This week, the Digital Team traded their desks for Christmas jumpers and met up for a festive time in Shrewsbury!

The Digital Team brainstorming together

Our festive trip to Shrewsbury to catch up as a team

This week, our team met up in person to collaborate on a number of exciting projects, as well as team building with the new members of our team. We all got a little competitive but it was great to challenge ourselves and work in new teams with people we might not ordinarily work closely with.

As a team, we created a timeline that captured the key moments and highlights from 2012 to today. The timeline was a lovely representation of our many achievements over the years.

It was also an opportunity for our newer team members to learn about some of our historic work, such as streamlining web content, launching new templates, attending CDPS events, using our volunteer days to support local causes, and designing new forms and systems to support users who engage with our services.

There’s value in taking a step back and looking at the big picture, and as a team it was great to see how our team has grown and to remember all that we’ve achieved together. Onwards and upwards in 2026!

After all the work was out of the way, we had a lovely session of crafting, making our Christmas wreaths! Everyone was so creative and it was a great opportunity to bond over the shared fury of working with hot glue guns.

A collage of our Christmas wreath making

As with many a Digital get-together, we quickly moved onto the pub for drinks and Dough and Oil for some delicious pizza.

Pictures from our Shrewsbury night out

The next day, Heledd and Sophie led a brainstorm for an upcoming DDAT project and we all began scripting and filming content for an upcoming project that we are working on.

The Digital team working together and collaborating

At times, it felt a little bit like this GIF, but it was a productive session and plenty of laughs along the way.

conspiracy GIF from its always sunny

All in all, we had a wonderful time and it was great to meet some of the remote team in person for the first time!

You wing some, you lose some…

Team birds has had yet another busy week. This week they:

  • updated the prototype change form based on feedback from the subject matter experts
  • sent subject matter experts a design option to show how using the radio buttons can be better for users than a free text box. They’re waiting for their feedback
  • mapped out the section of the form where users can change the end date of their licence, which now includes an option to extend the conditions of their licence. This was based on feedback from subject matter experts
  • met with Ian, Helen, and Heledd to update them on progress with the prototype change form, start and guidance pages
  • looked at design options to allow users to add new species to a licence, change the species on a licence, and apply to cover more of the same species on a licence.

Next week team birds needs to listen back to the recording of our meeting with the subject matter experts before finalising the routing and wording of this section

Other things we’ve been working on:

  • The publishing officers have been kept busy, with some last-minute reports, lots of intranet requests, and accessibility checks/advice.
  • Heledd joined other senior managers for Active Bystander training with Hapus. Psychological safety is critical if people are going to speak up when something isn’t right, and active bystander skills help build that kind of culture. More resources about how everyone can safely and confidently challenges discrimination will be added to the Learning Management System soon for all staff.
  • This week, Sophie caught up with Gwennan to discuss outstanding actions on our LMS content, including voiceovers and translations. We’ve been working with new software for this piece of work and it’s been a good challenge to consider how we can incorporate new techniques to engage our users.
  • James published updates to the Flood Map for Planning.