Here’s what the Digital team has been up to this week…

Team Birds (Phil and Laura) had two productive sessions with the subject matter experts:

Session one was all about understanding the user journey. They discussed when and how users can change a species licence – and what information they need to give us.

screenshot showing the team working together on the bird project

The second session was all about the internal process. The species experts shared their screens and walked us through everything - from receiving an application, entering data in the CRM, right through to issuing the licence. Giving a clear picture of the behind the scenes workflow.

screenshot showing the bird project platform

This week, our publishing team worked on a variety of projects and reports, including SoNaRR, the river basin management plan interim report and the 2024 annual reports for Hafren Dyfrdwy and Dwr Cymru.

Despite being a reduced team and experiencing disruption on our CMS platforms, we’ve accomplished a lot this week and will be enjoying a hot chocolate in celebration!

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • Lucinda presented her new designs for the flood alert system to Hannah and Sophie to glean feedback on the platform’s new features that support users as they send out flood alerts and warnings. Lucinda has actioned previous feedback from users to make simple, yet effective changes to ensure staff can use the platform in emergency situations with clarity and ease.

  • Laura has been working with the flood risk activity team to make some iterations to their online form and experiment with a new check service.

  • Sam and Laura got together to plan guidance for the team to use when designing check services. It’s influenced by the GDS check eligibility guidance, but will work for an NRW regulatory context, using the current build tools we have.

  • Sam’s continuing work on the ‘services: patterns and pages’ MIRO for the team to help us choose and use the best CMS tools for the task, and design services in a consistent way.

  • Laura and Sam had more chats about the perennial problem of who we are speaking to when we create a form: the person who will be named on the permit, a person in an organisation who fills in forms, a consultant? No firm answers just yet.

  • Hannah and Sam met to plan for the new publishing update (using GOV.UK Notify).

  • Alex has been in discussions with the developers from the marine customer platform team to explain payments and the use of gov pay. Alex has created a test service and given access to enable the team to start working on creating the service with API Keys etc.

  • Phil and Sam are planning for their meeting with their form builder account manager to discuss enhancements to make form building even easier.

  • Laura and Sam had more chats about the perennial problem of who we are speaking to when we create a form: the person who will be named on the permit, a person in an organisation who fills in forms, a consultant? No firm answers just yet.

  • Owain had taken part in the disaster recovery exercise for the NRW website, to perform smoke testing to ensure that the website can recover

  • Owain had set-up Hotjar tracking for out Intranet. This installation of Hotjar had been completed using the integration feature on Hotjar with Google Tag Manager