@pubstrat explained the context for the session.

Traditional policy and legislative development may not deliver the optimum customer experience. How do we marry up Agile principles with policy development?

@curiousc talked about breaking risk down and making it manageable. How do you re-train the politicians and media to not want the big story impact? It was noted that at the same time they don't necessarily want a big story if it's a failure! @curiousc outlined some points as follows:

• Agile is a commitment to communication.
• Everyone is responsible for making it work.
• In traditional policy making the plan becomes the objective, how do you separate them out?
• How do you adjust policy as you go along based on evidence? How do you use the users to make sure you are on track.

Some of the potential barriers and issues of going Agile in government were discussed. This doesn't by any means cover the whole discussion, just some key points I picked up.

Policy people are not good at changing their minds and tend to bury evidence where policy implementation hasn't worked well.

The current process helps policy makers to avoid facing possible failure and huge costs further down the line. Better to fail fast, early, cheaply. Failure can be positive. Can sell failure on the basis of cost savings.

You could surface issues to Ministers by saying you're going to use Agile approach.

Separate the plan from the objective.

Could a policy making process be tested out in a more Agile way? Hard to test small atomic bits of a large policy in the same way you test code.

Is Agile crossing over with co-production?

Need to test policy across a wide range of demographic groups.

Policies need to be delivered in a way that suits a networked, online society. Transparency is key. A digital footprint means that you have to deliver policy outcomes in line with original policy statements.