapier, Stripe, Xero, Outlook and our Wordpress site. The automation has saved us so many hours. I wish we had done it years ago.”

The CRM, Active Campaign, is integrated with Stripe, Xero, Outlook, and his website. This is what has given him his time back and helped increase sales. Not everyone will need the CRM to be integrated into a workflow or another system, at least not initially, but understanding what is possible is a key principle.

Cloud

Cloud First, is a relatively common policy in digital strategies, although many incorrectly think that it is the strategy itself and not a policy. Cloud First does not mean that all systems must be cloud based (or Software as a Service - SaaS) but that the first calling point should be cloud. I am a big advocate of cloud software and with the sheer amount of cloud CRM’s available then there is very little requirement for an on-premise solution. There may be some use cases where this is the case, but this is in the minority. By using cloud-based CRMs then not only are you making the most of new technologies to deliver better outcomes, but you are removing the overhead of having to manage and maintain the systems themselves. This also gives you the flexibility of accessing cloud systems from any location on any device. There needs to be a very good reason for not choosing a cloud-based CRM.

Ecosystem

The final principle relates to Ecosystems. A digital ecosystem relates to a set of systems functioning as a unit. In most cases this is where CRM providers work with other software providers to enhance the functionality of the system they offer.

A good example of this is the Salesforce AppExchange. Here there are hundreds of solutions designed to work alongside and enhance the Salesforce CRM. Alternatively, a good not-for-profit CRM, Donorfy, has an ecosystem of additional tools such as JustGiving, Gift Aid, Mailchimp, GoCardless and more. All of these will help improve efficiency of your processes.

When looking at CRM’s it is important to consider the wider ecosystem of tools rather than just the core CRM. There is a huge market of value-add software designed to work together. In some cases, the Ecosystem will remove the need to integrate systems yourself.

Use these Guiding Principles to help you navigate through all the options available to you. You may not need the Ecosystem today, but as you grow and improve processes then it may prove invaluable. If you look at your software estate and you end up with an Integrated Cloud Ecosystem of software, then you won’t go far wrong.

The Final two steps in my methodology are Design and Deliver. Now you have decided which CRM to buy then you need to plan out the project (Design) and then you need to Deliver success - success that you have achieved the outcome, not that the CRM is live!

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Local Government Customer Service Poll

Last week I ran a poll on LinkedIn. I asked the question of when dealing with a local authority (LA), “Would you rather complete a paper form with a 24hr yes/no response or an online form that took 3/4 weeks for a response?”

It was deliberately awkward and provocative to make anyone answering the poll think about what is most important to them. Is it the ease of using a digital service which many LA’s now offer, or the speed of having that service delivered?

In a utopian society then I think all would say that online and 24hr response would be the ideal, but I deliberately left that one off.

The results were weirdly remarkably close to Brexit, with 53% of respondents preferring a paper form with a 24hr response. Leaving 47% of respondents wanting an online service regardless of this taking longer.

The result surprised me, but only because I expected the paper element to score higher. At one point it was a 60/40 split, but online caught up in the final few days. But what does this result tell us about the way council’s deliver their services?

What it means is that for most people, the speed at which the service is delivered to them is more important than the access channel. To get a quicker turnaround, they would happily fill in a paper form. This probably goes against the ‘digital by default’ approach that many councils have taken.

What I did not add to the question, was whether the service being required was urgent. If I had, then we can assume that the response time answer would have seen an increase. So, for someone who is facing being made homeless, or needing to apply for housing benefit then the response time is everything.

Interestingly in the comments, there was the point that for Planning Permission, people expect to wait at least 3-4 weeks. For most applicants, the maximum time for a response is 8 weeks. Therefore, ease of access is likely to be the important factor, if the service continues at that slow a pace.

One factor we do need to bear in mind, is that I work in digital services, and therefore a vast majority of my connections on LinkedIn also do. Without embarrassing anyone, I can see who voted which way and there were many who voted for online, that work in that field.

I am not saying they were wrong, every vote is valid, but if your job is to deliver online services then the likelihood is that you will vote for it. Irrespective of that, I think it is still interesting that the majority take speed of service over ease of access and that is ultimately where a lot of councils are going wrong.

