Guiding principles

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The Technology Team does its best to hold itself to a set of guiding principles, which we’ve summarised here.

Prove the concept

Where we’re investigating if we can do something new, we try to prove the concept quickly with a prototype. This means we invest a minimum of time, effort and money into something which may not be worthwhile or viable.

Do it right

Once we’re proven that a concept works we will make the effort to implement it properly, rather than throw something together or keep using our prototype. It will often take slightly longer or cost slightly more, but it will almost always save time and money in the long run.

Keep it open

We work in the open whenever we can, sharing what we are working on, our successes and our failures. We need a reason to make something private, not a reason to make something public.

Zero blame

We understand that things go wrong, and believe that when they do nobody is individually to blame. Instead, we should collectively figure out what allowed things to go wrong in the first place and fix it.

Continuous improvement

We can always do things better, and should be constantly reviewing what we do and looking for ways we can make improvements both big and small. We welcome and encourage feedback – both positive and negative – on everything we do as part of this.

For the future

We always keep an eye on the future in what we do, making sure we consider things like long-term maintainance and costs over their entire expected lifetime. We also consider what might come next, making use of open standards, adding spare capacity and future-proofing where we can.