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Week notes #7

15 June 2013

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 […]

Week notes #6

9 June 2013

This has been a week filled with workshops. On Monday I spent the day at the Richard Ley Development Centre (RLDC) in Swansea. The RLDC is the DVLA’s conference and training centre. It’s perfect for workshops and planning sessions – there is lots of space, lots of whiteboards and Wifi! As part of the driving […]

Week notes #3-5

2 June 2013. 1 Comment

The last couple of weeks have been pretty hectic. There’s been lots going on and I’ve been travelling to and from Swansea quite a bit. There’s also been a bank holiday, and a couple of days off. Work on the driving licence service has continued. We finished sprint 8 and started sprint 9. The end […]

Week notes #2

12 May 2013

Last week was a very short week with both a bank holiday and a day of annual leave. Despite this it was probably more productive than previous weeks. On Tuesday I attended a show and tell to see the work that’s been done over the last sprint. It’s great to see things starting to come […]

Week notes #1

4 May 2013

A number of people are starting to put together week notes about what they have been up to over the past 5 days of work. I want to give this a go too, partly so I can look back in a few months time and remind myself what has been achieved. I probably won’t get […]

The internet is fragile

28 January 2013. 2 Comments

At some point in the last few weeks a lot of the things I worked on back in Consumer Focus disappeared from the internet. The sites were turned off and the URLs redirected to the organisation homepage. There is no explanation or notice explaining why you end up on that homepage and you would be […]

Surviving long distance commuting

22 January 2013. 5 Comments

As many of my friends and colleagues will confirm, I spent a large portion of the last 18 months commuting to work. Initially from Cardiff to London, then from Abergavenny to London. Both journeys over 2 hours in each direction. It wasn’t really practical to do this on a daily basis, either from a time […]

Exploring local government services online

14 November 2012

Back in February I wrote about how GOV.UK helps people get from a central government website to services provided in their local area. For each of these services, from paying council tax to reporting a dangerous building, we try and direct the user to the most useful place on their local council website. We do […]

Hello GOV.UK

22 October 2012

Last week we finally launched GOV.UK. On Tuesday afternoon I got to issue the pull request to remove all the beta messages from the site, then a team worked through the early hours of Wednesday morning to redirect as many Directgov and Business Link URLs to GOV.UK as possible*. On Wednesday, the site received over […]

Working towards launch

7 October 2012

As the launch of GOV.UK draws nearer, it would be a mistake to assume that the beta is in it’s final state.  The development and content teams are continuing to make tweaks and changes to the site based on feedback and testing. This will continue both up to and after it becomes the official site […]