Talking to Parliament about digital government
This week I gave evidence to the Parliament Science and Technology Committee about digital government and the challenges ahead to continue delivering good services to users
Posts tagged "GDS"
The state of blogging in digital government
Publishing blog posts about the work you’re doing is a great way of making things open. In the early days, GDS was great at this. Working out loud and talking openly about even small changes was normal practice. It was just a thing that happened. Fast forward to 2018 and things are different. Blogs that were once active, now lie dormant – untouched for months.
2017 year note
This year has been a bit of a mixed bag, with many ups and downs: Leaving GDS; setting up my own business; getting married; visiting new places; exploring London.
Benefits of controls on government technology spending
Spend controls often focus on immediate savings, but there are many other benefits of introducing controls on technology spending which often get ignored
Deliver little, deliver often, avoid the big bang
When building and running services it’s important get into the habit of releasing updates to users on a regular basis. Always be shipping.
Create the space to let teams deliver
Organisations that create an environment and culture that supports delivery will find they build better services and have more productive teams. Don’t slow down delivery.
GDS: Completing our work to secure digital services
Progress and impact of the work we’re doing to improve the security of government digital services
GDS: Incident report – GOV.UK DNS outage
An incident report about several issues that took government services offline
Plenty done
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.
GDS: Updating our security guidelines for digital services
Work we’re doing to improve the security of government digital services
Plenty more to do
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.
Spending time with users
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 spend most of my time with people who have an interest in and understanding of how government works.
Keeping motivated
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.
DVLA: Iterating the Vehicle Tax and SORN betas
Some of the recent tweaks we’ve made to the DVLA vehicle tax and SORN services
DVLA: Making vehicle information clearer
How DVLA is making vehicle information easier to understand for users
DVLA: Next phase of the tax disc beta
How DVLA/GDS are using A/B testing to push more people towards the beta vehicle tax service
Week notes #49
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.
Week notes #45
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.
Week notes #43
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.
Week notes #41
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.
Week notes #25-27
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.
In addition to that, I’ve been involved in some conversations about paying for a tax disc by Direct Debit.
365 days later
A year ago today two of the government’s biggest websites, Directgov and Business Link, were switched off and GOV.UK became the official site for information and services. The last 12 months have flown by. It’s interesting to see how much the site has changed over the year as it continues to develop.
It’s now the home to 75 government departments and agencies who are publishing announcements, policies, publications, consultations, statistics and blogs on over 45 different topics.
Week notes #22-24
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.
Week notes #16-21
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.
Week notes #14-15
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.
Week notes #12
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.
Week notes #11
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.
Week notes #10
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.
Talk: Digital by Default at Civil Service Live 2013
Yesterday (3rd July 2013) I have a talk about Digital by Default at Civil Service Live (an annual conference for civil servants) in Bristol.
There was quite a bit of interest in the talk (the venue we had was packed), so I thought it would be useful if I replicated the talk online and provide a bit of commentary.
Hello I’m Dafydd Vaughan.
I’m a Technical Architect at the Government Digital Service.
Week notes #9
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.
Week notes #8
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.
Week notes #7
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.
Week notes #6
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.
Week notes #3-5
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.
Week notes #2
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.
Week notes #1
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.
So, here we go with Week #1 (29 Apr – 3 May 2013):
The internet is fragile
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 forgiven for thinking that the sites and tools never existed. Every link ever made to any of those things are now broken.
GDS: Browser usage on GOV.UK
An overview of browsers and devices that are using the GOV.UK website on the GDS blog
Exploring local government services online
2019 update:
LocalDirectgov and the underlying datasets have now been replaced. This means the tool was getting out of date and inaccurate, so I’ve switched it off.
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.
Hello GOV.UK
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 possible1.
On Wednesday, the site received over 1 million visits and regularly had over 10 thousand people using it at the same time.
Working towards launch of GOV.UK
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 for government services on 17 October.
This past week, we’ve released (and written about) the new homepage design, updated browse categories and the removal of the search ‘auto suggest‘ feature.
Brushing off the cobwebs
Just over a year ago, I blogged that I was taking a break from CF Labs and joining a project to create a new website for government.
Since then lots of things have happened, and many things have changed. Here is a quick summary:
The Government Digital Service (GDS) was created to bring together many bits of government that were working on similar things, including the project to create the new website We released a public beta of our proposed new website for citizens (to replace Directgov).
GDS: It's not about cookies, it's about privacy
An update on how government websites will be implementing the new cookie / privacy regulations
GDS: Local Services and GOV.UK
How the gov.uk beta website will be exposing services provided by local government
GDS: Cookies on the GOV.UK Beta
How the gov.uk beta website will be using cookies