5 minutes with… Ian Ames
Hi I’m Ian, I help multidisciplinary teams deliver services in a user-centred way. I’ve worked in a variety of Digital and IT roles for 22 years working mostly for government organisations. I’m based in Plymouth.
This article was originally posted on LinkedIn in June 2023 and Ian has kindly given permission for the content to be added here.
Why did you choose a career in delivery or project management?
I actually started in Operational and support roles, and then moved to a position where I was responsible for successful service support for new software being released. I saw all the classic Development and Operations dysfunctions and thought there has to be a better way of doing things. This led me to the DevOps movement, I really liked the focus not just on tech but on culture, that was my gateway into other agile practices. I love agile because when things aren’t working it’s almost painful, that’s an indicator to do something about it, the inverse is the palpable buzz you get from a well functioning team, I love that.
What advice would you give someone starting out in the industry?
Good question! Firstly, don't be afraid of not being too technical, most teams have people who are more than capable of the tech, where a delivery person adds value is by helping a multidisciplinary team work together and communicate. If you have empathy for others, arent afraid to ask ‘stupid questions’, are willing to listen and learn about different expectations and constraints of different people in the team and can communicate clearly you’ll enjoy being a DM.
Have you ever worked on a particularly difficult project? Why was it rubbish/tough/hard?
Working on digital projects in government is still harder than it should be in a lot of places. Governance and decision making structures haven’t been adapted to agile ways of working and so teams become disempowered and it takes a long time to make decisions. Despite that I can think of few areas where when you do get it right you get to feel a deep sense of having made a difference to people’s lives.
What do you think are the most important skills for a delivery or project manager to have?
At the risk of giving a classic consultant response it really depends!
By that I mean that each team, project and organisation is subtly different, each will have strengths and weaknesses. A good DM will spend time understanding this and shaping delivery practices and approaches best suited to that context.
The sorts of questions I try to ask on a new engagement:
How experienced are the team? Are there any capability gaps in the team?
How autonomous is the team? What are our dependencies (all teams have dependencies whether they like it or not).
How familiar with agile/ digital ways of working is the client/stakeholders?
How complex is the problem we’re being asked to solve
Based on these I can think about how best to support the project, for example, do I spend more time with stakeholders to make the case for how the ways we work result in better services? Or do I spend time with the team to make their working practices awesome?
By far the biggest skill a DM can have is the ability to inspect and adapt. To look at things and think, how can we do this better? How will we know whether it is better? This can be applied to everything, product roadmap, ways of working, communication. Don’t be afraid to change things for your context rather than blindly following an established way of working.
What do you think are the biggest challenges facing delivery and project managers today?
There’s always a big focus on commoditised working practices, people will always want simple answers to complex problems, its human nature and something I have slowly learned to live with. It’s one of the things I prefer about being a contractor, I can choose not to work with people who don’t see the value of shaping their approaches to their context.
It used to drive me nuts as an employee when teams were compared despite them solving very different problems with differing challenges. What worked well for one team was no guarantee of success for the other team. By all means try it and see, but don’t enforce a way of working for the sake of alignment or comparison, those are internal needs, your customers or users won’t care how the thing is delivered.
What projects would you have loved to have been involved in?
There’s been some great answers to this question already that I might have picked, the moon landings, the early days of GDS. I think they appeal to me because they are discovering new ways to solve problems. Toyota’s development of Kaizen and Kanban and the Toyota way is up there for me too.
So much improvement can be made when you focus on the workflow and trust people to adjust and improve. The 1986 article the new new product development game describes most modern product management and scrum before scrum even existed. It fascinates me to learn how a lot of modern practices are pushing 40-50 years old and are still relatively novel in a lot of organisations. Being there at the beginning must have been so exciting. Of course I would have been around 7 years old so I’m not sure I would have been very helpful!
This post is part of a services called ‘5 minutes with’ series of articles from people in the delivery management and project management space.