Spring is finally here, we’re keeping our fingers crossed for warmer days ahead.

Embracing the season with a spring de-clutter

The bitter cold of winter has (nearly) passed, and it’ll soon be time to pack away the fleece blankets and winter woollies. On 20 March, we officially welcome springtime and here’s a few nice ways to embrace spring in your home or office.

A spring declutter is the best way to reset for the new season. Start by clearing away anything you no longer need from your desk, after all, a tidy space supports a clear mind. If you’re unsure if you still need that highlighter that sometimes works in a pinch, ask yourself when you last used it and if it’s really something you need on your desk.

After you’ve removed the unnecessary clutter from your space, grab the cleaning supplies and give your desk and equipment a quick wipe down. Freshening up your work area can help you focus on the task at hand.

Finally, we recommend sprucing up your new tidy office space with a vase of fresh daffodils or another kind of springtime flower. You might also find that opening a window helps you focus throughout the day, as ventilation is key for any office space.

If you’re really keen to declutter this spring, why not sort through your emails or files saved to your desktop, and finally delete the documents you no longer need? Springtime is a great time to reset ahead of a busy year!

springtime dandelion image

Renewal, regrowth and a bit of tree felling

Next week sees the publication of the new tree felling licensing pages. James, Paul and Phil have been working on these content pages for some time now.

The content has been created to help our users understand the Wales Agriculture Bill, which comes into force on 1 April. This new piece of legislation gives Natural Resources Wales powers to:

  • set environmental conditions for all tree felling licences
  • change, suspend or stop a tree felling licence, for instance if we become aware of a protected species in the area
  • issue unlimited fines for illegal tree felling

The new content has certainly thrown up challenges about ways of working, approaching topics in silos, and user-centred design. The subject matter experts have an expectation that they write the content, the Welsh Government approves it, and we publish it.

We thought we’d resolved all these issues with our Digital Standards. The new content shows just some of the problems we face as content designers.

Felling licence form

In April of this year the new felling licence form will go live. The form has been improved to comply with the Agriculture Bill.

The current felling licence form has many problems, such as:

  • incomplete applications being sent in to the team
  • missing parts of the application process, such as information on larch disease
  • poor quality applications, the team are always having to chase missing information

We spoke to the tree felling licence team to understand their problems and frustrations with the current form. James also did a lot of user research to understand the problems our users face with having such a complicated form.

We have carried out the following improvements:

  • improved the language throughout the form
  • added a new section for larch disease, this was not available before to our users, despite it being a key requirement of the licence
  • built in sections on watercourses, species and veteran trees. Even though these things were requirements of the licence, the felling team had to chase this information from every single applicant
  • added the ability for the owner of the land to give consent for an agent to act on their behalf. In the old form, there was no ability to do this. The landowners had no idea they had to give the agents access
  • improved the flow of the form. Allowing the users to only complete the parts of the form that are relevant to them. In the old form, they were forced to complete everything, even though the area might not be relevant to them.

baby ducks and their mum in spring

The new content request form is live! (and the old one no more…)

This will no doubt make a big difference to the quality of the tasks that are sent in to our team, as many requests currently miss out important information, including the URL of the webpage that needs updating. Our new form asks for all the necessary details as you submit your request, so if you provide everything at the time, we can pick up and action your request more efficiently.

So please, if you haven’t already - update your bookmarks to make sure you have access to our new and improved content request form.

The organisation is feeling a bit more agile

Heledd joined an Agile for leaders course with CDPS with colleagues from the Flood Risk Management leadership group. Huge thanks to Dave Brain for organising and for getting a great group of managers, and senior leaders together.

The course content was great, and it was an opportunity to brush up on good practice and discover some new tools and techniques. Having the time to discuss challenges for teams that are trying to work in an agile and user centred way, within organisations that are more traditional was also really useful.

It may not feel like it some days, but we are making progress with our Digital Maturity. We feel like we’re currently somewhere between “Technology enabled” and “Digitally Transforming”. It feels that we’ve come along a fair bit since publishing the Digital Strategy in 2022.

image showing agile model of digital maturity

Ceri Davies, exec Director for Evidence, Permitting and Policy, attended the training for the whole two days too - and we hope she’ll encourage other senior leaders to make the most of this training from CDPS.

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • Sophie has been reviewing Fire Prevention content to ensure it aligns with the web guidelines and A-Z style guide.
  • James has been busy analysing the user interviews for our marine licensing discovery. We held our first show and tell on Wednesday to share the initial findings with our colleagues
  • Sam’s working on new content for the permissions fees new webpage

springtime image of a British city

Friday Fun Fact

Spring was originally known as Lent. In the 14th century, it was changed to springing because plants were springing up from the ground. The name changed to spring-time about 100 years later and was eventually shortened to just spring. Years ago, it became a popular myth that you could balance an egg on its head during the spring equinox. Unfortunately, it’s just a myth.