Kalbir Sohi HMRC product manager, shares thoughts on attending sprint share just over a week ago -
Much of what we do in working in digital transformation across government starts with user needs and the latest GDS SPRINT event was clearly designed around the following need:
*As a* person working on one of the exemplar transformation projects
*I need* to hear ideas from people doing similar things
*So that* I don't re-invent the wheel every time I encounter a problem
I'd been to previous SPRINT events and whilst they were interesting the really good stuff tended to happen 'in the margins'. These conversations I had with people doing the same thing elsewhere in government were really valuable. It was where you heard about how someone tackled some problem that you knew you were going to encounter but didn't want to think about, or where you could share a little information on something you'd done that had worked well.
At sprint share I was able to get in a room with people from across government and talk about our experience of tackling the problems we've faced. The sessions I attended on Governance and Finance brought out cracking tales of navigating bespoke business cases processes and the difficulties people had faced spending money on things as simple as whiteboards and marker pens. They also allowed us to share solutions. I was prompted to make better use of data that we have on the cost of running our IT in HMRC and have since shared that with colleagues writing business cases - something that made their work easier.
By getting people together with the explicit purpose of sharing, sprint share went a good way towards meeting the above user need. We are still near the beginning of transforming the way that government delivers digital services but by sharing best practice and good ideas we will collectively move faster.
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