First week at IPO

A weeknote starting 1 September 2025.

After a couple of unplanned weeks off inbetween contracts (I blogged about week 1, but not week 2) this was my first week at the Intellectual Property Office (IPO).

Back in Newport

I went to their office on my first day (Monday) to join some onboarding sessions, meet my manager and pickup my IT kit. The onboarding was very well organised, and I'm joining with a few others, as a large phase of transformation work is kicking off. So it feels like an exciting time to join.

It was strange being back in Newport. IPO's offices are right next door to ONS (Office for National Statistics) and share some of the same facilities, like the canteen. I was getting flashbacks from my years working at ONS. Hopefully I'll bump into a few old faces.

For the rest of the week I worked from home, meeting some of the designers I'll be working with, as well as getting group intros with some of the product and delivery people we'll be working with.

A few weeks before the discovery kicks off

There are a few weeks to go before the new discovery phase of work kicks off. So we've got some time to learn about what happened in the last discovery, alpha and beta phases.

There are a few different workstreams that make up the new phase, so we are finding out about which bit we'll be assigned to. Some are in a continuous improvement phase, whilst others need more transformational work.

As is often the case, it sounds like part of the balance will be getting to grips with the products and services we've been assigned to, whilst also staying linked up across the programme to ensure the service as a whole feels cohesive to end users.

It feels like the organisation has done a lot of hard work already, restructuring teams around services.

I'm looking forward to learning more next week!

Running update

I ran 15K this morning, my longest run so far. It's roughly were I want to be in my training to run in the Cardiff Half in a month's time.