Catching a breath over Easter, I’ve been looking back and reflecting on an incredibly busy year at CDPS. 

From the public sector start-up Myra Hunt and I joined in January 2022 as joint CEO, with 7 employees and a cohort of contractors doing the majority of the work, we now employ 56 members of staff; delivery managers, product managers, user researchers, content designers, communications and events specialists, trainers, apprentices and an amazing leadership and operations team. 

We had taken the decision to invest in permanent staff, with as many based in Wales (currently almost 80%) and as many Welsh speakers as possible. So many contractors, brilliant as they are, are London-based, expensive, and only with you temporarily. 

We wanted to recruit people who are committed to our vision, and who would stay with us to gain a deep understanding of the public sector. Recruiting a permanent team also enabled us to deliver at a much lower cost – providing better value for public money. 

I never thought our recruitment would happen so fast – or that so many incredible people would come to CDPS. We worked hard to make it easy to apply for roles and have shared our resources and tools on how we did it. 

Attracting talent is easy when you have a great story to tell – and we do! About the desire to support organisations to make digital services that improve the lives of everyone, about the way we can contribute to nation-building in Wales, and the desire across the public sector to work together to do things better. 

That’s the story that brought Myra and me to CDPS, and it’s a true story – though none of the doing is easy. 

Our annual review will be published next month – here’s a flavour of what we’ve achieved with these great people. 

We’ve set Wales-wide standards on what makes public services “designed around user needs, simple, secure and convenient” and we’re helping people to work towards them. 

Since our inception, we’ve given 1,500 public employees specialist training to get them up to speed with digital practice and build confidence among leaders on the steps to take.  

We’ve worked with 22 local authorities to improve access to grants such as School Essentials Grant and Free School Meals. We’ve learned so much and will be using this learning to play our role in the development of a Welsh benefits system, working closely with Welsh Government. 

We’ve worked with Digital Maternity Cymru to ensure the needs of users whose voices are seldom heard and brought on-the-ground insights to the Taxi Licencing Bill that really challenged and sharpened their original thinking about information sharing, as set out in their white paper. 

We run five communities of practice, open to staff in digital teams across the sector, to help them build and share knowledge and confidence. 

We’ve worked with the Welsh Government to understand what’s needed to stimulate adoption of automation and artificial intelligence, and how do this effectively and ethically. 

We've experimented with and promoted a way to make bilingual services better, and published a book on it – Trio writing: Designing bilingual content for user-centred services. 

We’ve run popular webinars and lunch and learns to help the sector understand the challenges and opportunities of digital modernisation and held networking events in north and south Wales to bring together senior leaders to discuss key issues; such as artificial intelligence and how to futureproof public services, with digital as an enabler. 

And we’ve created a programme of work for 2024 to 2025 that’s been signed off by our former Minister, Vaughan Gething. We’ll publish this shortly, but our plans include: 

And key for us is continuing to learn and listen. We’re grateful to those across the sector who’ve engaged with us, shared their insights, challenges and priorities. We’ve learnt so much. But the key insight for us is that we will only succeed in Wales through collaboration, in partnership, with openness and goodwill.