Week 219

Hello and welcome to the notes for GFR’s 219th week.

James M continues to enjoy his well deserved holiday, leaving James A, Tom and I to hold the fort in this short week leading up to Easter. Our week was mostly made up of meeting people with potential projects and meeting with GDS to talk about the prospective Digital Procurement Framework (DPF).

Government procurement

Tom and I attended a GDS event on Monday about the proposed Digital Procurement Framework. The framework aims to make it easier for Government to buy agile software development services, and to buy those services from smaller companies. I’m pleased that we were part of the event and appreciate the way in which GDS are involving suppliers to help define the DPF. Our main takeaway from the event was that it sounds as though we had it pretty easy when it came to our involvment with GDS: sure the Capita process was painful but that pales into insignificance when compared to some of the experiences of the other suppliers at the event.

Work, who needs work!?

We had some people in on Wednesday who’d originally contacted us to ask if we’d respond to a tender document. We declined to respond to the tender, for the reasons mentioned in week 214, but said that they were always welcome to come in for a chat. They spent some time describing what they wanted to build, and more importantly why they wanted to build it (i.e. the problems they have right now), and we spent some time describing how we approach software development projects. It became apparent during the conversation that there were some low risk things they could try themselves to alleviate their immediate pain, so we ended up advising that as a course of action. We received some positive feedback after the meeting saying that they’d started exploring some of these low risk options and were excited to see how far they could get with this approach.

We joke internally about talking ourselves out of work but we really do believe that if the best thing for the project is to do something in house, or go with someone else then we won’t hesitate to suggest it.

If you’ve got any projects you want to chat about, please do get in touch.

Other leads

In addition to our GDS meeting and the potential project mentioned above, we’ve also hosted two other sets of people with projects this week. The most exciting of the two, in my opinion, is focussed on making some positive changes to a specific area of the music industry. They’re hoping to get some funding and we’re going to be keeping in touch to see how that progresses.

And with that, I’ll say goodbye and leave you to your lovely long Easter weekends.

Until next time, mes amis.