Digital Transformation at Scale

waterfall-based projects treated building IT systems the same way as building bridges and submarines. Gather a list of requirements first, build, test, launch, done. Waterfall-style methods can work perfectly well in controlled environments. You build a bridge because you want to go from x to y, and you build it from steel and reinforced concrete because they are the best materials. Neither of these things will change that much in 50 years. Waterfall works much less well in a landscape where people’s needs and the underlying technology are constantly changing. Agile is a rejection of applying false certainty to delivering policy with technology. Digital public services are infrastructure, but of a different kind. When they’re live, they’re just that –live, as ongoing, maintained services. Services whose users will have needs that will change over time. That means teams have to keep updating and iterating them.