Week 62: Doing something
I spent 2 days up in Leeds this week as part of our regular team get-togethers. It was a great opportunity to meet some of the newer members of the team for the first time and to reconnect with others.
Among the conversations we had was one about how we can improve our release process. We’d like to find a better balance between testing and assurance and the need to ship smaller changes, more often. This is not something I’m directly involved in, as it mostly affects the developers, but it’s something I can see the impact of.
This is a conversation that’s been had wider across digital prevention services too, with our leadership having set of goal of teams getting to a point of being able to do daily releases. I must admit, before joining the NHS, I had thought this was a given.
One good article on this doing the rounds is Do your approvals processes make it easier to do nothing than to do something? by David Knott, the government’s Chief Technology Officer.
I also remembered reading this from Monzo a few years back: How we deploy to production over 100 times a day, which felt like a relevant example given that banking is a highly regulated full of risk.
Booking speakers
Whilst I was on holiday I got voluntold onto the planning team for our next vaccination digital services all staff away day in late October. These take a lot of effort to organise, but I’ve really valued attending the events in the past, so I don’t mind helping out.
We’ve got a rough plan for the agenda. Feedback from previous events has shown that the bit people most appreciate is hearing from external speakers, so we’ve focused on getting those booked in.
Our idea for one the sessions is having a panel featuring staff representatives from the different settings where NHS vaccinations take place: GPs, pharmacies, hospitals and in schools. It’ll be a great opportunity to hear directly from these users of our digital platforms, and to have a bit of a debate about the differences between these settings.
I’ve got a few of these speakers booked in already, and hope to get the rest confirmed within the next week or so. Then it’ll be time to plan the rest of the day.
NHS Frontend version 10 follow-up
I wrote last week about our publishing of NHS frontend version 10, a big upgrade.
The next step is to encourage and support services to actually upgrade to it.
Whilst in theory it shouldn’t take that long to follow our upgrade guide, in practice there can be all sorts of blockers and other priorities that get in the way.
We’ve mentioned it on various internal calls and Slack channels, and there’s a blog post in the works, but word of mouth counts for a lot too. I had a chance encounter with a developer working on the NHS Learning hub, and so was able to give them some pointers and encourage them to collaborate with other teams on their implementation of the components in the Razor templating language.
With the NHS digital landscape being so broad and widely distributed, it’s unrealistic to expect all the digital services to keep the NHS brand perfectly in sync, but we can try and bring as many services up to date as possible. To this end, we’re setting a 6 month deadline, after which NHS frontend version 9 will no longer be supported.
Looking forward to the first Arsenal WSL match of the season this weekend!