It's been a while since I last blogged about the new Online Services team. There's a lot to report, so this will be the first of a short series of blogs giving an update on progress. This first blog post will cover the key milestones we've passed so far. Subsequent posts will cover how we're transitioning existing activities into the new team and, finally, I’ll say something about our adoption of agile methods for delivery.
In our first 10 weeks after the team was created, we chose to focus our energy on two main areas: developing ideas we’d had for new digital security services and learning how to make the most of our new OFFICIAL accommodation.
Our user research highlighted some potential gaps in the provision of cyber risk management support for departments developing online services. We identified some ways in which we might fill these. For example, we quickly prototyped a virtual community with a small number of users in which participants could ask cyber security risk management questions and obtain answers from CESG experts or others in the community. We’ll blog more about this experiment soon. We also began to explore other ideas and learnt a lot about agile working along the way.
We did much of this development work in our newly-acquired OFFICIAL location. We immediately appreciated the value of having a large space in which we could work collaboratively. Although we are used to open plan environments, we weren’t used to having lots of wall space on which to capture our ideas or the freedom of access to the internet. We found this was a real spur to creative, innovative thought.
As planned, by 8 May, we had been able to develop new ideas and new ways of working. We had identified a number of blockers but had ideas of how to overcome these. We therefore felt confident about continuing into a second stage of activity, running from 11 May to 31 July. For this stage, our goal is to continue the development work on three new ideas and also to successfully transition existing activities in CESG into our team.
1 comment
Comment by Jan H posted on
Alison - thanks for the update. I'm looking forward to the next instalment!