Happy Friday! Can you believe it’s nearly October!?

A team away day in Shrewsbury…

This week our team was lucky enough to spend the night in Shrewsbury for a team away day. It was a great chance to come together as a team and look to the future and brainstorm new ways of working collaboratively.

Shrewsbury buildings and the River Severn

Shrewsbury is an old town, reportedly started in 700AD. With the same mediaeval street plan and over 600 listed buildings, there was plenty to stop and admire. The sun was even shining for some of the trip - lucky us!

Our team’s away day was held at the Shropshire Wildlife Trust , an organisation campaigning for a wilder future and nature’s recovery. They offered a great co-working space surrounded by a beautiful garden filled with flowers, herbs and edible fruits. We got to know new members of our team better and get together in the same room and plan ahead. Meeting in person like this provides us with invaluable face-to-face time, where we can brainstorm and bounce ideas off one another in a way that can sometimes be difficult through screens alone.

After a busy day of discussion and collaboration, our team headed to the Dough and Oil for tasty pizza and £4 cocktails! We had a great time and thankfully we all survived a night in one of the UK’s most haunted hotels, the Prince Rupert Hotel. It is the oldest hotel in Shrewsbury and it is surrounded by a structure of Tudor and Georgian architecture and design.

Wildlife trust garden and Shrewsbury pizza

According to Haunted Rooms, “The Prince Rupert Hotel is said to be haunted by a lot of spirits. Shrewsbury also has a reputation of being one of the most haunted towns in Great Britain. Its dark corners, mediaeval streets and old buildings seem to lend the credence to lure surrounding spectres and ghostly apparitions tied to the hotel. There are more than 500 stories of spectres in the town of Shrewsbury.”

“One of the famous encounters is that of one of the directors of the movie “A Christmas Carol”. He was filming in Shrewsbury and stayed at the hotel, whilst at the hotel, he saw a ghostly male figure which disappeared through a wall in the hall. Pillows have also been taken from guests and some of the guests themselves have even captured the apparitions on camera.”

Thankfully, we can report that very minimal haunted happenings took place during our stay!

Next steps with outputs from team away day

Our goals for the team away day included:

  • Focus on how we improve and manage prioritisation as a tool
  • Communicating our work
  • Getting to know each other, how we work as a team

Massive thanks to Alex and Paul for planning, and the whole team for getting stuck into the activities, which included:

  • Manual of me activity
  • Discovering and discussing our strengths - similarities and differences
  • Backlog review - what’s in our day to day ‘planner’ verses our ‘Jira’ / project work
  • Blockers to getting work done
  • Update about transformation, and big picture stuff from Catrin and Diane.

Digital team ideas

We worked through examples of what work we felt was ‘day-to-day planner’, and what felt like things to add to our new Jira backlog - which is usually more complex, needs user research or more investigation and prioritisation before we crack on with it.

Heledd, Alex and Paul caught up on Friday morning about next steps, and making sure we assign, prioritise, action and track all the great stuff collated over the last two days.

Huge thanks to Naomi Evans, who sorted out all the logistics for the two day meeting and to Andrew for keeping the Digital ship afloat whilst the rest of us were in Shrewsbury.

LocalGov Drupal

On Tuesday, Heledd and Alex joined a webinar about LocalGov Drupal.

LocalGov Drupal is an open-source (free) component type website builder. It’s built and maintained by a community of developers, content designers and digital leaders from local councils across the UK.

Many of the problems, challenges and types of services delivered by local government are similar to NRW’s, so it was interesting to see how LocalGov Drupal was addressing some of those, and helping teams like ours.

Better tools and publishing platforms are something we’re keen to explore more in the near future. We’re excited by the potential to explore with LocalGov Drupal and other component type tools such as Gov.forms.

The session was recorded and available to watch on Youtube: Building Public Sector Websites Effectively with LocalGov Drupal

Other bits we’ve been working on:

  • Sophie’s been mocking up a long term flooding investment report as a HTML webpage on our test site, so it can be reviewed by various key parties and the findings can be accessed by users to the Natural Resources Wales website.
  • Sam and Kim have been working on publishing the content strategy.
  • Iboxes, iboxes, iboxes! Lots of days out pages and projects have been updated this week, with new messages to visitors in the local area. Keep an eye out for updated information at the top of your favourite Days Out pages.
  • We’ve also been removing out of date content from the website, a long-term project of ours. If you notice information that is no longer correct, please let us know by submitting a content request form so we can update our website as needed.
  • Sophie has continued to review a number of documents and share feedback to different SMEs with guidance for creating accessible content. You can find more information by reading through our writing accessible documents guidance.
  • Phil has been trying to see the wood from the trees with the tree felling licence project. Although things haven’t been easy, we now seem to be moving in the right direction

Fun fact Friday

As we move into Autumn, people born in this season live longer!

Would you believe it?

A study in the Journal of Aging Research found that babies born during the autumn months are more likely to live to 100 than those born during the rest of the year. Their study found that 30 % of US centenarians born during 1880-1895 were born in the Autumn months.