Work

Lessons learnt

9 March 2017

For the last 5 years, I’ve been at the heart of efforts to bring government into the digital age. I’ve worked with teams across departments to introduce new ways of doing things, to build new services and transform organisations. Along the way, I’ve learnt a huge amount about how to do it, and also what […]

What I mean when I say ‘digital transformation’

18 October 2016. 1 Comment

Digital transformation is a phrase that gets thrown about a lot in government circles at the moment. It means different things to different people. This makes it impossible for people to really understand what you mean when you say it. I’m not the first to write something about this. Simon recently wrote about how the […]

Plenty done

13 October 2016

A few weeks ago was my fifth anniversary at the Government Digital Service. I’ve had the opportunity to work on a huge number of important projects in various roles including software developer, technical lead, product owner, delivery manager, troubleshooter and technical architect. From building GOV.UK to travelling to DVLA in Swansea every week creating new […]

Plenty more to do

16 August 2015. 1 Comment

It’s been a fortnight of big announcements. Mike has announced he’s leaving. Leisa is going home. Tom, Ben & Russell have decided to move on. We’ve also said goodbye to some others – Andy, Lindsey, Sam and Mark. There’s been lots of noise about what this means for GDS, for ongoing digital transformation, for the […]

Spending time with users

14 June 2015

Last week I spent a day in Manchester with my team’s user researcher. She’s visiting people all over the country to help us better understand how people interact with government services. Taking part in research like this gives you a great opportunity to meet people outside of your normal circle. As a civil servant, I […]

A busy start to 2015

2 February 2015

January is usually a fairly quiet month. It normally takes people a while to get back into things following the Christmas break. This year however, everything seemed to have hit the ground running. Lots of projects have moved forward quickly and it looks like the first half of this year is going to be rather […]

Keeping motivated

9 September 2014. 1 Comment

When you’re deep in the day to day detail of projects, it’s quite easy to lose sight of the big picture. If you’re making lots of small, incremental changes, you can quickly forget what things were like when you started. I’m currently taking a couple of weeks away from my DVLA projects, partly because it’s […]

Week notes #49

7 April 2014

View driving record – lots of my focus over the past few weeks has been assisting this team to get to their public beta. It’s been a bit of a testing-fest with load, penetration and data quality testing going on. As the data from the driving records goes though a pretty complicated process to get […]

Week notes #45

10 March 2014

I started off the fortnight with 4 days in sunny Newcastle doing interviews for HMRC’s new digital centre. It’s always interesting sitting on the other side of an interview table, but these were somewhat unusual as we held them in hotel rooms. Luckily the hotel had replaced the beds with tables otherwise it could have […]

Week notes #43

24 February 2014

Vehicle tax & SORN – the team spent last week tidying things up and running tests with DVLA staff. They then launched the public beta on Thursday last week. Early counts suggest that nearly 5,000 people have taxed/SORNd their cars over the first few days using the beta. The team are now looking at the […]