We describe ourselves as a learning organisation – an organisation that has a culture of continuous learning and transferring knowledge.
We also talk about working in the open – which should include our successes and failures.
Being bold and transparent are two of our organisation’s values. This is the first time including a section on our learnings.
Here’s our top 10 this year:
- Building a permanent team has taken time, but it’s been worth it.
We’ve gone from 29 staff last year, to 56 this year. Having permanent members of the team has helped build trust and ensure consistency, not only between ourselves and our partners, but between teams in CDPS.
Rapid recruitment and making time to shortlist, interview and onboard properly, as well as doing the day job has been hard at times, but having people who understand the context in which we work and who are brought into our vision has given us more flexibility and saved money.
2. Demonstrating impact is hard.
Transformation takes time – months – often years. The work highlighted in this annual review is often the first step in a journey to making an impact. This could be attending a training course or joining a community of practice. For our delivery work, we’ve done lots of work over the last 12 months to clarify what outcomes we’re hoping to achieve and how we measure it and will continue to think about these aspects while choosing projects and partners to work with in 2024 and 2025.
We’ve also iterated our management information pack which is shared with our board. It includes both qualitative and quantitative data which demonstrates how we’re meeting our objectives.
3. Work on our internal processes is not always visible.
Some of the work we’ve done this year hasn’t been visible. We could have talked more openly about them. Things like our processes and playbooks (guidelines which CDPS follow), should be shared with other organisations, so they don’t have to start from scratch.
We’ve also launched our ethics committee, recently established to ensure we’re ethical in our practices and that our research represents a diverse group. The committee has led to a peer review of research proposals, improved practices and as a result, better research outcomes.
Our playbooks are also important tools for the organisation, our delivery and communications playbook for example, outline best practice for both disciplines and help with consistency within CDPS. The communications playbook outlines the importance of complying with our Welsh language standards, what is meant by working in the open, how to communicate effectively with slides, how to use our visual brand and tone of voice. It’s been an incredibly helpful tool as we’ve onboarded new members of staff.
4. Not continuing a piece of work is also a success.
We don’t own any citizen-facing services. Our role is to support the Welsh public sector to improve their services. On a few occasions this year, we have not carried forward pieces of work as some organisations could take the work forward independently, having developed or recruited the right capabilities.
Some pieces of work have also been put on hold. They are good pieces of work, which have either valuable recommendations or outputs, but the timing wasn’t right to carry them forward, for various reasons, including political and financial.
We’ve also realised we could have stopped sooner on some projects – and taken more time to reflect on next steps.
5. Working in the open takes practice.
Working in the open should include what’s going well, but also what you’re learning and what’s not going to plan. As an organisation, we are guilty of focusing more on the parts that have gone well. After all, Agile is about failing fast and learning from it.
When we work with partners on projects, we would love full transparency, but we’ve not always achieved this. We judge this on a case-by-case basis and sometimes it is down to the culture of the organisation we’re working with or the sensitive nature of the project. We have to build trust with our partners too and this takes time.
6. More upfront work is needed when onboarding partners.
We need to do more work upfront when onboarding partners about the importance of Agile and embedding user-centred design practices. Working with us means that we need to put the user first and we want organisations to talk about what they’re doing and learning from this.
This year we’ve worked with really passionate people, people who understand our methodology, but without senior buy-in, the changes they are making won’t stick. We’ve strengthened our prioritisation process to ensure there is a senior sponsor for every project we support. They need to be fully onboard and own the work in partnership with us.
7. The right capabilities versus digital, data and technology roles.
Few organisations have full digital, data and technology teams in their organisation (including ourselves). And that’s ok. The multidisciplinary teams we’ve formed have a mix of capabilities to get the work done, and this has led us to a piece of work looking at the minimum viable capabilities a team needs to work to meet the Digital Service Standards for Wales.
Most organisations already have the right capabilities, and it’s about identifying gaps and where any training might be needed. We can support upskilling, mentoring, and coaching through our training and communities of practice and can support organisations needing to hire both permanent staff and contractors.
8. People must want to go on the journey with us.
Without legislation or mandatory standards, progress is going to be slower and harder, we must change hearts and minds if we are going to achieve lasting change.
For example, last year, we ran a workshop with local authorities and Welsh Government. There was a commitment to working together and use content which we’d co-design to help people navigate support about the cost of living crisis. No blockers were identified. We co-created content for two benefits: Free School Meals and School Essentials Grant and the outputs included two pieces of bilingual content, which were fully tested with users.
4 local authorities are using the School Essentials Grant content and only 2 using the Free School Meals and this could be for a number of reasons, which are out of our control.
What we can control, is how we tell the story about the benefits of this work and, in this case, has led to a great collaboration with the Welsh Language Commissioner.
9. Less is more.
We’ve been reflecting on the projects we’re worked on over the last 12 months. At one stage, there were over 25 items on our delivery roadmap.
Taking on new projects is time consuming. They need to be shaped and sized, while also doing delivery for projects already up and running.
We have a more focused roadmap for 2024 to 2025, which will have the biggest impact and learning which we can share.
10. Language matters.
When working with partners, we sometimes mean the same thing but talk about it in different ways. Individuals and organisations’ application of Agile might not match ours, but it doesn’t mean they’re not applying some of the principles. We need to do more work upfront on ensuring we’re on the same page without making assumptions of people’s starting points and levels of maturity.