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Dafydd Vaughan

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Week notes #7

Photo from DVLA vehicles discovery

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.

Back at GDS on Wednesday, we started processing it all to turn it into something useful and figure out what we might have missed. We’ll be playing some of that back to the team in Swansea next week and we’ll be continuing to dig into these areas over the next few weeks till we have a plan for what we could start doing.

On Thursday, some of the DVLA IEP team presented to the GDS all staff meeting and gave everyone a bit of background to the DVLA and a glimpse of our alpha service.

The rest of Thursday and Friday was then spent in a workshop with the DVLA team and the Identity Assurance (IDA) team at GDS. We looked at how we could hook our customer website up to their service. We’ve got some good user journeys mapped out and some things to take forward.

Finally, I spent a bit of time with the Performance Platform team reviewing the information we
gathered last week and the next steps so we can make sure we report useful information.

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Week notes #6

IEP Phase 2

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 [...]

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Week notes #3-5

Open Tech 2013 GDS - YouTube

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 [...]

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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 [...]

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Week notes #1

Government Service Design Manual - Mission patch

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 [...]

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The internet is fragile

301-moved-permanently

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 [...]

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Surviving long distance commuting

London Paddington station - photo from mwanasimba (Flickr)

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 [...]

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Exploring local government services online

govuk-local-services-screenshot

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 [...]

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Hello GOV.UK

GOV.UK homepage extract - 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 [...]

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Working towards launch

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 [...]

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