We’ve slightly restructured the GDS GOV.UK team. This means that, if you’re a department or agency publishing to GOV.UK, from today you may see a few new faces. This blogpost sets out what’s changing, and why.
2014: a big year for GOV.UK
This year, we will move dozens more government websites - including HMRC - on to GOV.UK, which will bring it closer to being the single government domain.
During the last few weeks, we’ve been looking in detail at the work required to enable us to achieve this transition.
We know already that the user needs facing these agencies can be quite different to those served by our existing GOV.UK formats and tools.
So we’re going to need to do a significant amount of platform development - making improvements to formats, search and navigation as well as introducing new tools and applications to support the publishing of new content types.
This development work is our major priority over the next 4 to 6 months, so we're re-structuring our existing teams to deliver it.
What’s changing from today
First, a new project team will focus on the work of getting GOV.UK ready for transition - and in particular, on the specialist needs of groups of people such as teachers, lawyers and industry. This team will be led by Neil Williams.
We’re also changing how we manage the day to day work of GOV.UK, replacing the separate ‘mainstream’ and ‘department and policy’ product teams with new teams with responsibility for features right across GOV.UK.
These are:
- a content team with responsibility across GOV.UK content - led by Sarah Richards
- a team with responsibility for ensuring all of our format and tools meet the needs of end users - led by Roo Reynolds
- a team to support and develop all of the publishing tools and platform services which meet the needs of internal publishers - led by Mark Sheldon
As always, if you have any support requests then just raise them via Zendesk and they’ll find their way to the right place.
Or if you’re in an organisation transitioning to GOV.UK, your transition manager remains your first port of call.
What next
We’ll be talking to the GOV.UK steering group in the next week or so in more detail about our strategic direction for 2014 to 2015 - and then sharing this more widely.
In the meantime, do let me know if anything with our new set-up is causing you confusion.
