It’s half term, so a few of the team are on leave. Here’s what the rest have been up to:

Species licensing: The flight continues 🐦

  • Laura and Phil are continuing their work on the bird licensing project. They have begun working with the species team to review the current paper application forms, exploring why specific questions are asked, when users need to apply for a licence, and how they can better understand which licence they need.

  • They are also drafting a blog about improvements to the change form process, including how six separate change forms were combined into a single service to make the process simpler and easier to use.

  • The team has also continued to improve the change form based on user feedback, making it clearer, more efficient and easier for users to complete.

Other things we have been up to this week

  • The new intranet project team completed the governance framework, started creating intranet standards in MIRO and identified SharePoint Modern constraints which could affect the user experience.

  • Mary and Jane had a meeting with someone from the Commercial Team to discuss lessons learned from the recent introduction of the new parking system at 3 of our sites.

  • Lucinda has been working with a user researcher planning ahead to learn more about how users find our flood warnings service

  • In the publishing team, Kim continued work on the new intranet project and helped to test the new version of Umbraco, making sure all our current and scheduled web pages were displaying properly online. Hannah got the 2026 Sustainable Drainage Scheme grant pages scheduled to publish on 1st November, and Sophie published six (!!!) complex and high-profile water company reports.