The pace of work has certainly picked up again, following the election; it’s been another very busy week!
New digs
We started the week with our move into the new London office. Bye bye, 100 Parliament Street and hello, 22 Whitehall.
I was reminded again this week that I’ve been in Whitehall too long when I was telling the person doing my induction all about when it was the home for the Department for International Development.
Anyway, the new office is fine. Not great, just fine. It has desks. It has a tea point. It hasn’t got anything else that’s different from any other office space designed for pre-pandemic working arrangements – including not having enough desks.
It doesn’t half feel claustrophobic mind you, after years of big open spaces and high ceilings in 100 Parliament Street. Especially if you climb into one of the “pods” designed for phone calls. They may as well be stand-up coffins.
If at first you don’t succeed…
Administrative shenanigans aside, this week has been dominated by two big things:
- The King’s Speech
- Our digital service
Third time’s the charm?
The government announced its legislative programme for the forthcoming Parliament on Wednesday, and we’re back, baby!
The Data Protection and Digital Information Bill is dead. Long live the Digital Information and Smart Data Bill.
There was a “blink and you’ll miss it” reference to our Bill in the King’s Speech but, buried in the briefing pack on GOV.UK released moments later, there we are in black and white.“Digital Verification Services” gets top billing too – we’re apparently Florence, not The Machine, in this third round of underpinning our work with law.
Third time or not, this is a big moment for our team. As my former boss might say… Onwards!
Unsticking the LEGO
Whilst we were moving forward with legislation, this week we’ve had to move backwards with the digital service. Some developing policy work internally has meant that the service, as we’ve conceived of it since alpha, doesn’t align with what we now need to do.
Luckily a lot of what we’ve done is modular and reusable – helped in no small way by the use of common components and design patters from the GOV.UK Design System.
It’s still not an easy task though. We’ve had to figure out how we will unstick the LEGO bricks and stick everything back together again so that the service does support the work we need to do.
It’ll probably set us back by about 3 or 4 sprints; but we’re still on track to deliver our public beta later in the year as originally planned.