I think one piece of context that's possibly missing from these GOV.UK stories is how long the people involved have been working to get into the good position they are in now. I remember going to a talk (probably at XPDay in London) about 5 years ago and being impressed by the huge amount of organisational work they had done already. They were saying that they were expecting really good results in the years ahead, bu…
I wonder if they have long-time engineering and management staff. It seems to me that a lot of government (and large enterprise) projects fail or are inefficient because they get outsourced to some company that does the work but the organization doesn't really learn anything. Every few years everything starts from scratch.
The benefits of migrating Gov.uk Pay’s codebase to the Gov.uk Design System
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Re: The benefits of migrating Gov.uk Pay’s codebase to the Gov.uk Design System
#12Similar effort underway by the USDS in the United States. Really want to underline how cool the USDS are. They remind me of the Smoke Jumpers who in the 30’s really helped build out the forest fire fighting capability of the government in Montana. It was from that experience that the D-Day invasion ultimately relied on with paratroopers. They are a real crack squad that has survived now 2 totally different administra…
Re: The benefits of migrating Gov.uk Pay’s codebase to the Gov.uk Design System
#13I think one piece of context that's possibly missing from these GOV.UK stories is how long the people involved have been working to get into the good position they are in now. I remember going to a talk (probably at XPDay in London) about 5 years ago and being impressed by the huge amount of organisational work they had done already. They were saying that they were expecting really good results in the years ahead, bu…
I wonder if they have long-time engineering and management staff. It seems to me that a lot of government (and large enterprise) projects fail or are inefficient because they get outsourced to some company that does the work but the organization doesn't really learn anything. Every few years everything starts from scratch.
Re: The benefits of migrating Gov.uk Pay’s codebase to the Gov.uk Design System
#14Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if they have long-time engineering and management staff. It seems to me that a lot of government (and large enterprise) projects fail or are inefficient because they get outsourced to some company that does the work but the organization doesn't really learn anything. Every few years everything starts from scratch.
Yes, GDS have plenty of full-time employees - actual geeks, not just managers.
That seems to be the real problem of orgs who do a lot of outsourcing. They have a lot of managers who can't really judge the work and not enough experts.