Posts tagged "2014"

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 long overdue, but partly because I’ve done just that.

I’ve been feeling pretty demotivated and frustrated at the lack of progress in some parts. But, of course, none of that’s really true. There’s been plenty of progress, I’ve just lost sight of it.

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 to us, the DVLA testing team have been working hard to make sure we’re receiving and interpreting the data in the correct way. This work has been going on over the past few weekends, as well as testing the links to DWP/HMRC for our interim identity-assurance process.

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 been a bit awkward.

We finished off the Newcastle trip with a meet-up in the Brewdog bar where a fair few developers (and others) came to hear about what GDS and HMRC are up-to and how government is changing.

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 feedback and data to see what improvements we can make.

View driving record – a good couple of weeks for this project. They’ve test loaded a couple of million dummy driving records into the production system to see what bottlenecks exist & how long the initial load of data will take. They’ve also successfully loaded the real data from a select group of people into a special test environment so we can run a limited private beta for the next couple of weeks. This private beta will hopefully expose any data quality issues we have before we open it up to the public.

This afternoon, one of the projects I’ve been working on in Swansea launched into public beta.

For the past 3 months, I’ve been working with a small team at the DVLA to look at how we can make the process of buying tax for your car online simpler.

Taxing a car online isn’t exactly new – the existing service launched in 2006 and 54% of cars are already taxed this way.

What we’ve done is take the existing service and look at where we can make the process simpler. We’ve removed steps that were no longer necessary, stripped back the screens to make it clear and made look more like GOV.UK.

Quite clearly I didn’t manage to keep up with my intention to publish my week notes regularly. As things became a little crazy before Christmas, these always ended up at the bottom of my prioritised list.

I’m going to give them another go, but they’ll probably be shorter, but hopefully still interesting.

So, recently…

Vehicle tax & SORN – in my last set of notes I mentioned that we’d set up a team to look at making the tax disc buying process easier. This team has been working away since then to build a service we can release into public beta. A few weeks ago we passed our Digital by Default Service Standard Assessment (read the report), so hopefully we’ll be ready to show it off to the public soon.

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 has also been conversations about network connectivity and the wider DVLA technical transformation plan.