What is my take on this?

The focus for the last few years has all been about the front end. Delivering online services. I have seen councils migrate their online forms to a new package and there has been over 200 of them in some instances. There seems to be a form for everything, and yet in many cases the service behind the form is still the same as it was. The element of bringing a service online has taken little to no work off the back office.

If I can use my own example, then recently I moved house. I stayed within my local authority. Despite filling in the online house move form and subsequently two complaint forms, it still took two and half months to process the move. At no point have I had any acknowledgement of the delay, I was not updated at any time and my complaints have never been responded to. So, does the online element make any difference at all? It was quite simple for me, despite being overly lengthy, but the service behind it was rubbish and meant I had bills to the wrong address, my landlord got bills and it was a mess. Similarly, I’ve also recently renewed my parking permit. Despite being online and quite easy to do, a week later I still have a note in my car saying awaiting arrival of new permit, hoping not to get a ticket.

If you are going to spend the money designing forms for residents to give them services “so good they choose to use them”, then the key to delivering this is redesigning the back office processes.

So, for openness here, that phrase is one of my pet hates. It sits alongside ‘Digital by Default’ and ‘Delivering the Amazon experience to our customers’. Ironically, I’m listening to a webinar right now, where all three have been used! It is painful on the ears.

The least favourite is the Amazon comparison, and that is actually what started this poll in the first place. I buy from Amazon for two reasons, the first is that the price is good. That is important, but the key one is that whatever I buy is delivered to me the next day. The Amazon experience is not about the fact it is a MyAccount, the experience is that what I want is delivered very quickly. If Amazon took 3-4 weeks to deliver, then I would not use them. I would probably walk to my local shops. I appreciate that there is a large element of laziness here, but that is true of many people. I want cheap, I want quick, and I do not want to have to make much effort.

Compare that to council services. I will remove cheap, as this is not a competitive environment. There is only one supplier. Fast and little effort is where I value a council service. Waiting 2.5 months for a change of address does not work for me. Waiting over a week for a parking permit does not work for me.

Where the online service needs to deliver is not just on ease of access for me, but also to bring me the right result and quickly. There is no reason why many processes cannot be automated. A parking permit should be fully automated and in the post to me the same day as I pay for it. It was a renewal, not a new application. This renewal should have been expected, although a reminder may have been nice. Similarly, a change of address is very straightforward.

If anyone has experienced the Business banking world then you will know how much easier the new breed of financial institutions such as Starling and Tide make the process over some of the legacy banks. Tide took me under 15 minutes to open a business account. To open a second account with them took under a minute. Compare that to HSBC that took weeks, and to get an online account relied on me downloading a pdf and posting it to them. Then being sent a secure card and having to go online to set the account up, before being able to use a phone app. In a competitive environment there is only one winner here. Tide scanned my passport, it took a photo of me, it called all my company details from Companies House with an api. It really was seamless.

You may think this is different to a council, but look at it again and ask yourself who did all the work here? The answer is that I did. Tide actually did nothing, at least not manually.

Look again at my council tax move. Many of you reading this will know that despite me sending all the information in online, the move was only actioned when a council officer manually updated the system. And that is where many LA online services fall down. It is what is stopping the one-day online service. It is likely that although I completed the form online that the vast majority for the work was completed by an officer. Perhaps 20% was me, and 80% was the officer.

If you take Housing Benefit as a service, it is where I cut my teeth in local government, then you will see a very manual service. Teams of assessors manually inputting information. Most departments have a constant backlog, 8 weeks can easily go by without a response. And yet many councils have a housing benefit online service. The shift here needs to focus on the service behind the service.

We need to move from a manually intensive service to one where the customer does all the work. If I am submitting all my information online, then anything I enter should go directly into the system and update in real time. The role of the Assessor then becomes one of a QA role rather than a manual assessment role. For those worried about fraud, then a) HB fraud levels are quite low and b) you just check more claims than the current 4% and 10% levels specified. There are many mistakes made in HB claims by Assessors anyway, believe me I used to QA them, which means that flipping the service on its head is easily achievable. Delivering Affordable and excellent service will ultimately mean that the resident is responsible for doing most of the work. The resident needs to be doing 80% of the work and the council the remaining 20%. That’s how to deliver true online excellent services.

