Weeks 115, 116 and 117

Last time, I wrote about how we were expanding our Export Readiness service. So far things are going well. We’ve onboarded almost all of our initial 50 establishments and we’re now in full swing towards opening to everyone.

As part of getting ready to open to everyone, we’ve set up a support helpdesk. There’s now a dedicated phone number for people who need help using the service. (Whilst not a future measure of success, we’ve already had our first call 🎉)

On Wednesday, I joined a webinar hosted by the Australian Public Service Commission as part of the government Digital Profession. The focus of the event was operating models for transformation and I enjoyed sharing a few stories from our travels so far in agricultural trade.

In particular, I spoke about the importance of looking wider than the technology: to focus on the whole service, including the processes and humans that support it, and to join forces with your regulators to find opportunities to reform the regulation and technology in lockstep.

Over the last few years, I’ve often found myself behind the camera rather than in front of it, so it was great to be able to jump back into a panel discussion.

Our team has continued to grow throughout the lockdowns this year but many of our team have yet to meet face-to-face. So it was great this week to be able to bring together all the product managers and leads into the same room.

For this first convening, we focussed on two areas: how we work together as a team-of-teams, and how our individual products fit into the bigger picture. It was great to have both David and Nick drop by too.

Together, we now lead a team of more than 70 digital practitioners and it’s great to focus on how we work together as we continue to grow.