Agile training for policy professionals in government

Moments you may recognise

• "I've been invited to a show and tell"

  A show and tell is a regular meeting at which members of the team demonstrate their work. GDS also calls it a team review or sprint review, and the team can invite stakeholders. On Agile Fundamentals for Civil Servants you learn the roles, events and artefacts of Scrum in plain words, the sprint review among them.

• "The team keeps asking me what the user need is"

  GDS defines user needs as the needs a user has of a service, "which that service must satisfy for the user to get the right outcome for them". Users include the staff who provide the service, such as caseworkers and call centre agents. On Agile Fundamentals for Civil Servants you learn how government teams capture user needs as user stories and put them in priority order.

• "They say they are in discovery, or in alpha"

  In discovery the team learns about users and the problem and does not build the service. GDS says 4 to 8 weeks is typical. In alpha the team builds prototypes to test its riskiest ideas and expects to throw the code away, and the public cannot use what it builds. GDS also writes that stopping at the end of discovery is not a failure when the research points that way. In our guide to discovery, alpha, beta and live we set out what the team has to show before it moves on.

• "The team wants to talk about the legislation before its assessment"

  A panel assesses the service against the 14 points of the Service Standard. In our guide to the 14 points we tell teams to name any constraint, such as legislation, and to say what they did about it with policy colleagues. GDS also asks the team whether it considered an alternative to building a service, such as publishing content.

• "The team wants a decision from me this week"

  You may have no clear right answer to give. On Navigating Complexity in Government you use the Cynefin framework to work out what kind of problem you are dealing with and choose a way of deciding that suits it. We wrote it for policy professionals who work where policy intent meets delivery, among others.