Weeknotes 22/12/2023

The mulled wine is brewing, the presents are wrapped, the Christmas music is blasting and Santa is making his list and checking it twice…. As you can probably tell, we’re all very much looking forward to Christmas in the Digital Team. Here’s what we’ve been up to this week…

It’s officially winter!

Today is the first official day of winter, and you may have noticed our website’s banner image has been updated to reflect the drop in temperatures.

Big thanks to Rhys Griffith in Comms who provided a beautiful snowy landscape image for our new background for the winter months.

Content request forms… top of our naughty list

Online forms are a great alternative to paper applications - which can quickly become dated which can be a waste of resources. We have built a great deal of internal insight around preferred wording and language choices from the various online forms we’ve built in 2023.

Our content request form is designed to allow users to upload a Word document which may contain:

• Screenshots to demonstrate updates clearly
• URLs of the web page to be updated
• Hyperlinks that need to be amended
• Plus comments and tracked changes to allow us to better support Translation in their job of ensuring the content is consistent across both languages.

Any additional comments can be added in the long form text box created within the form, but the better you can clearly explain the changes needed in a Word document, the sooner your updates will be actioned.

However as with all online forms, there is still a learning process we must go through once it is set live. We monitor how users engage with the form, which pathways are too convoluted and consider ways to simplify the form without compromising on the quality of submissions.

We’ve been reflecting on insights gleaned from our content request form and have been making updates to improve this aspect of our service for our users, the staff of NRW.

We are always looking to improve our services and we welcome feedback, so if you have any comments - please let us know.

We’ve been nominated in the Future of Government Awards

Our team has been nominated for the Digital Advocates of the Year Award at the Future of Government Awards.

We have been recognised for being a small team that has achieved a great impact by championing digital transformation. We were one of more than 300 nominations from over 60 countries so we’re up against some incredible teams, but we look forward to tuning in on 15 February 2024 to find out if we’ve won our category!

We’d love you to join us at the Awards celebration which will take place on Zoom on Thursday 15 February at 1pm to 2pm (GMT). You can register to attend and we’ll share more details closer to the time.

In Wales, we have a Digital Service Standard to help make sure products and services designed and delivered are safe, secure, accessible and bilingual. The standard also helps teams, because:

• It focuses on building on what users need – avoiding building the wrong thing that can be costly (in time and money) to fix
• Ensures more people can use the product/service
• It’s easier – the standard encourages sharing and re-use. The most common problems will have been solved meaning you don’t start from scratch

Within our team, we try to follow the Digital Service standards wherever we can – but we’ve never had the experience of a service standard assessment.

This week Heledd, Lucinda, Laura and Sam were joined by Phil Baird, who’s a Senior Product Manager at CDPS to do our first service standard review – focussing on the “do something on NRW land” service.

This isn’t as formal as a service assessment used at GOV.UK. Instead, the review is was an opportunity to take a moment to stop and reflect on where the product/service is, how it can be improved and what we’re already doing well.

Phil (from CDPS) said “It was brilliant and I learned so much about the approach was really impressed with the work the team’s been doing” – so lots to celebrate and feel proud of, as well as reflect on some of the bigger challenges – such as (what seems to be) the utopia of “empowered service owner”.

Everyone thought the session was useful and we took away a few practical actions to focus on next. Heledd is looking forward to running a similar session with colleagues in a project team outside of the Digital team in January.

Ways of Working – our learnings from the past year

Our team outlined some of the lesser-known things that it’s perfectly okay to do within our team. We followed Giles Turnbull’s example of being explicit about the things that those of us who have been here a few years take for granted. This also helps people feel at home in the NRW Digital Team.

Other ways our team has begun to balance their screen time is through walking meetings. While most of us work remotely, some of the team happen to live a couple of roads shy of one another, so instead of a Teams call or meeting, we’ve been lacing up and going for a half hour walk to catch up. The fresh air and space from our desks also has the added benefit of providing inspiration when brainstorming page titles and more creative tasks.

Other things we’ve been working on

• The team is looking forward to welcoming Toyah to the team in January.
• It’s been a busy week of publishing public notices, consultations and various updates to the website. Everyone is getting their content into a good place for the new year and this is a wonderful thing, but can be a busy time for us.

Fun Fact Friday

Jingle Bells was the first song broadcast from space

History was made on 16th December 1965 when a song was broadcast from space for the first time. It happened on board NASA’s Gemini 6A spacecraft when astronauts Wally Schirra and Thomas P. Stafford told Mission Control that they could see an unidentified object ‘probably in polar orbit’ piloted by someone ‘wearing a red suit’. They then started playing Jingle Bells on a harmonica and a set of tiny sleigh bells which they’d smuggled on board without NASA’s knowledge.

Nadolig Llawen from the Digital team! <3