It’s been a bit of a frightful week weather wise with Storm Ciarán, but despite it being a cold and wet day, the Digital team got into the Halloween spirit by having a “spooky” hat day for our weekly meeting.

Digital team with halloween hats

A reminder from us

Another week of scary workloads and deadlines looming, our team has been working hard to keep up with the stream of requests coming in. Additionally, when poor weather or storms like Storm Ciarán are forecast, our website gets a great deal of traction as people come to look up flood warnings in their area, which can lead to an increase in customer feedback and general queries. We’ve been proactive in allocating work out fairly amongst the team and prioritising requests with clear deadlines, to ensure we stay on top of things. As always, to speed up the process and get your request actioned sooner, we ask that you complete the content request form with all the information that is needed to complete your request.

This means a Word document attachment with screenshots and links to show us exactly what you would like changing. Clear instructions make our job a lot easier, so if in doubt, ask a team member to review your request to check that it’s clear enough for someone new to pick up and understand exactly what you’d like updating.

As you can see by the nifty chart below, we currently have 78 tasks outstanding after receiving 3000 tasks, which we hope to clear in the next couple of weeks, but with new jobs being sent in to us all the time, we ask that the requests are made with a reasonable amount of time for us to complete them ahead of the deadline. Sending us things to be published on the same day is not always manageable for us, so please be aware of this when planning when you will contact the Digital Team.

Public Digital’s ‘Show the Thing’

Sam joined Public Digital’s ‘Show the Thing: Indonesia’ session where Juan Kanggrawan, Head of Data Analytics and Digital Products for Jakarta Smart City, shared knowledge and lessons learned from their smart city project.

Pulling together data from 300+ government agencies they are working to be use that data to better able to make better decisions that that benefit society such as:

  • allocating subsidies (benefits) to people who are missing out
  • minimising fraud and error
  • policy analysis – is what the government’s doing improving people’s social and economic status

Their government agencies have different levels of data readiness, with some collecting data using, say, Power BI and others still using paper records. Leadership buy-in is sometimes not there. Data is often messy - and often needs checking.

Juan talked about how they tackled these things including:

  • be sure about the problem you are trying to solve (they started years ago by looking at citizens’ enquiries to government departments)
  • always try to get leadership buy-in
  • if you don’t have buy-in, just do what you know is right and show how it can make a difference when the time is right
  • start small so you can deliver and demonstrate successes
  • know when to push, how hard and adjust your strategy accordingly
  • there will be gaps in your execution – be able to settle them quickly

This was part of the Show the Thing series – you can sign up on Public Digital.

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • Sophie’s been working hard publishing reports on the website and advising people on accessibility and pointing them in the direction of our helpful writing accessible document guide.
  • James has been busy working on the felling licence pages.
  • Service Works published a blog and a recording of Laura, Lucinda and Sam’s session on simplifying permissions with a user-centred approach, on a budget: We are Serviceworks.
  • Shaun has been working on web content for reservoir safety and inspections, as well as content and an application form for water company discharges.

Trick or treat

This week’s fun fact is very on brand for Halloween. Did you know that the song “Monster Mash” was once banned by the BBC.

Massachusetts singer Bobby Pickett wrote the song in 1962 and interestingly, it was put together in less than an hour!

It is fair to say that the Monster Mash is the song of Halloween! It’s spooky but catchy! However, the BBC did not share that opinion. In the same year as its release, the BBC banned it from the airwaves on the grounds that it was “too morbid”.

It made No.1 on the Billboard charts in 1962, however, the offending hit didn’t chart in the UK until 1973 when it rose to No.3.

Good luck getting that out of your head now!