Wed 11th October: Matt Barnaby - Changing the Change: Agile in Public Services plus Joe Stead - The Trials and Tribulations of Greenfield vs Legacy Projects

The cost of public services are in constant scrutiny and anyone who's worked on a public sector software project knows there is plenty of room for doing things differently if there is a motivation to do so, saving enormous amounts of money in the process. Some of you will remember Martin Sumner speaking at Agile Yorkshire back in January 2015 comparing the NHS Spine 1 project with the Spine 2 project. The former a traditionally procured and run waterfall affair requiring hundreds of outsourced consultants and lots of expensive proprietary hardware and the second a pilot for an agile approach employing a tenth of the resources and taking significant advantage of low cost, open source infrastructure. In a non IT context Malcolm Gladwell's much discussed 2006 article in the New Yorker Million-Dollar Murray challenges the accepted approach to dealing with the homeless with a system thinking eye that should be familiar to us in the agile community. This month Matt Barnaby will share his thoughts on doing this differently in the public sector in our main speaking slot followed by Agile Yorkshire regular Joe Stead's reflections on working with new and existing product code bases.  Matt Barnaby - Changing the Change: Agile in Public Services Times are hard in public services. An increasing demand for providing services to the most vulnerable members of society is being undermined by crippling bureaucracy, continuous budget cuts, increased stress and 'more for less' as a mantra. In fact, times are really hard! How on earth do services cope with change? For years Basis (a RedQuadrant Company) has been helping public services to 'change the change', to do 'it' differently. You guessed - we use agile to do it differently. How do we do it? Come and find out. Our session is going to walk through a number of cases where we have 'changed the change'. We have delivered savings of millions, dramatically improved social care practice whilst making savings, and engaged staff in re-developing their own mental health services to halve the customer journey time whilst boosting quality. We intend to demonstrate how progressive prototypes are so much more beneficial to delivering the right thing sooner (which might not have been what they thought they wanted, right?) and how self-organising cultures maximise the use of agile. We also like to play games so come prepared, you might need to get creative (or lose some clothing!) Bio: Matt is agile coach specialising in change, improvement, project mobilisation and the delivery of transformation to create organisational efficiency, process and service redesign within public services. Matt has delivered effective agile models with the sole purpose of making things better for people delivering - or indeed receiving - services. His work has brought sustainable change to public services. He started his career as a youth worker, before working with many different public sector clients as an agile coach. These range from 20 local authorities (in the UK and Australia) to the NHS. His work has also seen him delivering projects in other sectors such as transport, finance and central government.  Twitter: matthewbarnaby Website: basis.co.uk Joe Stead - The Trials and Tribulations of Greenfield vs Legacy Projects I've spent a large chunk of my career working on greenfield projects, the promised land. All of the projects faced different issues, and we worked towards coming up with different solutions. The promised land wasn't all it's cracked up to be. Recently, I've spent a lot of time working on legacy projects, bringing them into the modern world. Again, these projects aren't perfect and presented a whole variety of different issues. Let's explore the types of projects, and decide which is better: Greenfield, or Legacy. Bio: The majority of my career has been dominated by the .NET world, although recently my focus has been on exploring the greater development community. I'm a firm believer of continually learning and trying new things, you never know what else is out there. Recently, I've focused on setting up a user group and developer community in Hull, HullDevs Twitter: @Joe_Stead Website: joestead.codes