Transformational change and service design
This part of the business is led by Mark Sproul who has over 20 years experience working with organisations to improve how they deliver digital services.
He loves the challenge of unpicking complexity and helping organisations deliver digital services that are as good as they can be.
He spends time with an organisation, listening to and understanding them, then develops solutions that help them achieve what they need to do. It’s about communicating and getting strategic buy in and accountability for change that delivers improvement and realises benefits.
There are a range of methods that can be used to achieve an organisation’s goals, depending on what is being produced.
How to improve
Listening, coaching, skills development and knowledge transfer. Mark always aims to ensure stewardship is embedded in the approach taken. Ultimately, when he moves on, he wants a team to have the knowledge and skills to continue to lead organisational improvement.
Techniques for improvement
Service design
Mark is well versed in the principles of the Digital Service Standard which provides a useful blueprint for best practice.
Service design spans all aspects of digital delivery and Mark is comfortable working with organisations at all levels to ensure it meets your objectives. One of his key strengths is achieving support and buy-in throughout an organisation and ensuring the correct level of senior support is in place to deliver change.
User-centric approaches
Mark is partial to a post-it note. Most effective services require a high quality user experience. Design, research, analysis, prototyping and testing to ensure the product meets user needs is a key aspect of any product design function.
Creation and sizing of user stories and backlog refinement are standard elements of user centric approaches. Mark is comfortable assembling teams that deliver quality products, or working with existing staff to improve their working practices.
Delivery and Agile
An Agile approach in the workplace empowers individuals to deliver. It’s really important that the output of any digital service team is product, and to achieve a quality product you need a quality, motivated team that’s proud of the work they do.
Mark loves supporting the growth in maturity of the team, charting improvements in delivery and using retrospective sessions to help them self identify improvements that they own and feel responsible for.
He has extensive experience working in Agile environments in Scrum Master and Product Owner positions, working with in-house teams, outsourced teams and hybrids of the two. All of this is done to improve delivery.
The roadmap
The product roadmap is a key reference point that sets out the journey. The risk, however, is the introduction of false certainty.
A key component of any roadmap is constant iteration across sprints as more is understood about the product and the pace of the scrum team. Mark ensures expectations are managed around the roadmap through clear and open communication in the team.
Technical, security and procurement
Mark is also comfortable talking about platform, security and overall service delivery models. Two of Mark’s last two roles have involved moving organisations to the Cloud.
Mark has a comprehensive understanding of cloud models and the advantages they bring, and is also aware of some of the pitfalls organisations can fall into.
Mark also has a strong understanding of managing data and security. This knowledge includes a comprehensive understanding of procurement frameworks.
Not Agile
Not all projects require an Agile approach. It should only be used for projects where products are being released. Quite often, identifying enablers and blockers via the roadmap and managing outside of scrum ensures the product and scrum teams can focus on delivery.
Get in touch
To arrange a discussion about what you might need, please contact mark@balerno.digital.