Blackboard with 'back to school' written on it

September is here, schools are open again, the rain has returned, that’s another week done for the digital team….

Getting our priorities straight

The team has a new set of priorities for the next few months. We’re moving towards having a balance of project-work and business as usual tasks. It’s a shift from the old way of working where we tried to manage many conflicting organisational demands. Our team has decided on the scope of the project work and it is based on evidenced user needs, research, and team feedback.

New recruitment system

NRW’s new e-recruitment system went live this week. The new system has replaced the manual time-consuming processes for recruiting managers, and it should lead to a better online experience for applicants. Mary and Sophie have rewritten and published the many pages of intranet content about our recruitment process to dovetail with the new system. They also edited the internal applicants’ page on the intranet to ensure that our staff can easily find information about applying for vacancies. Mary also published the new Jobs, apprenticeships and placements section of our website this week. As well as a link to the e-recruitment system to search and apply for a job, the new pages have content that promotes NRW as a good place to work.

Publishing update bulletin

From the end of September, we’ll have a new monthly “publishing updates” bulletin, which anyone will be able to subscribe to. It will be a short-and-sweet list of all significant publishing updates, such as consultations, evidence reports, board changes, guidance, and more. Hannah will be sending it out on the last working day of each month, working with Sam to decide what is considered “significant”.

Other work we’ve been doing:

  • finished bug checking our digital forms, woohoo!
  • working on the ‘send a flood message’ system and making improvements based on user research
  • working with the flood team to look at pain points in the user journey
  • looking at how we will publish lots of habitat regulation reports that are coming our way
  • working on and checking a tool that calculates waste stack distances
  • spoke to commercial about their request for an enquiries form and discussed how this might not be the best way forward for the user
  • the Annual diversity and inclusion report 2024–2025 and the Welsh language annual report 2024–2025 have been published this week