Week 43

Eep, it’s been busy this week.

On User Needs, we finished our assurance and we got the okay to go live, which is great news. We’re starting to give access to some other people at GDS who are working on the transition. We’ve added a label to the header to mark it as ‘beta’. I spent a bit of time with Paul to plan a new round of user testing, and David and I have wrapped up the duplicate needs spike, giving us some new stories to get the work done. I’ve been doing some initial work to integrate Maslow needs with the Whitehall app. The first step has been to add the 40 'generic’ user needs for different formats on the Departments & Policy section of GOV.UK.

The User Needs project is going to take a pause in a couple of sprints time. This is so that we can focus on some of the other pieces of GOV.UK work which is higher priority at the moment. Stuart is going to continue manning the fort whilst David and I work on other things.

I went to ThingMonk on Monday afternoon and Tuesday. It was a conference about the Internet of Things, hosted by James Governor. I really enjoyed the talks, in particular those by Patrick Bergel and Tom Taylor. I took notes for the talks from the first half of the day on Tuesday, so I will write them up properly when I get chance.

On Wednesday, I attended a day-long training session run by Civil Service Learning about recruitment and selection. I’ve helped out with some informal interviews for potential contractors before, but until now I’ve not been on panels for any competency-based interviews. I found the training fascinating, as there’s so much you need to consider throughout the whole process. The day finished with some mock improv interviews between us all, which were rather funny.

And finally, this afternoon, with the help of Ben, Khadejah and many kind folk at GDS who donated some money, I put up a Christmas tree by our purple sofas. It feels quite festive now!