Week 78

We continued our planning work this week. Now that we have a good sense of what we should do next, we took each big ‘feature’, dug into the detail of each one, and wrote rough stories. By doing this, we hope to make the team more resilient: if any unexpected blockers arise on a piece of work, we still have other big things we can pick up.

I also carried on tidying up our team wiki. Confluence is terrible and breaks in bizarre ways. Despite this, all the pages for old features are now gone, and I’ve organised all the things we’re working on into themes of work, giving a stronger narrative to our team. Ideally, this should help limit future work too, because if a feature doesn’t fit into one of the following, then it’s probably not something we should be doing:

• Remove detailed guide categories and policy areas
• Build a complete search index
• Improve the quality of search results
• Make search easier to use
• Simplify navigation across GOV.UK

I’ve had a few conversations this week about the GDS Code Club. It’s about time we get things moving - we held out longer than we planned in the hope we could get some more people signing up to help out, but it hasn’t really happened. I’m fortunate to have been sent the feedback from the pilot of the Cabinet Office Code Club that took place earlier this year, which should help us avoid some easy mistakes.

We continued our work to iterate policies this week. To a group of people from across GOV.UK, I showed the prototypes I made last week and we talked more about what we know about the current policies format and who’s using it (short answer: not much). If you use policies on GOV.UK, we’d like to talk with you, so please do get in touch.