Briefer weeknotes for a shorter week

It’s Easter, so it’s quieter around NRW.

We’ve had fewer content requests and there’s generally less ‘noise’. It’s good to have some breathing space.

Sgwrs

We’ve been having our final, recorded check-in with Heledd, our manager. These are called ‘Sgwrs’ - ‘conversation’ in English.

We chat all openly and regularly with Heledd and as a team. But it’s good to, more formally, look back on the last year and the priorities we had set for ourselves. Sometimes we’re able to complete what we planned. Often work gets deprioritised by the requestor or replaced by something urgent. We’re an agile bunch, so adapt to the circumstances, but…

What’s important?

We’ve been talking in our team meeting this week about how and what we prioritise. How can a small digital services team add the most value in an organisation of 2400 staff? How can we be given the space to work on solving problems for users? How do we deal with competing, and sometimes conflicting, demands? How do we let go of some things? No doubt we’ll be talking more about all this with our soon-to-join-us delivery manager and product manager. Exciting!

Permitting service

Shaun, Sam, Andrew and Kim are still working away on new forms and content for the permitting service as mentioned in last week’s weeknotes.

Creating a Welsh version of the form in the form builder is straightforward but intense, as it has to be correct. And these forms are long, with lots of skip logic to route users down the right path.

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Sam and Kim are creating a publishing checklist to help quality check the content and forms before waste applications and content goes live:

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What and how we publish on the NRW website

Heledd did a show and tell for staff on the content and publishing manual covering:

  • our team roles
  • what we publish (and don’t publish)
  • our principles for good content
  • our style guide and how we write for the web guidance
  • how colleagues can access data about user behaviour
  • how staff can find and use the content request form

Other stuff we’ve been doing

  • James has been arranging user interviews for the forestry IA
  • Laura has been planning for a meeting with comms on Umbraco (CMS) publishing best practice
  • Laura, Lucinda and Sam have been prepping for a show and tell next week on their ‘permission to do something on NRW land’ work
  • Soph, Kim and Lucinda’s work on the about us section continues apace, fixing content accessibility fails along the way
  • Shaun, Lucinda and Heledd joined a CDPS networking event in Anglesey
  • Phil has finally managed to get the new forestry structure into the test site, ready for testing with our wonderful subject matter experts. We will start to add the new content to the test site next week, egg-citing times

Happy Easter!