What about those who cannot serve online? Well, hopefully you are creating capacity in teams to deal with the most vulnerable. I have a previous blog on the 80/20 split of low need / high need residents that you can read. In a nutshell, you are spending 80% of your budgets on 20% of the population of your area and as such this is where you offline services need to focus. 

When you write a Customer Service strategy that states that you want to deliver excellent services, then just take a step back and think about what this means. As I have shown in the poll, to 53% of residents this means speed of service. To 47% this means ease of access. Redesign the end-to-end service with a focus on how quickly the customer gets a response. Automate as much as possible, even if this is normal in your service. Balance this with how much of the work you can pass back to the customer to do.

As Andrew Grant, ex-CEO of AVDC, still says today, there should be an algorithm to approve certain types of planning permission. This means same day planning permission is a distinct possibility. That is an Amazon style delivery. Unfortunately, people have got used to this being at least a six-week process in most cases and therefore expectations are low.  They do not need to be. Having a slick online submission portal is undone by the delays in the service. This can be remedied quite easily. Again, we must apply some sense here and probably an 80/20 split as not every application is straightforward.

Transactional services should all be automated, that is straightforward enough and hopefully goes without saying. Other services will take some thought, but nothing is impossible.

What can we take from this poll ?

Split out your audiences. You know that you have an 80/20 split of Low need vs High need, you also have a split of those who want speed over ease. Design services ‘so good that residents choose to use them’ by giving them both. Make the resident do the heavy lifting where they can and automate as much of the back office as you can. Move to a QA service rather than a manual one. It is no different to any other industry that is following this model. Residents will be used to booking holidays, having their own boarding cards, buying train tickets, self-serve in supermarkets. It is about applying this theory to your own services. Customer service and customer services are two different things and for now customer service is what needs the attention. It may need a complete service redesign, and councils to work together, but the technology is out there to make this a reality.

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Why local government needs to start thinking like Uber

Please not another post about Uber and Digital Transformation….

Well no, not this time. Mainly because I don’t believe that Uber did transform digitally. In fact, they did not transform at all. And its less about the technology than it is about the process.

So why should local government look at Uber?

Well, what Uber has done is taken a process (hailing/booking a taxi) and made it more efficient. Let me explain.

Before Uber you mainly had a couple of options for getting a taxi. The most common was phoning the taxi office and asking to be picked up at a certain time. Once the booking had been made you had no contact with the taxi firm. As the booking time got nearer you started to listen out for cars, then you’d be peeking through the curtains and as the booking time passed you’d phone the taxi firm to be told that it’s just around the corner. The second option was to hail a taxi, to stand in the street and wave your arm, debating whether light on means for hire or if it is busy. Hoping it doesn’t rain and less taxis are available. Once you have hailed a taxi the inevitable conversation about can you stop at a convenient cash point would take place. For the driver, they would drive around looking for a fare, with no idea where the person waving at them wanted to go and hoping it was a good fare. This is where most local authority services are today using an inefficient legacy process.

What Uber has done is to give customers a more efficient way of hailing a cab. No more standing in the street waving that arm hoping that a free taxi sees you and stops. No more making sure that you have the correct money on you, without knowing what the fare was going to be. No more peeking through the curtains hoping the car door you heard is your ride.

Uber took that experience and gave you an app that hailed a ride as soon as you wanted one, it gives you tracking so you know when the Uber car is arriving, the registration number, the driver's name and the price. At the end of the journey the money is simply debited from your account, without you scrambling around for cash.

Uber has given us a much more efficient way of using taxis.

For Uber drivers, it also gives them a more efficient way of choosing jobs to take and knowing exactly where those jobs are without sitting in taxi ranks or driving around the streets hoping to be flagged down. Taxis hailed in this way also have very little choice on end destination and accept any fare that hops in the back.

So it’s all about having an app?

