Having been invited to speak at the Government ICT Summit 2011, I was rather taken aback at the lack of SMEs attending..

However, given this was the case, I decided to go for the open and honest approach and present the views that are all but too common in the SMEs world regarding working with the public sector.  Firstly, SMEs feel that government sometimes "stitch them up" by tying them into contracts with the large systems integrators through eco-systems and the like.  SMEs want a direct relationship with government and if this can’t be offered then my argument is that a strict code of ethics need to be signed up to by all - and adhered to!  My second point was that government seem to have made an assumption that the right SMEs for the job are going to be up for working with them.  Unfortunately, the ones which are the most innovative and useful to government are also useful to the private sector too and if they can make the money in half the time, (avoiding expensive procurement processes) then who can blame them?

My central point was this; for the new approach to work there needs to be ENCOURAGEMENT aimed at the best SMEs to take part and EMPOWERMENT for the public servants buying services.  Nothing will change in procurement if civil servants continue to be risk adverse to the point of paralysis for fear of taking a step wrong.  

Unfortunately, if central government thought that just by saying it should be thus, it would be made thus, they would be mistaken.  I thought that I was preaching to the converted but a colleague told me that this was not the case and that civil servants need to be bought into the idea of working with SMEs.

We need to get to the heart of the culture of government, and change the structure (and length) of government contracts.  We need to encourage SMEs to take part in the process and in parallel empower the buyers to take risks.  Only then will Cameron's words become reality...

“.... Wherever possible, we’re going to break up large contracts into smaller elements, so that SMEs can make a bid and get involved”

We wait with anticipation Prime Minister...

Further analysis here

After "eating our own dog food" for some months now and having daily scrum meetings across our Accounts (a scrum of scrum of sorts..), I turned my attention to the business development process.

Using Kanban to manage our proposals has been a real eye opener and the idea of "pulling opportunities to close" has really helped.

More here: http://www.infoq.com/news/2011/05/kanban-examples from Mattias Skarin

Today's training reminded me why MM is different..

When we are approached to provide training to companies we actually start with a consultative process.  We ask the client to take us through the current highs and lows of their project process and then after a small piece of analysis we can agree between us which areas we need to focus on.  Simple but very effective.  Generally this leads to higher engagement from attendees and also a better ROI for the client.

Magic Milestones are currently helping Align and Pull to standardise their project management practises and to introduce agile techniques. The team are already seeing the benefits of daily scrums and product backlogs - more soon!

An interesting thing occured to me the other day.  Whenever we need to resource up a team our clients don't seem to have role descriptions any more they just say, "I want another Rachel or another Hannah etc etc." Its interesting that they describe something like this and we understand what they mean! I would like to call this agile team building and it seems to work...