An essential part of what we do CDPS is sharing knowledge and best practice. We do this in a number of ways through building communities of practice and working in the open.
This year, CDPS’s Business Director and Head of Operations, Simon Renault, took on the role as chair of the Welsh Government Sponsored Bodies IT subgroup and reformed it as a DDaT subgroup, drawing membership from across many Welsh Government sponsored bodies including larger ones such as National Museum Wales, National Library of Wales, Natural Resources Wales and Transport for Wales as well as smaller ones such as Hybu Cig Cymru / Meat Promotion Wales, Public Services Ombudsman for Wales and Arts Council of Wales.
This group discusses and shares their common challenges and best practice ideas to support the delivery of modern digital services in their respective organisations.
5.1. Building communities
Objective 1: Supporting the leadership and culture amongst public service leaders to drive good digital policy making and support digital transformation
Objective 2: Support others to ensure that people can access digital public services by helping them create services that are designed around user needs
Objective 5: Continuing to promote shared use of the technologies and create and embed common and shared standards in digital, data and technology
Objective 6: Help business in Wales better meet the digital transformation needs of public services
Five Ways of Working: Long-term, involvement, collaboration
7 well-being goals: A Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language, a globally responsible Wales
“Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or passion for something that they do – and they learn how to do it better as they interact regularly.”
- Etienne Wenger
Over the last 12 months, we’ve grown our 2 existing communities of practice (communicating digital and building bilingual services) and established two news ones; user research and content design.
Across the 4, we have run 34 community meetings, attracting 642 people from organisations across Wales, to share, learn and build support networks.
Communicating Digital
This community of practice supports those involved in communicating digital change.
We discuss topics such as how we communicate the benefits – and challenges – of digital transformation and how to do it innovatively – and bring organisations along.
This year, we held 10 meetings with 133 attendees.
We had meetings discussing how communication teams and user-centred design can work together, dealing with controversial comments on social media, inclusive language, internal communication challenges and hybrid event planning.
“This is always a brilliant forum for discussion and sharing ideas, and if you’re communicating in the digital sphere in Wales, it should be right up your information superhighway! Thanks, Gemma, for an interesting session in a friendly and welcoming community.”
“It was amazing how joined up it all felt and was great to see some new faces there too. Great work as always.”
“Oh, it was such a lovely way to start the day! Love chatting to the group, thanks for inviting me!”
Join the Communicating Digital community
Building Bilingual Services
This community of practice discusses and shares practices on designing services to support service owners and teams to design better bilingual services.
We discuss topics such as how to build a service that works equally well in 2 languages, why getting it right involves more than just translation and how all services in Wales need to be bilingual.
This year, we held 17 meetings with 428 attendees.
This year, we were joined by guest speakers including:
- Mapio Cymru, discussing the availability of maps in the Welsh language and increasing their use
- Natural Resources Wales and Defra, discussing a bilingual service for purchasing a fishing rod licence
- Civil Service Jobs, on their approach to implement a Welsh version of the Civil Service Jobs portal
- Welsh Government, on using Microsoft Teams bilingually
- Welsh Government, on bilingual social media best practice
“Enjoyed being part of a chat this morning for the @cdps_cymru Community of Practice. We talked about our approach to developing bilingual content, including trio writing. It’s been amazing working so closely with the translator and @GwennoEdwards, a super user researcher. It was also my first time in a ‘user experience fishbowl.’ This is a liberating structure – a different method for sharing information. Super idea from @Dyn_Drwg and much less intimidating than a formal presentation.”
“I have been attending the Building Bilingual Services Community of Practice meetings for over 2 years.
I really like the pattern of having structured sessions intermixed with a more open forum. The presentations have been relevant and given me food for thought on many occasions. The sessions on Microsoft Teams translation were particularly useful for my role as a Senior User Researcher. I have also shared recordings of sessions with colleagues they would be relevant to.
The open sessions are really useful to share ideas, pain points, good practice, lessons learnt etc with likeminded people in a positive, constructive environment.
The community meetings are useful to benchmark our practice and it’s reassuring to know that we are on the right tracks in terms of bilingual services. I’m not able to make all the meetings but make an effort to prioritise them and attend when I can.”
Join the Building Bilingual Services community
Content Design Cymru
Set up in July 2022, this community brings together people who design content so that they can help and support each other to do their work and tell others why content design is important.
We want to grow content design as a discipline and position content designers as experts who are essential to delivering better public services in Wales.
