Blog posts by Alex Blandford

One of the discussions we keep having in the office is about the idea of repeatability, especially outside of central government. How often are the user needs so different that each circumstance needs a different system? How often is it actually just bad IT and empire building that gets in the way of unified user experience? […]

Teacamp is one of the best places to have a frank discussion about the state of digital projects. Yesterday Janet from the Identity Assurance team came to discuss how the programme is going, and gave a broad overview of the project as well as a nuanced and detailed description of some of the ways that […]

I went to Barcamp NFP a couple of weeks ago. It was incredibly refreshing to see so many people working so hard to bring their organisations up to speed and to share things that work with each other. A special word of thanks to Laila (@spirals) for organising such a fantastic day. On a personal […]

This Thursday is BarcampNFP, and we’re going along to talk about doing digital properly. We’ve had lots of these conversations with digital teams recently. Last week, Lily went to a department to give an informal talk about how to build the best product for your users by starting with research and testing what you build. […]

Working at dxw for the past year has introduced me to the phrase “special little snowflake”, usually preceded by “no-one is a…”. This covers most projects that I come across, but it isn’t to say that there aren’t large and important specificities to problems. More often than not, if you’re looking at the same problem […]

Harry and Alex were at SPRINT14 this week. It’s the Government Digital Service’s annual show and tell for broader government, showing what’s been achieved and laying out the direction of travel for the next year. Throughout the day, it was incredibly encouraging to see how seriously Government is taking the transformation of digital services. We […]