Weeks 104, 105 and 106

It’s been a few weeks (sorry).

  • First things first, I’m very excited that our Capability team have published the first edition of our Service Delivery Handbook. It’s aimed at two audiences: people from our regulatory teams who are new to working in digital teams, and seasoned digital practitioners who are joining us in the department for the first time. It’s an early release and it will expand and evolve along with our teams.

    It talks about how we deliver — from our values and strategy to how we structure our teams and how we apply the service design and delivery process. We also have our own ‘words to avoid’ list.

    We’ve borrowed a lot from the people who have come before us, whether the DTA, GDS or elsewhere. Likewise, we’re publishing it in the open in the hope that other teams may find it helpful in the future too. (You can find the code on GitHub).

  • Another big milestone this week is that our Export Profile team have successfully connected our single export account to the whole-of-government Digital Identity platform. This means that our users will be able to prove who they are — and the businesses they can act on behalf of — using a variety of different identity providers, including myGovID and Australia Post.

    At our showcase on Friday, we had a great demo of it in action. In the next week or so, we’ll be releasing this to the participants of our existing private beta. We’ll go live to everyone in public beta later this year.

  • Last time, I talked about some of the challenges in scaling our Export Readiness private beta. Since then, we’ve made some good progress on dealing with the legacy system that sits behind-the-scenes. We now have an interim fix on the cards to allow us to scale up, and a long-term plan to get rid of the old system entirely.

    We’re also working to improve the experience for our staff who review and process the applications we receive — and this week, the team have been testing prototypes of a new workflow tool with our staff.

    Depending on which commodities you export, an application to change the details of an export establishment is often sent to multiple different teams across the department before we can make a decision. A digital workflow for this process will save us a lot of time and make the steps more visible to our staff and our users.

  • Since we couldn’t celebrate in person, we’ve sent out mission patches (plus some bonus chocolate) to everyone who worked on our first release of the Export Service on 30 June. Tracey’s already received one and has shared a photo in her weeknotes.

  • The folks at Public Digital this week released a 2nd edition of their book on digital transformation, with a focus on how digital teams have responded to the pandemic. It was nice to see the NSW Digital Restart Fund highlighted as a case study.

  • As of this week, I’m fully jabbed. 💪

Finally, here’s a photo of the rainbow lorikeets that I’ve been feeding between Teams calls: