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 digital services. From rebuilding a service that takes billions of pounds in payments in just a few weeks to bringing IT back in house after 30 years of outsourcing. From sitting on the technology spend control board to hiring hundreds of skilled people into government.
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 future of IT in government.
If I said this hasn’t all been unnerving and concerning, I’d be lying. I’ve spent a lot of time this week wondering what this means for me. Is it time for me to move on – do something new?
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 productive.
This month the first phase of DVLA’s Vehicle Management service has moved to a public beta. Motor dealers can now notify DVLA that they’ve bought a vehicle online without having to return the paper V5C document. This will automatically update DVLA’s records, refund any vehicle tax due to the original keeper and cancel a vehicle tax direct debit if it’s set up.
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.
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.
We’ve been working closely with colleagues from GDS and HMRC who have used similar patterns and who are also in the process of spinning up their infrastructure services. This is giving us the chance to learn from each other and avoid repeating mistakes or falling down rabbit holes. All seems to be going well, but we’ve got at least another couple of weeks of this ahead.
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 cut myself off from anything work related. This inevitably led to an insane amount of work prior to my time off and a crazy period of catching up upon my reassimilation.
It’s been another busy few weeks.
Our big focus over these few weeks has been making sure absolutely everything we have to do before our public beta is included in our backlog.
We’ve spent quite a bit of time with the dev team and lots of people at DVLA teasing out missing stories, converting ‘documents’ into stories and working out dependencies. It’s always amazing how many stories are hidden in documents and not fully visible.
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 IT contract management team and see the latest show & tell from the view my driving record team.
Wednesday was the biggest feature of the week with our Sprint Alpha event. It was a chance to show off everything that GDS has been doing with transactions across government. Filled with a mixture of civil servants, press, permanent secretaries and ministers we had a chance to update everyone on what we’ve been up to and what comes next. We’re working on 25 services across government, including 3 (view driving record, vehicle management and personalised registrations) at DVLA.
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 piece of paper. If you drive a van for work, you can use it to prove to your employer that you can drive that type of vehicle. Similarly, if you hire a car you can use it to prove to the rental company that you can drive. There are lots of reasons why someone might need to see it. Unfortunately, lots of people misplace the counterpart or throw it away not realising they might need it and then have to get a replacement.
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 it easier build new services. Given how complex and tightly coupled the existing systems are, this isn’t going to be a simple process.
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 procurement (a piece of work to split up their existing IT estate). We took at look at the work their team is doing and made some suggestions on how to proceed.
A little late this week.
On Monday I got to spend a day visiting the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency (VOSA) in Bristol. Amongst other things, VOSA look after the MOT service. They’ve got a small internal development team and some SMEs working on various internal tools and an alpha of a potential future MOT service. It’s fantastic to see this sort of thing happening in departments that are getting very little support from GDS.
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.
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 licence project I’ve been working on, we’ve been building a bunch of services to handle lots of queries against the DVLA’s driver databases. We spent Monday looking at the systems that currently (and might in the future) make queries for this data. The aim was to identify which services might be next to transfer over to the new platform.
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 of sprint show and tell was really well attended by staff from across the organisation. We’ve been concentrating on the public facing elements of the service recently so we could start user testing. We’ve now started spending more time on the backend services including the internal APIs, data services and auditing.
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 together. We also had a general pre-sprint planning catch up and team retrospective.
On Wednesday we started the first round of user testing the online service. We tested with both DVLA staff in Swansea and members of the public in Birmingham. This round has highlighted some things we can change now to make the service simpler and confirmed some suspicions we had. It has also given us some things to investigate further – it’s important not to jump to conclusions from just one round of testing.
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 round to writing these every week, but hopefully often enough that it makes sense.