Jason Smith Commercial Director
User experience of agile project: I have never known a project to develop at such a rate."
- Job Title
- Commercial Director
- Bio
Jason has over 20 years IT experience working with major corporations including GlaxoSmithKline, British American Tobacco and United Utilities. Prior to joining IndigoBlue in 2003, his most recent role was as the manager of Logica's pharmaceutical practice, leading sales campaigns into major pharmaceutical organisations.
- Short bio
I'm IndigoBlue's Commercial Director and also support much of the company's sales and marketing. I also enjoy trips to Glyndebourne, fine wine and not so fine wine.
- LinkedIn profile
- http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/jason-smith/0/141/64
My Most Recent Posts
A Playful Interlude
31 JAN 2013 | Posted in agile requirements, coalition play, non-technical agile, stroppy client | Author Jason SmithIn the dim and distant past, I used to write for a moderately successful satirical journal called “The Brains Trust.” The founders of this gloriously scurrilous rag, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, have gone on to greater things and last year wrote a play called “Coalition,” which I ended up producing and miraculously sold-out its run in Edinburgh.
It now has a London run featuring lots of people off the telly (Phill Jupitus, Jo Caulfield et al, whoever he is) – so come and see it.
Our most read posts from 2012 cover topics from all areas of IndigoBlue's services and interests.
Most of these posts were written in 2012, but a few older posts are still offering great value to our readers. Its interesting to see the range of topics that are included!
The top 10 are:
Old MacDonald
20 DEC 2012 | Posted in agile governance framework, incremental business change | Author Jason Smith |
1 Comment
One of the unique specialisms we have at IndigoBlue is what we have to say about Governance and Incremental Business Change. We have a framework to support this; however we are not specialists in naming things. We tell people we are called IndigoBlue because that was the colour Buddha saw on reaching enlightenment. However, we are actually named after the single “Blue Monday” by New Order. So, our framework has been called a number of things: “ADAPT”, “Adapt”, “Adapt and Control” and less imaginatively “The IndigoBlue Governance Framework.”
Why did the salesman cross the road?
04 DEC 2012 | Posted in incremental delivery | Author Jason Smith | 3 Comments
This is, I should warn you in advance, an utterly pointless blog. It is also very boring. However, it has a joke at the end of it. It concerns the last part of my journey to work. I walk from Green Park Station to our office on Jermyn Street. I usually walk down the south side of Piccadilly and turn right just past the Ritz. I then make left turn and cross St James’s Street. It would be more efficient, if there was no traffic, to simply carry on down Piccadilly, but as St James’s Street is busy with traffic I end up slightly lower down and cross at the zebra crossing.
The Change of Fear
02 SEP 2011 | Posted in agile adoption, change management, fear of change, model project | Author Jason Smith | 1 Comment
An apocryphal experiment was carried out with some chimps a few years ago. Five chimps were put in an enclosure and left for a few days. A rope was then hung in the centre of the enclosure with some fruit at the top. One chimp started to climb the rope and when it grabbed the fruit, the floor of the enclosure delivered an electric shock to the remaining chimps. Within a couple of days the association was made and no chimp would grab the fruit.
Many congratulations to John Wright and his team on travelling from London to Paris in 24 hours. I expressed surprise, when John told me the news, that Eurostar took that long. However, he then pointed out that they'd done it by bike. And hadn't even stopped for coffee and pastries. I'm sure they were all peddling much faster as a result of having to wear lycra cycling shirts designed by Rob Smith, our managing director.
Accentuate the negative
31 MAY 2011 | Posted in Agile in Government, Agile in public sector, agile project management, Government | Author Jason SmithIndigoBlue has been closely involved with the recent flurry of activity regarding the use of Agile methods in Government. We ran one of the principal pilot projects at the Home Office & Met Police, contributed to the IfG report and have been proselytising to a number of Government CIO’s. Our approach is reasonably straightforward: Agile is a set of techniques to help deliver incremental business improvement.
Black Swan
01 APR 2011 | Posted in agile approach, disaster recovery, risk reduction, Taleb | Author Jason SmithThe idea of the black swan is a fascinating one. I am not, in this case, referring to the film of the same name about a slightly dippy ballerina who wishes to improve her dancing through copious quantities of drugs, sex and fantasy, although it might make for a more entertaining post. I am referring to the concept first defined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable .
Weapons-grade Agile
11 MAR 2011 | Posted in cost of agile, scaling agile | Author Jason SmithThere was an interesting article in Computing this week – it alleged (after an extensive survey of one CIO, probably in a bar shortly after he’d been fired) that Agile was hugely more expensive over a system’s lifetime than traditional ways of running projects. “I wish I’d never heard of Agile,” wailed the unfortunate CIO.
At IndigoBlue, in addition to our good-looks, generosity and sexual dynamism, we specialise in two things. The first is, crudely, weaponising Agile; making Agile suitable for large organisations and complex programmes. The second is applying its philosophy, techniques and processes to strategic business change; how to apply incremental change across an organisation.
De Minimis
07 MAR 2011 | Posted in agile business change, Government, incremental change, incremental delivery | Author Jason Smith“De minimis non curat lex - the law does not concern itself with trifles.” This phrase is often used in cases where an item is so insignificant that a court declines to make a judgement; or, by me, to dismiss a colleague’s certain victory in an argument, usually with an airy wave of the hand.
It is interesting that the law has codified something that most of us struggle with throughout our working lives. We are overwhelmed with trifling objects, often urgent and simple to address and so we allow ourselves to complete them and ignore the important, higher priority items.
MY RECENT BLOG POSTS
In the dim and distant past, I used to write for a moderately successful satirical journal called “The Brains Trust.” The founders of this gloriously scurrilous rag, Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky, have gone on to greater things and last year wrote a play called “Coalition,” which I ended up producing and miraculously sold-out its run in Edinburgh.
It now has a London run featuring lots of people off the telly (Phill Jupitus, Jo Caulfield et al, whoever he is) – so come and see it.
