Weeknotes 03/05/2023

Another short week this week, and while we’re loving these long weekends, it does feel like we’re having to cram a lot into our shorter weeks.

A lot of talking and collaborating

Lots of great conversations were facilitated this week. Heledd loves talking to people in the team and outside of the team - especially when everyone is eager to discuss making services work better for users!

But how do you balance all the great collaboration that’s needed to improve our current services, with the work necessary to roll out these updated services?

Welcome Alex!

As we move into May, we welcome a new member of our team. Alex has joined us as the first Product Manager in our Digital Services team. This is an exciting time for us, as we’ve never had a person dedicated to this role before now.

The GDS have a description of what a Product Manager does, but we’re an agile and adaptive bunch, so we’ll see how this role fits into how we work as a team.

Alex knows some of us from working together on the CDPS project with hazardous waste in 2021-22.

We’ve begun introducing Alex to all the stuff we do, think, hope and dream about (which as you can imagine, is rather a lot).

To bring focus and clarity to all the things we’re so excited to share with our new team member, Heledd started a new MS Planner board to start putting of links to various sources for Alex to start to explore, such as:

  • Guidance on how we work
  • Our content handbook
  • Digital strategy
  • A list of the different tools we have
  • Team planning boards - both the requests, and the problem areas to focus boards

I’m sure we’ll add more to it as we go, but Alex can be our guinea pig to share feedback and help make onboarding even easier for all the other people that join our lovely crew on this mission of ours, over the coming months and years!

photo of our onboarding content for new staff

Alex’s first impressions

To capture Alex’s thoughts and first impressions as he joins our team, we sat down for an impromptu interview to understand more about his first week working with the Digital Team.

photo of alex, our new product manager

Alex: “I have been lucky enough to start in the team on Tuesday so I am only 4 days in, but I wanted to introduce myself and share my first impressions here in the week notes.”

Why did you want to join the team?

Alex: “I applied for this role because I really enjoyed my experience working in partnership with CDPS on the recent Natural Resources Wales’ Hazardous Waste discovery and alpha project. I have worked with some of the team already Sam, James, Lucinda, Heledd and quickly realised that this would be a great team to be a part of.

“I was impressed at the impact and value of iterative design and the use of prototypes with users, and I wanted the opportunity to experience it on other projects.

“I have long been an advocate for putting users’ needs as a top priority due to many years working in utilities, a customer facing environment. I have worked closely with call centres and field operatives and have direct experience of difficulties faced by internal and external users and how systems can both remove and create these difficulties.”

What are you most looking forward to?

Alex: “I am really looking forward to getting to know everyone on the Digital Team. I will be booking in one-to-ones with everyone over the next week, and although virtual meetings are not as good as face-to-face, I am sure we will have plenty to talk about.

“The NRW website covers such a broad and interesting range of services. I can already see the potential for transformative changes, and I am really looking forward to being a part of that journey.

“In a previous life (Utilities) we used customer feedback, number of contacts, complaints and Net Promoter Score (NPS) to help focus where our attention should be focused. After a project we would review the metrics to evaluate if our improvements were having a positive impact. I am really looking forward to working closely with the team and SMEs to put our users’ needs first.”

What have you learnt over your first few days?

Alex: “The team is clearly passionate about what they do! It has been great to join an environment where everybody appears to share the same values and vision for the future.

“There is lots to do, as I mentioned earlier, we cover so much content and services, some are already fairly good, while others need work. However continuous improvement is ingrained in my work style, so the job is never really done.

What is something you were surprised about since joining our team?

Alex: “The Digital Team covers more than people may be aware of! From my first few days, it is clear that the team are delivering on a wide variety of work, from creating and updating existing content to creating new, accessible content that serves a user’s needs.

“I am really looking forward to shouting about the great things we do here and the things we will do together.”

Services - the story so far…

Back in 2021, James started to pull together a list of services. He spent quite a lot of time with others in the team trying to describe the goals that different users have.

Some of us attended various training sessions with Lou Downe’s School of Good Services, which helped develop our thinking in this field. We also had input from CDPS, who were also attempting to pull a list together as part of the digital landscape for Wales work.

There is also lots of good stuff about this in the GDS Service Manual, and we’ve joined lots of webinars and meet-ups to hear about how others have approached this over the years.

There are several definitions of a service, but we keep referring back to this:

We remember presenting this initial list to colleagues on the Digital Governance Board. There was a positive reaction, but looking back, perhaps the conditions weren’t quite right for us to take it further at the time. 

This need for a list of services highlighted was then highlighted as an action in our Digital Strategy. Everyone agreed that if we were to work to the service standards, design services for users, we needed to know what our services are.

our digital strategy committments

Around the same time, our colleagues in the Customer Experience Team were working with Mima to start mapping customer journeys, and doing brilliant work to build awareness around how people interact with our services.