No, it is not about the app itself. It’s about the data. A buyer sends data to the app to say I am at this location, I would like to go to that location, you can see my profile and I’m willing to pay the fare calculated on screen. The app sends that data to available drivers (sellers) in the vicinity and they can choose to accept the fare or not. There is then a transfer of data back to the buyer saying I will pick you up, my name is x, my car registration is x, model is x and I am currently in this location, x minutes away from you. You can then track the car to your door. Once you have completed your journey you simply get out of the Uber and decide if you are going to tip through the app or not and you can add a star rating for the driver.

The actual efficiency that’s been enabled is the transfer of data between buyer and seller with no real human involvement to keep the buyer updated at all times and the seller to be able to apply for fares.

Uber have now replicated this experience with Uber Eats, where again it’s the efficient transfer of data to open up a marketplace of sellers that the buyer can choose form and then be updated at every step of the process.

Local government can learn a lot from Uber in how they have taken a very manual process, with little feedback into an exercise in data transfer through a marketplace app that joins a buyer and a seller together with no real intervention from Uber themselves.

For a local government, the buyer would be the resident and the seller the service department. How efficient have you made the services that you provide to both buyers and sellers? Have you looked at the data and how it is transferred through a process? Remember they have taken a manual data point, waving your arm, into a digital one. You don’t have to just think vehicles either, all services can be effectively looked at from a buyer and seller perspective. The Uber element is just the marketplace that allows that transfer of data to happen automatically and in real time. How many councils can offer an Uber like experience to bulky waste collection? Or green bin collection? How can social care or housing look at a similar model of efficient data transfer?

It’s time to stop thinking about software and think about data. Data is key to your services. How can you use data to better inform your residents giving them the efficiency that they desire? How can you use the data to give real time updates on progress? How can you use the data to open up a marketplace of options for your residents? There is still far too many manual processes involved in local government services. Even those with e-forms are often downloading and re-keying this information. Paper worksheets are still prevalent. Imagine every Uber driver having to go back to base to collect a job on a piece of paper before they set off? It would lead to huge inefficiencies and cost.

Connecting residents and services efficiently and with automation will help you deliver the best services that you can.

And remember, in this example, both buyer and seller are using their own devices, and happily so, to complete their tasks. Uber and just providing the means of connecting them to each other.

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Agile vs Waterfall Project Delivery- Is there a better way?

So is there an alternative to Agile and Waterfall project delivery?

A lot has been written about Agile software delivery and Agile project delivery and the benefits of this over other methodologies. If you do not know what these are then please look up the Agile manifesto. In essence, though, what we are talking about is working in small incremental steps, usually about three weeks, constantly reviewing and iterating. The irony of Agile is that there are a whole host of people and businesses who stick to the methodology rigidly, which makes a bit of a mockery of calling something Agile. It has benefits, particularly over Waterfall delivery (again, look this up), but like all models they need to be flexible and to work for you.

The reason I do not give fixed elements to Discuss and Discover in my methodology is that it will change by industry, business size, age and goals. The methodology is designed to work for everyone and be adaptable enough for any type of business. How you then Deliver projects will again depend on your business, size, skillset, what outcomes you have purchased and timescales.

In Deliver we look at how to allow your projects to Deliver by whichever model suits your business best, but still giving you the oversight that you require as a leader to ensure the projects meet their outcomes. We will be looking at how to put together a project reporting template that works for your business.

Today, technology companies tend to deliver software through the Agile methodology. This is fine for the software companies. They can build software however they like. However, when it comes to your business you have to find what works for you. Agile often has large implications for the resources that you need to provide on a project. If you do not feel like you can cope with the resourcing or speed at which companies want to deliver, then do not. You do not need to follow the crowd. Your IT delivery team needs to work at the right pace for the company.

1. Deliver your projects

So how do you apply the Be The Five oversight to your projects?

In Agile the focus is on sprints. These are 2-3-week development cycles. I will not go into the detail of exactly what happens in each sprint as you do not need to know. This is one for your technical guys.

However, I dislike the term sprint, it is wrong and meaningless to those outside of technology and puts people off. In athletics a sprint is full-on, all effort, can go no quicker and be exhausted at the end race event. Think about a 100m race. We do not want that. Waterfall is more comparable to a marathon if you only saw the start and the finish. It is a slower but equally exhausting exercise. However, a development project is often just a number of sprints. We need to relate to something simple and easy to understand.

