Week notes #7

Dafydd Vaughan on 15 June 2013

Photo from DVLA vehicles discovery

Lots of progress this week.

The Department for Transport Digital Strategy published in December last year contained three transformation projects at the DVLA in Swansea. We started the first – the Integrated Enquiries Platform (IEP) – back in January. The other two (vehicles online and personalised registrations) hadn’t been started yet. Until this week.

On Monday and Tuesday we kicked off our ‘discovery‘ process for these two projects. We took over some space at the RLDC in Swansea, invited lots of people to talk to us and explain everything that might be related to the projects. We filled whiteboards and post-it notes with thoughts, diagrams and figures. By the time we left on the Tuesday we’d taken on a huge amount of information.

Back at GDS on Wednesday, we started processing it all to turn it into something useful and figure out what we might have missed. We’ll be playing some of that back to the team in Swansea next week and we’ll be continuing to dig into these areas over the next few weeks till we have a plan for what we could start doing.

On Thursday, some of the DVLA IEP team presented to the GDS all staff meeting and gave everyone a bit of background to the DVLA and a glimpse of our alpha service.

The rest of Thursday and Friday was then spent in a workshop with the DVLA team and the Identity Assurance (IDA) team at GDS. We looked at how we could hook our customer website up to their service. We’ve got some good user journeys mapped out and some things to take forward.

Finally, I spent a bit of time with the Performance Platform team reviewing the information we
gathered last week and the next steps so we can make sure we report useful information.