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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
3 November 2013. 1 Comment
The last few weeks have involved lots of spinning plates. Two weeks ago GOV.UK reached one year old. We celebrated in the traditional way with blogs, cake and beer. Building out the new DVLA cloud infrastructure is ongoing. The View driving record team has started and completed the first stories focussed on Identity Assurance. There […]
13 October 2013
The last couple of weeks have been dominated by one topic – infrastructure. As mentioned in my previous week notes, we’ve been designing and building out the production infrastructure for the View Driving Record service at DVLA. Lots of effort has gone into talking to suppliers, designing what we need and spinning it all up. […]
23 September 2013. 4 Comments
I’ve neglected my week notes for a little while so here is a condensed update covering week 16 to 21. Part of the reason for the lack of notes is that I took a couple of weeks off towards the end of August. I tried to avoid using my computer during these weeks and completely […]
22 July 2013
Some belated notes from last week. The week started off with a very quiet few days in Swansea. Lots of people were away for various reasons so, for me, it was pretty unproductive. I did however get to spend some more time with the contract team and see the latest show & tell from the […]
14 July 2013
At the beginning of the week I took part in a workshop to look at abolishing the Counterpart Driving Licence (the piece of paper that comes with the plastic card). The counterpart contains additional information such as what you can drive (entitlements) and penalty points / disqualifications (endorsements). It’s seen to be a fairly important […]
6 July 2013
After a couple of very busy weeks things are starting to calm down and return to normal. I spent more time on Monday with some of the team working on the DVLA IT transformation. We’re looking at ways to strangle down the complex legacy IT estate to make it simpler to maintain and to make […]
30 June 2013
After the last few manic weeks, this week was a chance to slow down a bit and take stock of everything that has been going on. On Monday I and a bunch of technical colleagues met with the DVLA team leading on their ICT contract let (a piece of work to split up their existing […]