Weeknotes 28/03/2025

This weekend sees the clocks change once again. Don’t forget to set yours forwards an hour on Sunday – yes, even that annoying oven one that you have to dig the manual out for every time!

A day out to the seaside

Toyah is just back from a week’s leave, but before she went off, she joined the Marine Licensing and Marine Regulations teams on a day out visiting a couple of local sites of interest.

The Port of Mostyn is a long-standing feature of the north Wales coast - you may have seen it if you’ve ever taken the main train line here! Operating both next to and in the water, it is an established repeat ‘customer’ of the Licensing team.

(Image credit: Port of Mostyn website)

We were invited along to hear about its history and see the port itself - although it was during a quiet spell, as there are no wind farms being built at the moment, so there wasn’t too much going on. We also got to see an area of land where reclamation/conservation work is being carried out. Everyone found it really valuable to see the site in person - it makes such a difference to your understanding of what is otherwise just words on an application form or an email, or a screenshot of a map and handful of coordinates.

After the port we drove to Talacre beach, which is both a Special Area of Conservation (SAC) and Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) near Prestatyn. Here we met three of our NRW conservation colleagues, who gave us a really interesting overview of the SAC - its composition and importance, and their work in protecting and improving it. The area is home to numerous species, including the rare natterjack toad, little terns, and many species of butterflies, moths and bees.

After a short sandy trek along the beach and back through the dunes (sticking to the approved paths, of course!), we said our goodbyes and headed off home…a far shorter journey for us locals than for those who’d travelled up from south Wales.

While it wasn’t digital-specific, not focused on forms or web content, or even really to discuss the licensing process itself, Toyah found the whole day to be incredibly insightful. It can be easy to forget that the people we design for are working within their own particular set of circumstances, and seeing those brought to life in front of you really helps give perspective.

It was also great to meet the Marine teams in person again, it gave us chance to chat about the work we’ve done together so far, and what we’re moving onto next. While you can obviously do this over Teams, in-person conversations always feel more fruitful and it really helped solidify Toyah’s working relationship with both teams.

In short: if you have the opportunity for a similar day out within your own field, absolutely do so, it’s well worth the time!

A tool to help staff decide whether to respond to an incident

Lucinda has been working on creating a tool for staff to help them triage incident reports.

The tool should do two things:

• Help staff on the incident rota know if they need to take action
• Log the decision so there is a clear audit trail

Using our form builder, Lucinda created a test form that gives a recommendation on if a user should act on a report. The form also guides users to make the necessary checks to be certain the decision they are making is the right one.

The form can trigger an email at the end containing a copy of the answers which can be used to evidence the decision. It can also act as some confirmation that the right checks were made.

In the current draft the structure is a bit tricky. It asks a few highly weighted questions to let a user know if it is recommended that they take action, it then asks some more questions, before asking the user what decision they intend to make.

This is challenging as the form gives a recommendation, then guides a user to make more checks, those checks could mean overriding the recommendation.

Lucinda hopes that some further conversations with the incident management team will help… but also a digital team content crit might help unpick some of the complexities!

Reflections from final two days of ‘Leading modern public services’

Heledd spent two days this week attending the final two days of the ‘Leading modern public services’ course. On Wednesday morning, the fab Gareth Morlais, who’s an expert on Welsh language technology, joined to share the latest from the Welsh Government’s 2050 team. This team focusses on reaching a million speakers, but most importantly, on increasing the daily use of Welsh. His focus was all about people, but we were also amazed at how far along generative AI has come – and together we demoed creating an englyn about Llanrwst – it was quite impressive, although didn’t make complete sense!

The majority of the two days was spent working in groups in a compressed design sprint (usually five days). The challenge I took on with my group, set by Tash (from TPXImpact) based on the problems we’d collectively shared in previous sessions was: “building meaningful + safe relationships to encourage risk/ bold thinking as a sector how can we ensure that relationships within our organisations + across the sector are meaningful + safe, involving the right people + maintaining these connections, while also understanding our roles within the system to create a cohesive + effective movement” . Quite the mouthful, and challenge!

Many of us are familiar with using and seeing design thinking and prototyping ideas for services, products and content in our teams’ day to day work. But the same tools and techniques can also help solve knotty problems - in policy, process, and organisational (and cross-organisational) levels.

Not going to lie… it did get messy (even had a bin on the table at one point). There were several points when I had no idea where we were going. But through collaboration, listening to each other for different perspectives and expertise - we came up with an idea we could pitch!

We also let go and had fun - possibly something that was easier for us to do than in our normal day to day roles. But, as one of the quotes from Tash reminded us… “humour allows us to pattern switch”, as stated by Edward DeBono, author and originator of the term ‘Lateral Thinking’.

Thanks to Peter Thomas and team at Centre for Digital Public Services / Canolfan Gwasanaethau Cyhoeddus Digidol team for organising this programme and bringing in Tash Willcocks to lead and share so much amazing knowledge!

A bit like our proposed solution to solve the challenge, although l learnt a lot through this learning programme - the biggest benefit is all the new connections we’ve made, which now opens the door (a little bit wider) for more collaboration to improve public services together.

If only there was commitment and funding for everyone in a leadership role in public sector to do this - now, that would be transformational! 👀

Other things we have been working on…

• James has been busy holding user research interviews with flood duty officers. This is about trying to improve our ‘Send a flood message’ service that was launched last year.
• Alex, our product manager, has joined Sam and Phil on the species project to provide additional support in delivery and stakeholder management.
• Toyah has been working through the marine tasks that came in while she was on leave.
• The discovery phase Lucinda has been working on for the flood team is getting close to being ready for development.