It’s been a sweltering week of work so we hope you’ve all been keeping cool if you’re not on your holidays just yet. If only we could work from a paddling pool in the garden…time for NRW to invest in waterproof laptops maybe?

cartoon hot dog in flames

Content freeze but we’re still hot hot hot

The digital team continues to shine. We have a content freeze on our website until 17 July 2023 while we upgrade our CMS. Hopefully this will give us a bit of breathing space to focus on the other bits of our work.

The message about the content freeze is a bit slow getting out so we’re still getting quite a lot of requests. We’re spending quite a bit of time talking to people about what can go on during the freeze and figuring out if their request can wait. It’s not always comfortable asking someone if their work can wait. Most people have been pretty understanding and it’ll all be worth it when we have a more secure site.

Scorchio!

Shaun is working on web-pages for medium combustion plant permits (burning things to generate heat and/or energy). New legislation coming into force will require anyone with a boiler, engine or turbine between 5 and 20 MWth to apply for a permit and carry out numerous assessments including air quality modelling. Shaun and Andrew decided to split the application into two separate forms, one for simpler stand-alone boilers and one for larger or more complex medium combustion plants and specified generators in the hope that most people will be able to apply using the simpler web-content and form. We’re trio writing with Claire the subject matter expert and making great progress to meet the deadline.

Burning to learn

As part of the ‘Service Design in Practice’ course that James and Lucinda are taking part in at the moment, Heledd joined a ‘sponsor check in’.

This was a good opportunity to meet other sponsors. We had an update on how things are going from Jo and Ffion (the course leads), and an overview of the ‘work-base challenge’ that they’re starting (more about this in future posts!). The feedback from the 11 people from NRW that have either completed or started the course, is positive. People are learning a lot - both on the theory, and the practical side.

The course is also helping to raise awareness of the value of service design in our organisation and Welsh Government. After the session, Heledd reflected on how this (fairly intense) course is part of a wide range for developing skills and capability - one of the missions in NRW’s Digital strategy. There are lots of ways that people learn and develop their skills and knowledge to design better services.

These include:

  • having a culture of sharing knowledge and experience in the team
  • always being open to learn from others
  • trying new things, and learning from what goes well (and not so well)
  • joining and contributing to communities of practice and talking to people doing similar roles in other organisation
  • learning as part of blended project teams working alongside other delivery partners - such as CDPS, DXW, and colleagues in ICT with BJSS.
  • events – such as GovCamp Cymru
  • show and tells, webinars and online learning
  • reading other people’s blogs, weeknotes
  • formal and accredited learning programmes
  • books, lots of books
  • apprentices
  • mentors

Cooling down with the Net Zero project

Heledd and Lucinda joined a kick-off meeting with the NRW Net Zero project. The team are trying to capture the size of NRW’s whole carbon footprint.

There’s a lot going on in this space, so it was great to bring people together to start with, and understand what’s already happening in this area – in NRW, in Wales, and beyond! Colleagues in ICT have access to some interesting tools as part of the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. It sounds like it’ll help give a good indication of the size of the carbon footprint, based on all the data that’s hosted on the azure cloud.

Heledd is helping link NRW colleagues with others in the Welsh Public sector, who we may be able to collaborate with following the Tech Net Zero discovery report Centre for Digital Public Services-cdps.wales.

Lucinda is signed up to go to a Defra-led meetup in July about “Principles for designing lower environmentally impacting services” - and will share what comes from that with the group. It’s a nice informal group, and for now we’ve committed to meet on a fortnightly basis to share what we’re finding out in our individual areas.

Other hot things we’re doing:

  • Sophie has been focusing on the Intranet, working to update pages and send content across for translation. Our backlog of reports that need accessibility checks is slowly shrinking, but every day new ones come in so staying on top of this is ever the challenge. You can save us time and get your request published sooner by reviewing our guidance for accessible documents to fix any accessibility errors and double checking your request before you send it in to us.
  • Lucinda, Sam and Laura have been preparing to hold another show and tell (this time to management people) about the new ‘check if you are allowed to use the land we manage’ service. We will let you know how it goes next week!
  • James and Heledd attended the Building Bilingual Services Community of Practice session with the Department for Work and Pensions, who talked about their work and learnings from creating the universal credit online service in Welsh. It was also to see a little demo of how they use Jira to manage their workflow.