In athletics, there are many different types of race, and the first one, where it is a controlled sprint, is the 400m. Therefore, in this model we are going to work in races and laps. One lap of the track being 400m. We will relate a lap to being a week of time. Therefore, your project will be made up of a series of laps, that make up the race.

You do not need to keep the number of laps in a race consistent. You may Decide that the correct ‘race’ to run is for four laps (four weeks) initially to build the core of the product and then move to two-lap (two-week) races afterwards to gain better feedback on the key features. The choice is yours and depends upon what you are delivering, but you do not need to prescribe to a fixed time. Do what works for you. It may be a series of one-lap races, it might be five-lap races, or it may be a mix. Find what works and what you are comfortable with to be able to Deliver the outcomes you have looked at throughout Discuss and Discover.

For some technology builds, perhaps a rebuild of a website, you will not need to see anything for the first month at least as there is a core framework to put in place. Similarly, with smaller builds you may want to see developments weekly as you can achieve results quickly. This is one decision that is yours and does not need to follow a set rule book. Find a pace that works for your business. Not every company is a sprinter and not every project is a marathon. What is important, though, is that at the end of each designated race, however long, that you communicate progress to the business.

As the leader, if your team can report back to you based on the 5 Ds at the end of each race, then you will be in a good position to have a complete overview of the projects. Think of this as being the reporting layer above the developer or delivery layer. Give your project team the flexibility to find the right pace that works for your business.

2. Delivering the 5 Ds

Here is what you should expect to see in each element.

Discuss. Here your delivery teams can go further in depth and look at actual processes in more detail and how to improve these. This must be a joint effort with the users of the systems. Do not assume you know what the best process is unless you are involved in it or speaking to the right people. Do not underestimate the power of having proper, more detailed, conversations with people at this stage. One key discussion here is if any resources from outside the project will be required. This may be for testing or data checking. The resources and their availability should help you in Decide to plan how long this race is and potentially what in Discover is prioritised.

From a reporting perspective you will want to see who has been involved and what outcomes, processes and requirements have been Discussed. We need to see what resources are required in this race.

Discover. You have had the conversations. You have understood frustrations, pain points and poor processes. You know what they like and what they do not like. You can now start to pull this together into a list of requirements and outcomes. From the conversations you have had in Discuss, you should now be able to pull together a comprehensive list of these at a high level that will start to make sense from an outcome perspective. You can still iterate on specific functionality later, but the core outcomes you want to achieve should be well understood at this stage.

From a reporting perspective we want to see what outcomes the project is delivering and which of these are being delivered or part delivered during this race. Does this tie up with the resources available?

Decide. Any decisions that are made about this particular race should be collated here. The main decision that the project will make is going to be how many laps will be run in this race. Remember that one lap is a week of time. If you know that, based on Discuss and Discover, three laps are going to be required, then this needs to be reported. It helps the service managers plan their time and resources better if they know upfront who is required and when.

Reporting will cover any decisions that have now been made. How long is the race and how does this relate to the resources available? If there are any conflicts here, then you need to be aware of them. Do you have the necessary people available at the right time to Deliver the outcomes?

Design. This is where you are going to go into greater detail on how you are going to Deliver the outcomes of this race. No-one builds a house without designing it first, even if they change requirements further down the line. Similarly, there is always a sensible order to building a house. Start with the foundations and work your way to the top before adding the fixtures and fittings towards the end. This aligns nicely to having longer races early in the project and then much shorter races towards the end as the final touches that Deliver the best outcomes are agreed and delivered.

From a reporting perspective, you want to know and understand how they are going to Deliver the requirements and what you should expect to see at the end of the race.

Deliver. This then is the element of going away, doing what you have said you will do, and building or configuring what you have Decided and Designed in the first race. It is important not to dive into the Deliver phase of projects and it is something I see all too often. Going back to Proper Planning and Preparation Prevents P*ss Poor Performance, you need to ensure that you have an agreed plan that you can follow, even if it is just for the first race.

From a reporting perspective at the end of the race the report will be updated with what was delivered against what was agreed to be delivered. You will easily be able to see how on track you are or whether there has been any slippage. If there are issues arising with resourcing or similar, then this should be clear to you at this point. You can then take any necessary action.