This year, we held 7 meetings with 81 attendees.
We discussed topics such as defining the community’s scope, designing a community vision, challenges in adopting user-centred content, sharing learning from trio writing and how content design has bettered users’ experiences.
Join the Content Design Cymru community
User Research in Wales
This year, we established a new community of practice for user research in Wales. Our research told us there is a need to create a specific community to connect and support people working in public services in Wales that have an interest in user research.
The community aims to connect people across public services in Wales that are interested in or practicing user research, champion the importance of user research to deliver and design better public services, develop user research knowledge and skills, and improve the way user research is carried out in public services in Wales.
This year, we did desk research to learn about existing communities, how they work, and spoke to people who were already running successful communities.
We invited Welsh Government colleagues who had been running their own internal user research community, as well as CDPS colleagues. The workshop was very helpful and gave us the momentum and confidence to move forward.
After the workshop, we decided to start with a small discovery to find out what our user needs were.
We broke the work down into sprints, where we undertook desk research, interviews, and a survey to help us understand who our members were, what they needed, and the existing community landscape.
We held interviews with 6 participants and had 20 survey responses, from those in user researcher roles, and in non-user researcher roles.
We have now set up this community which already has 66 members from 23 organisations.
5.2. Working in the open
Objective 2: Support others to ensure that people can access digital public services by helping them create services that are designed around user needs
Objective 6: Actions to help business in Wales better meet the digital transformation needs of public services
Five Ways of Working: Integration, involvement, collaboration
7 well-being goals: A Wales of more cohesive communities
Transparency is one of our values and working in the open supports this.
Working in the open is about communicating in short, frequent updates. One part of the story at a time, as the story (or the work) happens and unfolds and is central to Agile development – especially in the public sector, where a lot of information is public property. By working in the open, we share our project updates and findings with a wide audience – and we invite comments and feedback that we’re prepared to act on.
This year, CDPS has worked in the open by:
- publishing blog posts at different stages of project development
- holding webinars for a broad Welsh public sector audience
- making many of our show and tells public on YouTube
- publishing CDPS weeknotes
- distributing a CDPS newsletter
- expanding our social media presence on Twitter and LinkedIn
Blog posts
This year, we published 47 blog posts, which had a total of 4,616 page views (an average of almost 100 per blog post)
The blog posts covered areas such as how to attract, recruit, and retain digital, data and technology roles and updates from project teams working on e-prescribing, medicine administration and procuring a schools management information system among many more.
This year, our most popular blog posts were:
Nursing records go digital – a case study - 835 views
CDPS and chief digital officers outline priorities for Wales - 683 views
Bridging the digital divide in Wales - 670 views
Webinars
This year, we’ve held webinars on digital accessibility, understanding the link between tech, digital and the environment and cyber security essentials to help public sector organisations on these areas, relating to our Digital Service Standards for Wales.
We also held webinars on attracting, recruiting, and retaining DDaT talent in Wales and on user-centred design topics including service design, testing, and improving content and using user research to make improvements to your service.
Show and tells
At CDPS, we run regular show and tells, which is an important part of Agile. Show and tells are a regular meeting (usually fortnightly or monthly) for teams to show their work and talk about what they’ve learned. It also allows stakeholders and partners to attend, ask questions and make comments on how the work is progressing.
Visit our YouTube channel to watch our show and tells.
Weeknotes
We’ve continued to distribute our weeknotes this year with 157 currently receiving them. Our weeknotes provide stakeholders with a weekly update from our joint CEOs, Harriet and Myra, our delivery teams, and functions such as user-centred design, skills, and communications.
Newsletter
This year, we sent 7 newsletters and increased our subscribers by 40% with 542 signed up across the Welsh public sector.
The average open rate was 29.03% (this is slightly higher than the industry average of 28.77%)
The average click rate was 46.71%, (where the recipient clicks on a link in the newsletter to read more) and the industry standard is 3.99%.
Social media
We’re continuing to promote the work we do and share good practice and learning on our social media accounts. We are always looking for ways to improve engagement and have had recent success with using Welsh and English equally and appropriately within the same social posts and posting more video content natively to our social platforms.
We’ve seen an increase in followers across all our platforms:
- Twitter – 20% increase from March 2022 to 2,345 followers
- LinkedIn – 66.9% increase from March 2022 to 1,484 followers
- YouTube – 93% increase from March 2022 to 89 subscribers