No rest for the wicked

I am, in a word, knackered.

This week I have been having a lot of trouble sleeping. I can get to sleep just fine, but almost every day this week I have woken up, for no apparent reason, between 02:00 and 04:00 – and then the land of nod closes its borders.

A lighter weeknote, then, reflecting a week of fatigue and a compromised ability to throw myself into things quite as rigorously as I might usually attempt to do!

This week at work

Recruitment

We finished interviews for the HEO position in my team this week. We still have half a dozen interviews for an SEO position to do over the next few weeks.

Overall this has been a pretty bumpy recruitment round so far. I might write up some reflections on that separately.

Away Day and roadmapping

We had a whole team away day this week. It was a good opportunity to take stock of where we’ve made good progress last year on delivering our objectives, and to think about how we want to go gangbusters in 2025.

My roadmapping session went well. Or at least, I think it did. We didn’t finish the conversation and this is the first time we’ve tried to do a whole team roadmap, so everyone got assigned some homework. Hopefully we’ll have a roadmap we can be happy with in the next couple of weeks, and then we can start using it in earnest.

Scheme development

Following last week’s certification scheme review, we’ve been working on additional content for our auditor guidance, templates, and scheme requirements. The changes we need to make are quite conceptually complex, so I think we’ll need a couple more weeks to draft them before we can validate them with stakeholders.

Register and registrations

We’ve emailed everyone on our existing list of certified services this week, prompting them to move on to our new digital service. This is step one in a mass badgering that will occur over the next few weeks before we push our new digital service into public beta.

Spending Review and business planning

I’ve looked at more spreadsheets than I would like to have done already this month already; and yet more this week. When will it end?!

(Never. It never ends. Business planning is eternal)

Found interesting

• Nintendo has finally officially revealed the Switch 2 and said precisely nothing about in the process. The trolling continues. There will at least be a new Mario Kart though.
• Ofcom has set out how it expects age assurance to take place under the Online Safety Act.
• You can now play DOOM in a PDF.
• The Institute for Government has published its latest report on the state of the Civil Service. The diversity data is interesting; particularly on LGB+ diversity. Despite the headline figure of there being more LGB+ people than you would expect based on the national averages, it makes the same old mistake of not disaggregating by gender too. We’ve long known LGB+ women are underrepresented compared to LGB+ men.