It passed me by that it was our first anniversary two weeks ago. It’s been quite the year, and although it feels like not a lot has happened over the last week, I’m not sure that any of us would have forecast the progress we have made in the last 54 weeks. I remember a workshop earlier this year, thinking that we had so much to do; it would be interesting to run that again to see how much we’ve moved on.
Although it’s good that we’ve been able to do so much for colleagues across the council, what I’m most proud of is the team we’ve built. Actually agile, focusing on value, flat, and dedicated to learning. We have a camaraderie that has sustained us, a culture that is healthy and welcoming. Long may this last.
Over this last week, the team has got some good stuff done, mostly to support other teams. We’ve built a VPN to connect to Servelec’s back end to enable a data migration; built some EC2s; set up networking for Social Care Finance; and are investigating ways to enable colleagues in HR to receive data from our payroll provider.
Some of the other work is being used as a catalyst, or maybe a test bed, for things we knew we’d need to do in future anyway. For example, we know that external services will need ingress access to our environment, so we have used requests from the Academy application manager and from the Data Platform team to work out how best to do this in a secure way, and how to automate it.
There’s been some progress on account migrations. The GIS apps are talking to each other but we need to set up a connection to the Addresses API as the final step. We’ve agreed a way forward on the Housing accounts with the Housing Finance team as well, and that should be unblocked early next week. Progress on the websites migrations has also come on strongly, with an AMI built in Packer and an ALB configured. We’ll migrate the first site in the staging environment shortly, to make sure it all works as expected.
