It’s been another busy week in the land of Digital with lots of planning and reflective (for completed projects) meetings taking place to form part of our future work.

Things we’ve been involved this week:

  • The team shared lots of useful feedback and responses about the Strategic Review of Charging (SROC) work in a retrospective this week. For users, SROC meant the design and launch of several new digital permit applications, and a lot of new web content.
  • Heledd joined a trio writing session to finalise a chapter of a new book about designing bilingual services. Thanks to Curig and Garmon for their feedback (and brilliant edits). The book will be launched at an event with Jeremy Miles MS, Minister for Education and Welsh Language at the Eisteddfod in August.
  • Sam has been looking at GOV.UK Pay and she and Lucinda joined an excellent GOV.UK demo this week. We learned a bit more about the no code (payment link) option versus the API version.
  • Paul from our team set up a Smart Survey scoping meeting with Andrew, Lucinda, Alex and Phil to look into better ways of working. We discussed how we could make improvements to our new Smart Survey forms but, also, we continue to ensure the data we keep on Smart Survey conforms with GDPR law and is removed after a set period of time. We will meet regularly to take this valuable work forward.
  • Lucinda, Alex, Kim and Andrew met to discuss and refresh themselves on how to create Google Analytics dashboards for NRW web pages. We discovered what the newly named ‘Looker Studio’ (previously ‘Data Studio) could do and played around with different scenarios to achieve meaningful web stats.
  • Phil has started the next phase of the woodlands and forests work. He has started creating the ‘Amend a felling licence’ form.
  • Andrew has completed ‘Do I need a medium combustion plant (MCP) and/or specified generator permit?’ with SME Claire Watts and Shaun - the form is designed to help our users answer certain questions to establish if they need to actually fill out the recently completed (and very large) MCP application forms. A huge win for our users if they don’t need to spend time completing unnecessary forms.
  • Catrin joined us to discuss the recent staff survey results and the corporate plan. We had the opportunity to reflect on what’s going well, what we can do more of as a team, and what we need to do better as an organisation.
  • As a team, we’re always cautious of jumping into technology before understanding the problem that needs to be solved. But with so many people talking about AI, some of us are catching up on the recording of the a webinar organised by CDPS with the Alan Turing Institute to learn more about opportunities for the public sector to make better use of technology.

A Mooving Friday Fun Fact Gurtrude

Did you know a cow has four stomachs? It’s a myth really – if you want to be pedantic, (and we do), technically, our four-hooved, bovine friends only have one stomach but it’s split into four distinctly separate compartments:

1. the rumen, 2. the reticulum, 3. the omasum, and 4. the abomasum.

Each of these has a different role to play in the efficient digestion of food and what comes out the other end.