It’s been very warm in some parts of the country this week, and some of the team are taking a well deserved holiday.

Last week we said goodbye to Catrin (our leadership team member) as she left the organisation. And it’s been another tough week, as a 45 day consultation was launched about proposed restructure.

Kim has been mega busy updating our intranet pages. This piece of work was to let staff know about the organisational restructure. Kim completed all the work to such a tight deadline, adding lots of content and links to our intranet. Brilliant piece of work Kim, thank you!

photo showing a jellyfish in the ocean

Marine licensing transformation

Work continues on the marine licensing project, with Toyah having now finalised the new content with SMEs from the Marine Licensing and Marine Regs teams.

The focus has been on stripping away superfluous text and improving what remains, tying everything back to ‘what does the user need to know at this stage of their journey?’. We have a ton of great insight from the Deloitte discovery work earlier this year, plus from the experiences of the licensing team themselves, and have used this to create content which will:

  • Improve the applicant experience, providing clearer descriptions of what we need from them and what they can expect of us
  • Improve the quality of applications, so reducing the amount of time and effort spent by MLT chasing for more information or corrections

So far we’re only working on content relating to band 1 (low risk activities that need a licence) - but even this has proved tricky to get our heads around fully! This has been good in a way though, it’s allowed Toyah to put herself in the shoes of an applicant who’s new to the licensing process and dig into a number of key issues.

We know that many of the reasons for applications not being ‘duly made’ (classed as complete and ready to enter the decision-making phase) come back to problems such as insufficient coordinates, missing documents and similar. Experienced engineers and more technically-minded applicants may already be familiar with these kind of subjects, so are less likely to need help with how to provide them. But a person who has never interacted with NRW before and just wants to do some minor maintenance to a wall may have no idea where to even start. Toyah freely admits she doesn’t know the first thing about coordinates, and wouldn’t have a clue how to answer a question about them in a form. And don’t even get us started on the thorny issue of defining Mean High Water Springs…

The new content we’re updating the website with should help the less experienced applicants (and maybe remind the more experienced ones too), meaning that more applications get duly made quicker and more smoothly. It’s planned to go live in September, and we’ll be eagerly awaiting feedback.

photo showing the digital team as storm troopers balancing on a bicycle

Working together to ensure accurate, up-to-date web content

We have been working alongside the Environment Agency and the Office for Nuclear Regulation, to publish a series of updates about nuclear projects and their assessment progress. Our team has worked with colleagues across the organisation to ensure that the latest information is present on our website as soon as the assessments were published on the Gov.UK website.

Standardising our forms

Kim, Sam and Phil continue to work on trying to standardise our online forms.

This week we have been changing the form titles. Most users visit our site to apply, change, give up or tell us about a thing. In the past our forms have used titles that reflect how we work internally, which is not very helpful to our users.

screenshot with list of our current forms for users

Our aim is to standardise all our forms to make them more user friendly.

Felling public registers

We have a few forestry public registers on our site. These help our users find information about felling in their area.

The old public registers used a table format on each content page. This made the register very difficult to update and caused the digital team a lot of problems. It wasted a huge amount of our time.

The registers and content was also very dated. We had one page explaining how to apply for a licence instead of what the public register was actually there to do.

We asked the users to send us a written letter, through the post, if they wanted to view a licence we had issued. This was very impractical and wastes a lot of time and resources.

We had one register that displayed a lovely grey box on the page, how helpful! We had content and text within the forestry registers, in one language. It’s a policy of Natural Resources Wales to have a bilingual website, so this was also not good.

What’s happened to the page title?

screenshot showing a broken webpage

Something needed to change and we needed a good old spring…. well summer clean-up of this area of the website.

My, how things have changed

This week we updated the forestry public registers and content pages.

The registers are now all in a standard spreadsheet format. The felling team updates the spreadsheet and the digital team uploads it to the webpage. This saves us lots of time and effort in our busy work environment. We have also improved the content of each of the four felling licence register pages.

screenshot showing one of the revised webpages on our website

There is still some work to do to clean up the data on the environmental impact assessment register, but we are getting there.

sunlight filtering through the leaves

Keeping cool on hot days

We’re not complaining – there’s finally some sunshine here in Wales, but it can be difficult to work in this heat. We wanted to share some wellbeing tips that can come in handy during the summer months.

  • While it’s lovely to feel the sun on your face as you work, it can make you and your computer/laptop prone to overheating. Ensure you have adequate airflow underneath and around your device, to give your equipment plenty of breathing room.
  • Remember to take regular breaks and keep your electronics away from heat. Never place your computer by a window under direct sunlight. Instead, close your curtains or blinds to prevent sunlight hitting your device to keep everything running smoothly.
  • Drink plenty of water! Even if you’re not in the sunshine, warmer days can affect your focus and make you feel dehydrated quickly. Keep a bottle of water (with a lid on to prevent any spills) on or near your desk to keep your hydration up throughout the day. Aim for 8 glasses of water each day!

photo showing a to-do list with tasks at various stages

Other things we’ve been working on this week:

  • Heledd took part in a user research session with CDPS, who are trying to understand the challenges faced by public sector bodies in Wales in creating accessible services. She had a lot to share about our experiences - the good, and the bad! We look forward to reading the report and recommendations.
  • Sophie has worked with the Wales land management forum subgroup to make sure their meeting minutes are accessible and inclusive, so that all users have equal access to this information. Providing accessibility guidance and feedback, we’ve worked to improve understanding around what makes a document ‘accessible’ and some of the common errors we see sent in to our team.
  • We’ve been working with our colleagues in the communications team to share analytics data for their reports. We recently updated our dashboards as Google Analytics no longer stores data from pre-GA4 days, so we can only access analytics on our website from 10 August 2023.
  • Owain has been mainly working on the NRW Testing. We are finishing off the last handful of the tests and ensuring that we have addressed the bugs that have been raised.
  • On Wednesday, an Internal consultation about the organisational restructure went out. Owain had provided support through the preparation for this piece of work. Along with providing the much needed tech support to troubleshoot the root cause of any issues that came up on the day.