Agile Government – Contradiction In Terms?

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In recent months, I’ve been one of a number of people in the commercial sector contributing to a major new report by the Institute for Government that discusses how to ‘fix the flaws in government IT‘.  The report recommends trying to seek a balance between platform based services, where standardisation and cost reduction is the key, and delivering projects using agile development methods, where flexibility and speed are more important to deliver the right product and deliver benefits earlier.

The report has now been published on the Institute for Government’s web site, along with some videos of people explaining some of the key benefits of an agile approach.  I was one of the unlucky victims – so you can see my views on the key benefits of agile in the video below.  If you’d like to hear from others in the private and public sector also talking about the benefits of agile, you can do that by clicking here.

It will be interesting to see what the British government do with this report.  Can they successfully transition such a formal, traditional and enormous IT organisation to agile?  Sounds tricky to me, but I sincerely hope they try, and I wish them the very best of luck with it.

Kelly.