Hacking over the Careers Service

I recently spent a day with our company Chair Barrie Hopson and other leading experts in Information, Advice and Guidance learning about and experiencing the benefits of agile technology. The purpose was to see whether these group of experts could use this technology to come up with a new tool that would help deliver an effective IAG service. 

Agile Technlogy is full of interestingly named techniques like 'scrums' and 'spiral waterfalls', which have ben developed apparently over many years, although I have not heard of the technique before. Except when they described this approach to building software it did seem very much like what we do. I cannot recall when we last produced a detailed specification for a project and my sense would be that all our customers would describe us as collaborative in our approach, open to change and constantly seeking continuous improvement.

It was therefore interesting to hear about the approach although frankly I am unsure that it will have helped UKCES to make the careers service more effective. This was because the organisers failed to practice what they preached. The developers worked separately rather than collaboratively and only engaged with the practitioners at the end of the day. As a result the whole day ended in disarray and whilst the developers were going on to produce somethg on their own I cannot believe that it will have any impact. An opportunity missed methinks.

Although not for us because we had some interesting discussions in relation to finding homes for our diagnotics that when on the direct.gov site were each accessed by 30,000 individuals every month.