By September 2022, a greater number of people within the organisation were talking about service design. By this point there was greater understanding and agreement about how important this list of services was - and Mima picked up the task of creating a full list of NRW services.

Outside of our organisation, there are lots of people in Wales having similar discussions. Jo from WeAreService works shared a really useful crib-sheet, based on some of most current standards and approaches.

Last week, Heledd, James and Sam spent two days in the Cardiff Office with Mima, and colleagues in the Customer Experience team. It was really great to get together, and we achieved a lot.

To sum up Heledd’s reflections:

“This stuff is really hard, draining work. Stepping back from things for some months means we can come back with a different perspective - and get excited again.

“How we talk and describe services within our organisation, needs to be consistent with how others do it - we look forward to the days of starting to look at cross-organisational services.”

This, which popped up in Heledd’s Linkedin timeline nicely summed up:

designing public services isn't a sprint, but rather a torch relay ultramarathon

Next steps - We discussed some next steps and Mima have already taken on some of our feedback, and we’re also keen to talk more as a team about how this could help us think about user needs for our website.

What do we work on…?

What we work we do as a team mainly comes via these two routes:

  • SME knows about something new or a change e.g. WG policy update
  • The Digital Services team sees opportunity for improvement from data (call centre, analytics, user research, feedback).

Now that we’ve established clearer processes for how we publish content on the website, Heledd is keen to support the team in focussing more time on where we can have the biggest impact.

We have (another) Mural space where we’ve identified:

  • areas where we have evidence of problems for uses
  • areas we’re confident we can make better (within 3-6 months)
  • areas we can make better use of the tools we currently have to deliver improvements to services
  • areas that we feel could demonstrate value of user-centred design, and help gain wider support
  • areas where we feel that we have existing support to enable delivery

This will continue to evolve, especially now that Alex has joined us, and as the plan for digital and customer transformation progresses.

Personas - and revisiting a stash from the days of print

In yet more conversations this week with colleagues. Heledd joined a chat with Curig, Gemma and Mark (from the Org Development team) to talk about looking at personas, to help us describe user needs for people working for NRW. This was an initial chat, and we chatted about the importance of gathering all the historical evidence and examples.

The following morning Heledd then went to the box under her desk and dug out this. Guess when this was published?

an old poster resource

January 2007. Over 16 years later, and the narrative wouldn’t look out of place on a blog post today, in 2023.

Evidence of how much effort and work has gone in for a long time, to try and make our website work for the people who matter - pretty obvious really. But, still, here we all are.

#IStillBelieveInDigitalTransformation

we even found an old cd rom!

Oh, and there are several other historical publications from the days of paper publishing if anyone would like to delve deeper - such as this CD-rom of what to do after a flood.

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • The entire team (plus Diane) listened with great interest to the latest update about the work to help people do something on NRW land.

  • Heledd and Sophie have continued to update the about us section, this week focusing on the publication scheme webpage to ensure it features relevant, up-to-date content in line with ICO regulations. We even had some lovely feedback from Miriam, who works in the Customer Hub team.

  • Sophie has met with various members of NRW to discuss the need for specific Intranet content to support officers in conducting their inspection work. Working together to ensure user needs are at the focus of our content creation will allow for more useful content that meets specific needs for the target audience.

  • Kim has organised translations of amended sections of the waste permit applications and updated these mammoth forms with the attention to detail they need.

  • Sam’s been working with the waste policy team on updating the standard rules for the waste page, including grouping them under more user-focused headings like ‘vehicle dismantling’ instead of ‘using’, ‘treating’ and ‘storing’. This will be important for when the new permit applications are published.

  • Kim and Sam continue working together quietly tweaking, checking and testing the new waste permit forms and content so that they work for users and the permitting team (It’s a super big piece of work). They’re trying not to let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of good, remembering that it will be a huge improvement on the current process for users.

  • Sam’s created a new group heading for the waste permitting page to help users scan the content more easily.

  • Kim and Sophie have been reviewing minutes from different meeting groups to ensure the content is accessible ahead of going live on the website.

  • Owain, Kim and Sophie also discussed the massive job of removing any instances of ‘span’ from the website, and began brainstorming ideas to accomplish this.

  • Kim has been in the Intranet trenches this week, updating so many different areas and sending copy over to translation to ensure users have an equal experience regardless of the language they access our services with.

  • Sophie has continued putting blog posts live ahead of newsletters going out in the middle of May.

  • Sam met with a waste policy SME on how to redact information from new permit applications since applications will be published on the public register.

  • Sam introduced more accessible links on the environmental permitting guidance page.

  • Phil has been working his way through the forestry content. There are three main content pages left to check, and one form to improve. It will be lovely to get all the content uploaded to the test site and for us to finally make it all live. This will then complete this phase of the work. Next, we will move onto the felling licence content and form and start improving that area of our website.

  • The team’s planner board’s getting a tidy up to help us spot new content requests more easily - thanks to Kim for a fab heads-up!

Hope you all have a wonderful long weekend!