It’s the end of week 4 at GOV.UK. A whole month in post!
Starting to find my feet. Feeling orientated and that I might be starting to be making some useful contributions around the place. It’s tricky when you are surrounded by the immensely talented, knowledgeable, fast-moving folk. It’s easy to come to halt and watch them go, forgetting to run with them.
This week the boss was on some well earned R&R. Took it as a huge validation of progress made since joining that Jen felt able to take time off and let me, Rachel and the SMT crack-on. She knows the GOV.UK delivery teams are on the case and would stop us getting into any trouble.
Deputising for her this week meant being on-point for more approval requests, and attending the GDS Executive Team meeting and ministerial forums. Fascinating! Amazing to see the next level at work. Reassuring to know that they work hard, leverage all their experience for every decision, and aren’t all just taking a breather in those meetings :)
There was quality deep-dive time with the lead devs and tech archs on GOV.UK, and personal tours of our platform infrastructure. Impressive! The teams involved there often go unsung but they have done amazing things over the last 12–18 months against the Brexit and Covid backdrops. There was some plain-speaking which I appreciated about the advocacy they need to keep our infrastructure quick, reliable and secure. I am as excited about optimising and looking after our core as I am about making new things.
Big moment of the week! We got the GOV.UK roadmap out into the public domain — huge thanks to the multidisciplinary team who made that happen in between everything else going on.
The response has been really positive and there have been around 500 views of the gov.uk/roadmap each day since we released it. Which is great. Releasing it is a statement of intent and it’s good to know there’s interest out there because we very much intend to update the roadmap and post commentary around it a little and often throughout the year ahead. Open roadmaps for the win! I’m pleased that GOV.UK is doing this again; I’m particularly looking forward to using it as a prompt for conversations with service teams across government.
And kudos to the GOV.UK Notify and GOV.UK Pay teams whose roadmapping game has been consistently strong. Pay has started adding research learnings to theirs, which is interesting to read and has got me thinking.
Though it’s been busy, it’s not as busy as it was. Some teams in checkins have logged this as an odd feeling when we’re talking about wellbeing. It’s important not to feel bad about there being a bit more time to sit with a task or to do those extra checks that got pinched in recent months. It’s OK not to be running a million miles a minute. There will be many moments of adjustment in the weeks and months ahead. Let’s keep sharing on that.
Timely: Time Moves Slow — BADBADNOTGOOD
Bon weekend y’all.
