Firstly, a huge and well-deserved congratulations to Lucinda and James who both completed the Service Design in Practice course this week. It’s an intensive, detailed course, requiring dedication and commitment and not a little travelling for Lucinda. Their knowledge and passion will be invaluable as NRW endeavours to transform its services.

Show and tell for the Service Design in Practice cohort

alt text

On Tuesday, we gathered in a room to hear about the great work that the two teams had done over the last 6 months. Heledd’s reflections:

  • The blended team of NRW, Welsh Government, and other public sector people working together as part of the project brought extra perspectives that helped challenge assumptions.
  • Highlighted how similar the services carried out by different public bodies are – and the benefit of sharing and collaborative working to help join-up experiences for users.
  • Their creative narrative and approach to the presentation brought their learning journeys and the user journeys they’d begun to uncover to life! James’ team even wrote a poem about their journey with the licences for fishers (Heledd won Freddos for guessing the 22 fish puns in it). Lucinda’s team delivered the presentation with a game of pass the parcel, and a journey through their Mural.
  • Finding, recruiting and approval for incentives for user research was a challenge – one we’ve seen in some other areas. We know we need to do more user research, but it’s hard work on all sides to find the right people – who are busy with their lives and businesses. Incentives feel like a small investment at the beginning, that has a great return on investment later.
  • Now - looking forward to how we progress - enthusiasm from Lisa and Eirian in regulation to continue working with us in Digital on more user research and developing the service blueprint for ‘permits for building something’.

Re-grouping around pain-points and opportunities for transformation

On Wednesday Heledd joined a session with colleagues from Regulation, the NRW Transformation team and a team from Deloitte, who are working with them on this.

It was a chance to take a fresh look at the biggest challenges and opportunities.

There’s a huge opportunity to reduce risk, improve services for users, and lower development cost – by bringing digital, technical, data and subject matter specialists together around the same problems for users, as part of Business Transformation.

We’re looking forward to sharing more about our work in Digital with the team, and work closer as part of any future multidisciplinary teams.

Online payments for horse riding

Laura and Alex had a positive meeting with finance colleagues about taking online payment for horse riding permits through GOV.UK Pay. This will be the first time we’ve used it in a service for users. Exciting.

One GOV.UK Pay thing we have to get right is our service name and description. This is important because the information appears in several places:

  • payment screens
  • template payment and refund confirmation emails
  • dashboard for staff so they can select the right service

Sam and Laura had long chats this week to get this right on the English side. Our initial phrasing worked for internal dashboard users, but made the emails to users look a bit spammy. We got there eventually!

We’re meeting our translation team colleague next week to talk through how this can work in Welsh.

Bits and pieces

It was a week of bits and pieces for Shaun with amendments to the silage and slurry web content, replacing the OPRA spreadsheet (now macros-free), a couple of forms (water abstraction pre-app and surrendering a water discharge permit), whilst starting work on a large piece on complying with an intensive farming environmental permit.

Cockles

James met Welsh Government colleagues to agree how to better signpost overlapping content about cockle gathering between our websites.

He’s also been advising about how to make our replacement metadata service comply with our Welsh language and web accessibility requirements.

Attachments and accessibility

We publish some documents on our website and by law, these must be accessible.

This week, our team has been working hard to produce an accessible template for teams across the organisation to log minutes and meeting actions in an accessible format. We’ve been rebuilding tables, updating colours, adding keys and removing footnotes to ensure our new template allows all users to access and understand the content.

We ask that colleagues follow our writing accessible documents guidelines to help ensure their request for content to be published meets the deadline.

It’s Shrewsbury time

Our intrepid team is meeting in Shrewsbury next week and Paul, Alex and Heledd have been preparing sessions for an interesting couple of days.

Train disruptions and ghosts won’t hold us back.

Fun fact Friday

It’s believed that a ghost of part of a chicken wanders around Pond Square in Highgate, London. This, ahem, fowl apparition is thanks to Sir Francis Bacon, who wanted to test his theory that meat could be kept from going off by keeping it cold. In 1626, he stuffed the chicken with snow and he himself, caught a chill and passed away. The chicken’s ghost, meanwhile, is reported to have been seen flapping around the square.

Weekend wellbeing

The only way to make sense out of change is to plunge into it, move with it, and join the dance – Alan Watts