Once your first race is finished, we return to Discuss.

In normal Agile terms, this would become a show and tell, where you are showing key users what has been built. However, the phrase ‘show and tell’ is one way. It must include a feedback loop and that is why it is not a show and tell as such, but another conversation. You could add another D here and go with Display and Discuss as that is nearer the exercise that you are going to be doing.

Once complete, you continue the Discuss phase into the next race period of the 5 Ds. It’s a very cyclical method that ensures that you can bring users in at the right time, ensure communication is clear, see benefits as early as possible and gain an understanding of the people-change element of the project.

3. Deliver the race reports

What you will end up with is a series of reports that relate to each race within a project. To keep the language familiar to athletics we will call the project a meet. So, we have a meet (project) with a defined number of races taking part within it and each race is broken down into laps (weeks). You will have a high-level meet report that covers the overall length of the project and the overall outcomes broken down into smaller race reports. At the end of the meet you will have some comprehensive project information to use. Each report produced should be shared with your organisation. So, a 16-week meet could be made up of four races and each race is four laps. You would have five reports – one for the meet and one for each race. Alternatively, a 16-week meet could be made up of eight races and each race is two laps. Here you would have nine reports. The choice and flexibility is yours to manage.

Once the system is ready and you have built or configured what delivers the outcomes, then you are ready to deploy. Even at this stage, if the business case still stacks up to continue working on the build, then you loop around the Ds again and again until you have maximised the value of your delivery. You do not have to deploy software and then stop. The benefits of digital is the flexibility to constantly be looking at improvements and, as you grow to become more efficient, you will need to take advantage of this flexibility. Alternatively, you may not need to add functionality, but you may want to improve what you have already built. You might want to refine the system and make it even more efficient. You may want to stabilise the system and make it more robust. The projects do not always need to be about new functionality.

4. Deliver the benefits

We should also consider development costs of projects here. I have stated that you can continue to iterate and improve processes almost on an open-ended scale, if you so desire. This really must be looked at in relation to the benefits that it will Deliver. An important step to consider, particularly if it is a development project, is to know roughly how much you plan to spend on building your software. If you have a team of five developers and project managers and each costs you £40,000 per year, then with on costs of 25% that team will cost you £250,000 a year, or just under £5,000 a week (or lap in our terminology).

Knowing from the outset that you are going to spend £80,000 on build costs gives you 16 weeks to Deliver a system. The overall meet time is then the 16 weeks, which you will break down into races. The £80,000 number can be figured from the benefits that you will realise from the development. It might be about more sales, business growth, increased customer service levels or higher customer retention rates.

After 16 weeks you can keep going, but if every week of additional delivery costs you £5,000 in salaries and costs, then you need to be seeing the additional returns against this figure. One of the key terms that we need to be looking at as you get towards the end of a project is Evaluate. This ensures that you have delivered the outcomes for the costs and timelines and looks at whether further benefits could be delivered. Always take the time to evaluate your projects against the outcomes and desired outcomes. It is the only way you can measure success and know what the next steps should be. You will have your set of reports for the meet so evaluating against these is quite straightforward. Projects cannot be open ended, hence why you need to initially place a limit on this. You may Decide to extend the project to meet further benefits. The build might take longer than expected. You should have a figure as a starting point to work towards. Just be flexible where it makes sense to be flexible.

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The Digital Transformation CEO

Subtitle - (Should the E in CEO be for Ecosystem?)

CEO’s need to become more digitally savvy to ensure that their business takes advantage of the benefits that it can provide but this isn’t just about the technology model. Can you apply the same thinking to your business? Let me explain how thinking of your company as a digital ecosystem can help you achieve this.

