Weeks 97 and 98

Still in lockdown in Sydney. One Teams call blurs into another, and one week has blurred into the next. So here’s some bumper week notes for the fortnight.

  • We’ve welcomed more people to our team over the last two weeks. Felicity has joined us from the Digital Transformation Agency to lead the new End-to-end service team – an ongoing team to be the steward of the whole user journey across our regulatory teams and our digital services. Chris has also joined the team as a senior service designer.

    Julian has joined us from the DTA as our Content Lead, building our content design maturity in our teams. Gabby has joined us from New South Wales as our Community Lead, helping our teams to talk in the open about their work. (In related news: we are in the final steps to set up a blog, which is exciting.)

  • The private beta is going well. All of our trial participants have now used the service at least once, and one user has used it three times so far. The team have been interviewing our participants to get feedback about what is (and isn’t) working. We’ve also launched the private beta of our Export Intelligence service, starting with a dashboard for meat processing plants to see a benchmarked view of their hygiene performance data.

  • We’ve all been doing a lot of work on “what’s next” in the past two weeks. All of our teams now have roadmaps for at least the next 3 months, with most now looking towards 12 months. We’ve been able to involve our senior colleagues in the regulatory areas in shaping and prioritising the roadmap, which is great.

  • In addition to this, we’ve been working with our regulatory areas to find people who could join our teams to become product managers and subject matter experts. I’m really excited about this. Over the years, I’ve really enjoyed helping people without any prior digital experience take the leap into product management roles. I think we’re going to have a great cohort over the next few months.

  • We had a team celebration on Thursday, giving everyone a well-earned pat on the back for the June 30 releases. It’s the first time we’ve come together as a whole team, albeit remotely in the circumstances. It was great to look back at how much we’ve grown – more than 40 people have joined the branch since March – and a good opportunity to look forward: our next phase is a bit like the “difficult second album” as we need to scale up and find a pace that we can sustain for years to come.

  • Finally, it was good to join a couple of online events in the past week. The first was a panel discussion held by the Institute for Government in London on how Australian politics is influencing the political debate in the UK. The second was a ‘demo day’ held by Bondi Labs which showcased the work being done across the agricultural industry in remote auditing, which is a big opportunity in a post-pandemic world.

As lockdown stretches on, I’m off to make another cup of tea.