It’s August. It’s meant to be a quiet month. Lord knows, it isn’t. On the bright side, lots to share in this week note.
Shiny and new(ish)
We’ve had a mini restructure. A few months ago, another member of the team went off on long-term sickness leave and so we put in place some temporary changes to the team. Thankfully she’s on the mend and back to work now, but we’ve decided to maintain some of those interim arrangements. We’ve also made further changes to spread the work out across the team a bit better. Some bits I used to be responsible for – but that went elsewhere during this interim period – have come back.
So as of this week, I’m responsible for:
- governance – things like our annual reporting cycle and Spending Review cases (this is the bit that’s come back to me)
- digital delivery – building our new and improved GOV.UK register of trusted digital identity and attribute services (which I kept all along)
- certification – making sure there is a robust process for evaluating the quality of digital identity and attribute services in the market against our trust framework, and also monitoring and enforcing against use of our brand and trust mark (which was an interim thing)
- security, fraud and threat intelligence – drawing in insight from industry and across government to keep the ecosystem and the public safe from threats as the market develops (which was also an interim thing, with a slightly expanded scope now)
That feels like a nice coherent grouping of stuff to me. It’s also a lot of stuff to cover for one lowly Grade 6!
A new scope means the team has been able to consider what we call ourselves and what our team purpose is.
We’ve settled on the Market Oversight and Integrity team as our name.
As for our team purpose: we build and maintain the infrastructure that creates trust in digital identities.
Don’t know if it’ll stick. Might change it. But it’ll do for now.
Long and winding roadmap
A new team shape means revisiting our roadmap too. I’ve been speaking individually to bits of the team this week to update it and plot out the rest of this quarter, the next quarter and then ‘the future’.
I’m starting to feel like it’s coming together!
Towards the end of September, I think I’ll get the team together to do a half-day retro and roadmapping session, to plot out what comes next to really embed this in the team.
I’m hoping that by Christmas I can persuade the rest of the programme to join in this more agile way of working, and people higher up the chain that there’s value in publishing it for everyone to see.
Recruitment
Three of the vacancies that were unblocked last week have been progressing at pace this week.
I’ve managed to delegate recruitment for a new analyst to join us to, well, the analysts. (One fewer job for me to do!)
I’ve piggy-backed on another recruitment to make a job offer to a candidate to fill our content design vacancy. Fingers crossed that she successfully onboards and can join us soon.
And I’ve sent off the forms to start the recruitment for our new security, fraud and threat intelligence policy team lead too.
Progress!
Missing the (Power)Point
In more parochial news, this week there are new corporate templates. Specifically, new PowerPoint templates. This is the fourth time that’s happened in the past 18 months, and it is the fourth time that someone has not correctly created the template. Sigh.
Anyway, I’ve spent time fixing them up so that I, and the rest of the team, could use them properly.
You might think this is a waste of time that is beneath my pay grade. Surely, I, a senior manager, have more important things to be doing? And you may well be right.
But, I would point out two things:
- Templating matters for efficiency. I spent probably half an hour fixing these templates. This half an hour time investment will save me countless hours of repetitively futzing with the formatting in the future.
- Templating matters for consistency. Well constructed templates heavily nudge people into sticking to a format. This kind of visual consistency matters. Some people will tell you that making slides look “nice” is not important. A frivolous diversion. Let the words speak for themselves. Those people are wrong. People say they don’t care about the format, only the content. Those are the same people that ignore the content if the formatting is poor. Consistency helps the (in this case very loud) graphic design fade into the background – so people focus on the content.
So. Busy week! I’m off to have some pasta and a cold glass of white wine on the balcony.