About three years ago I went to a conference in London for Box and one of the presentations was on Uber and the technology they use to drive their business. In particular it was about the Uber app, which in its most rudimentary form is a platform to bring together a buyer and a seller.  The slide showed how Uber had utilised several software providers, each credible in their own right, that when integrated together gave Uber the platform to deliver a customer experience that allowed them to grow and scale and be cited as a disruptor. The software at the time was Twilio for communications, AWS for infrastructure, Google for maps, Braintree for payments and SendGrid for emails. All individual components neatly integrated into this app, and one that they’ve managed to replicate with Uber Eats and a good example of the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

At Peterborough Council we replicated this approach with the same componentised platform approach with the digital tools we looked to move to. We broke down the various components of our IT infrastructure and had a common tool for each element, which importantly were designed to work together. At Peterborough we had Okta for security, G-Suite for productivity, Salesforce for Case Management, Box for file storage and document management, AWS for infrastructure, Qlik for business intelligence, GoCardless for direct debits and a few other apps as well. Again, as per Uber, all these applications are fantastic as standalone apps, but bring them all together and they can perform much better as a whole. They also had the added benefit of all being designed to work together, really giving you that ecosystem of apps that you could apply across the council. It was all about breaking down the components and having a common answer to the problem that was reusable across departments and using the right mix to deliver individual services. It was the ecosystem of joined up apps though that made the whole thing work.

Similarly, the Government Digital Service (GDS) worked to the same model. If every govt department that takes payments uses the same solution then providing services is simpler, more efficient and repeatable. They worked to provide an ecosystem of common components that could be re-used across multiple government agencies streamlining processes. There are numerous local government organisations also looking at this platform ecosystem model. Generally, its referred to as Government-as-a-Platform and makes sense that if there’s 400 council’s that deliver similar services that they use the same components to build their services.

What’s this got to do with the CEO?

Well what digital is bringing to the party is not just a new way of being able to deliver digital services but also a new way of organising your business. You will also have an ecosystem of teams that each in their own right are perfectly capable. But what if you brought them together, would the whole be greater than the sum of the parts. Imagine HR was Twilio, Finance was Braintree, Sales was Google, Marketing was SendGrid and so on. As individual apps and teams they all work perfectly well as standalone systems. But now imagine you could bring them together to create that Uber experience or team. Could that provide your customers with a better level of service? Could you align teams to products or services rather than by job function creating multidisciplinary teams all working together to provide the best service they can? All with an understanding of how each other operates and seamlessly integrating their work together. Using digital tools, even as simple as Teams or Slack can bring the right resources together to super charge your service without making huge organisational changes.

As a separate example, in football (or any team sport) you often hear the commentators talk about teams with less skilled players playing as a team outperforming better players that don’t play in unity. Again, we’re talking about bringing Forwards, Midfield, Defenders and a Goalkeeper together and integrating them as a unit rather than as standalone functions. The whole being better than the sum of the parts.

So, like a Football Manager or as digital components, as a CEO you need to manage the ecosystem of teams and systems that you currently have to provide the best experience for your customers. Use digital tools to bring your teams together with the right mixed skill set to deliver that Uber experience to all. Be the Chief of your Ecosystem.

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Is it really Digital Transformation?

Is there an IT project today that isn’t labelled as digital or digital transformation? Why do we feel the need to label everything as digital these days? I’ve judged awards where entrants have put forward application and even OS upgrades as digital transformation projects, when they clearly aren’t. 

We all know that digital is the current buzzword in the industry but we really need to take a step back and label our projects properly, and yes I’ve been guilty of it in the past too. 

 As a company when working with clients I like to break their strategy down into both digital and technology projects and then each of those into three categories; those being Manage, Improve and Re-Imagine. This will then help you set out your programme plan for the next 1-3 years. 

So what do we mean by Manage, Improve and Re-imagine? 

Manage

Whether digital or technology, the likelihood is that you’re going to have applications that you can’t remove from your estate easily or quickly and as such you’re going to have to keep them working. Maybe you’ve already purchased a forms package that's now a bit dated but you have a hundred forms being used in it. You’ll need to keep these working until they can be replaced. That would fall into Digital Manage. Or from the Technology side, you’ve probably got applications that have a contractual term or a one off piece of software that can’t be replaced, or an application that’s used by a large number of staff and can’t be replaced easily. That would then be Technology Manage. You can start to look at your estate and drop software, hardware and infrastructure etc into these categories. This should then be BAU work for your department. 

