Agile and New Ways of Working

Agile is a way of working for uncertain problems. This module traces its roots from Winston Royce's 1970 paper and Takeuchi and Nonaka's rugby image to the Agile Manifesto and the Government Digital Service, reads the Manifesto's values as cultural bets, and places delivery on a spectrum from predictive to adaptive. Cases from the NHS National Programme for IT and Birmingham City Council show the cost of learning too late.

Many organisations do agile without being agile: the rituals arrive but decisions, budgets and trust stay the same. This module starts with diagnosis, using Rittel and Webber's tame and wicked problems, Snowden's Cynefin framework and the Stacey matrix, then turns to culture through Denning's three laws, McKinsey's missteps and Rigby, Elk and Berez on agility and stability. ING Netherlands is the case, read honestly.

Scrum's rules are light but its discipline is demanding. Working from the Scrum Guide by Ken Schwaber and Jeff Sutherland, this module covers Scrum's roots in Takeuchi and Nonaka's rugby image, the three pillars and five values, the three accountabilities, the Sprint and its events, and the three artefacts with their commitments. The FBI's Sentinel system shows what disciplined delivery did and did not contribute to a turnaround.

Most of the time work is not being worked on; it is waiting. This module explores the Toyota Production System and the andon cord, Womack and Jones's five principles of Lean, Ohno's seven wastes in public service terms, and John Seddon's failure demand and critique of tool-driven Lean. It then covers David Anderson's Kanban method and Little's Law, with Virginia Mason and its NHS partnership as the case.

A pilot is built to succeed; an experiment is built to learn. This module covers Eric Ries's build, measure, learn loop, the minimum viable product and the choice to pivot or persevere, testable hypotheses from Gothelf and Seiden's Lean UX, and assumption mapping from Bland and Osterwalder. It sets out what makes an experiment safe to fail in public services, with Dropbox and the government's Humphrey Consult tool as cases.

Agile teams need more direction, not less, but of a different kind. This module draws on Heifetz's adaptive challenges, Bungay's three gaps and directed opportunism, Moltke's mission command, Kniberg's alignment and autonomy grid and Greenleaf's servant leadership to set out five parts of the redesigned leader's role. McChrystal's team of teams and Task Force 714 show how shared context gives speed at scale.

The team, not the individual, is the basic unit of agile working. This module covers bringing work to stable teams, Skelton and Pais's Team Topologies with its four team types and three interaction modes, cognitive load as a design constraint, Conway's Law and the inverse Conway manoeuvre, and Amy Edmondson's psychological safety. Google's Project Aristotle is the case, read with care about what the company itself reported.

When many teams must work as one, the hard part moves to the joins between them. This module names four forces that pull teams apart, compares SAFe, Large-Scale Scrum, Scrum at Scale and Nexus, and argues for reducing dependencies before adding coordination and descaling before scaling, drawing on Wintzen's cells at BSO. The Spotify model, from Kniberg and Ivarsson's 2012 snapshot to Jeremiah Lee's critique, is the case.

Governance is not the enemy of agile, but it must change so that accountability and learning pull the same way. This module compares project and team funding, explains Hope and Fraser's Beyond Budgeting and Handelsbanken's choice not to set sales targets, and draws on the National Audit Office on agile governance. It then covers outcome roadmaps, Goodhart's law and John Doerr's OKRs at Google, closing with guidance for public boards.

Some organisations have gone beyond giving teams more freedom and redesigned authority itself. This module compares Dignan's old and new operating systems, tests Frederic Laloux's teal organisations against their critics, and reads Buurtzorg, Morningstar, Zappos and Haier alongside Hamel and Zanini's Humanocracy. It shows why distributed authority depends on clear decision rights and the advice process, not on removing structure.

Public services must learn fast without failing the people who depend on them. This module looks at how the Government Digital Service made agile accountable, from GOV.UK to the Design Council's Double Diamond, the discovery to retirement lifecycle, and the UK and Welsh service standards. It considers agile under public duty, including the Well-being of Future Generations Act, and reads the National Audit Office's findings on Universal Credit.

Few management subjects produce stronger opinions on thinner evidence than hybrid and remote work. This module separates what we know from what is contested, from return-to-office mandates and survey data to proximity bias and hybrid's failure mode, and sets out five steps for designing hybrid on purpose. It closes with the Trip.com randomised trial by Nick Bloom and colleagues, and what it means for public services.

Flexible working decisions are made every week and shape recruitment, retention, wellbeing and fairness. This module traces the right to request from 2003 to the day-one right of April 2024 and the Employment Rights Act 2025, sets out the eight statutory business reasons for refusal, and explains how inflexibility can amount to indirect discrimination. It also covers rota-based teams, the right to disconnect and Wales's remote working ambition.

Shorter working weeks are being raised by staff, unions, members and candidates for hard-to-fill roles. This module separates the 100:80:100 model from compressed and reduced hours, examines the UK pilot of 2022, Iceland's public sector trials and Microsoft Japan, and sets out what a fair trial should measure and the critiques it must answer. South Cambridgeshire District Council shows how evidence, honesty and design settled the question.

In most public services the scarcest resource is focused time. This module draws on Microsoft's infinite workday data, Cal Newport's hyperactive hive mind and deep work, and Patrick Lencioni's four meeting types to show how to protect attention and choose the right channel for each conversation. GitLab, Amazon's six-page memo and Atlassian's Team Anywhere show deliberate design in practice, alongside a team communication charter.

AI tools are arriving in councils, health bodies and charities faster than policy or training. This module reads the evidence, from Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond's study of customer support agents to Dell'Acqua and colleagues' jagged technological frontier, and offers a way to decide whether to automate, augment or keep work human. It covers the UK government's AI Playbook, the legal training pipeline and two civil service evaluations of Copilot.

Method matters, but it is never enough on its own. This capstone reads four cases through agile ideas: the failure and rescue of HealthCare.gov, GOV.UK Verify's missed targets, a district council's trust in teams to redesign their work, and neighbourhood coaching at Bromford and Hafod. It then draws everything together as agile leadership in five layers and four instructions: diagnose the work, design the system, trust the people, keep learning.