Improve

Here we are starting to change things. However, with improve there will always be an element of legacy involved somewhere. From the digital perspective you may be introducing an online account. So you’ve improved the front end with digital applications, but ultimately the information from the account still feeds back to a legacy back end system. That would then be Digital Improve. From the technology perspective we might be taking those legacy applications and moving them to a IaaS service and reducing your own data centre usage. Again we’re transforming the way we run the service but there remains some legacy there. That would be Technology Improve. Here there will be some project work to introduce new ways of working.

Re-imagine

For both Digital and Technology, this is where there is no legacy involved. You’ve got a blank sheet of paper to deliver a service. This might be building an app from scratch that covers front and back end services. It might be going SaaS and completely replacing a legacy system and the processes that go alongside it. It’s likely that when we get to re-imagine, you’ll have more in the Digital box than the Technology box. And this is reflective of the types of work that IT will be working on in the future where IT becomes a more business centric service delivering tools that support the business achieve its aims. However, even once we’ve re-imagined a service, this may well fall into the Manage box in the following year. 

 As IT we can then plan our project work annually. We’ll have written a strategy that breaks down the businesses requirements and thought about how we can accelerate the business to reach its goals. Against each goal we can look at the IT involved in that service and improvements we can make in each of the categories or even go back to the business and explain how technology can get them to their destination quicker and ask for funding and investment. It’s easier to write a business case when you can show exactly how the investment will be used to accelerate digital and the efficiencies that go with it. You also may need investment to keep some of those legacy systems alive, but again you can show why and how you will eventually replace them.

 So let's not be lazy and label everything as digital transformation when it’s not. All you need to start is a piece of paper on which you draw six boxes. Three for digital and three for technology, and allocate systems, and infrastructure to Manage, Transform and Re-imagine and you’ll be surprised how easy the following years projects will fall out of this when you compare it to the businesses outcomes. 

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Digital Transformation Strategy

There’s been a number of local government strategies released recently around Digital, Cloud, Technology and IT or a combination of them all. Most of these, if we’re honest have been very poor. They lack any kind of information to be a real strategy that delivers results.

A strategy is, ‘a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim’. Therefore this is the most basic starting point, that it is a plan of action. What you are going to do. It is not a collection of buzzwords aligned to current themes within the industry, which many local government strategies fall foul off.

However, key to the strategy is actually the part about achieving a long-term or overall plan. This is where most IT (be it technology, cloud or digital) strategies go wrong. The reason for this is that they are often writing a strategy on the long-term aims of the IT department and not the council. This is where the buzzwords come in, but in delivering outcomes to departments, these buzzwords should be no more than guiding policies.

At its most basic level, IT is a service department. It is there to serve the rest of the council. Its role is to help make the council better at what it does. Therefore the IT strategy has to be a plan as to how IT will help the council achieve their aims. Or simply put, why you are going to do what you are going to do!

The starting point in writing an IT strategy is to find the other strategies or plans that that relate to the council. These could be be around growth, lower costs, better customer service, service transformation, better quality housing, the list can be endless. All council’s will have a corporate plan, and service plans underneath this. It is ITs role to then accelerate the journey to delivering these plans.

So there’s your starting point. How is your IT strategy going to help the business achieve or accelerate its plans? When you look at it from this perspective then the IT strategy becomes much easier to write and much more relevant. Even if you have to pick one core outcome, or one core outcome per department, you can really narrow down your focus to give the strategy real meaning.

I’ve seen IT strategies that don’t have any references to the wider council plans; one’s that don’t have any form of a plan and ones that are being written despite the council service not having a plan (in this case a transformation plan). How can you possibly write a strategy for a service department when you don’t know what the plan for the council is?

So please, if you’re tasked with writing an IT strategy of whatever kind, ensure that you’re writing it to serve the council and accelerating achieving their goals. And if you don’t have a relevant council or department plan as a starting point then either write these first or at least interview senior staff that you can reference back to. That way you can then align all your projects back to a bigger plan and explain to the business how you are helping them achieve their goals. 

The strategy can be easily structured:

1) What do you (the department) want to achieve?

2) What is stopping you achieving this?

3)What are you going to do to bridge the gap?

4)What policies are you going to work to?

Find the technology and tools that are going to solve the problems that are stopping you achieve your outcomes!

Oh and if you need help, then I’m here…...

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