Looking back: CDPS year in review 2022 to 2023

At CDPS, we are growing modern capability and skills in the public sector, so people have the confidence, skills, capacity and capability to deliver better public services. 

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 3: Work with others to develop a digital workforce strategy for public services in Wales and support practical measures to create a pipeline of skilled professionals 

Five Ways of Working: Long-term, involvement, collaboration 

7 well-being goals: A prosperous Wales, a resilient Wales, a globally responsible Wales 

What we offered 

This year we created bespoke courses for people delivering devolved public services in Wales. We wanted to offer a hands-on learning experience grounded in digital in the context of Wales. 

The courses offered were: 

• Digital and Agile: the basics  

• Agile fundamentals for teams  

• Agile fundamentals for leaders 

Whilst continuing to deliver these foundational courses, we also wanted to meet demand for other topics. We created 2 new courses, which were delivered in 3 parts and ran for 3 weeks. 

These were: 

• Delivery manager training for local authority officers 

• Agile training for local authority officers 

What we delivered 

• 14 sessions of Digital and Agile: the basics 

• 7 (2-day) sessions of Agile fundamentals for teams 

• 5 (2-day) sessions of Agile fundamentals for leaders 

• Agile for 3 cohorts of local authority officers  

• Delivery management for 3 cohorts of local authority officers 

We also ran 11 lunch and learns (half-hour deep-dives on topics related to user-centred design) and 10 Lean Coffees. 

“Lean Coffees are a structured, but agenda-less meeting. Participants gather, build an agenda, and begin talking. Conversations are directed and productive because the agenda for the meeting was democratically generated.”

Training in numbers 

This year, 500 people from 39 organisations have taken part in our training; including colleagues from local authorities, health boards, arm’s length bodies and Welsh Government.  

What we learned  

• It would be beneficial for participants of other courses to attend the “Digital and Agile: the basics” course, so all participants have the same understanding of what we mean by these terms. We found many people confuse them with the tools to enable remote working. 

• While mixed cohorts provide the opportunity to share experiences cross-sector, training whole teams in the same cohort would help with discussions about blockers and enablers and where honest and open conversations could take place. 

• Zoom fatigue is real – lots of screen breaks are needed to keep people motivated and engaged. 

• Miro – our interactive collaboration tool is like Marmite – it takes some getting used to and needs to be built into the support provided in advance for people struggling with the concept of a virtual whiteboard. 

• Welsh case studies are hard to find – we’re keen to include as many relatable case studies as possible in our training but struggled to find many with a Welsh context. 

All participants reported an increase in their understanding of digital and Agile, of the meaning of digital transformation, and their confidence in putting it into practice, and in giving it a go in their organisation or role. 

Constantly iterating 

We’re practicing what we’re advocating for with our training courses – asking for feedback from all attendees and using this to make changes to both the content and the delivery. We did this in the form of a quick retrospective at the end of each of our courses, and with a follow-up survey and user research interviews. We have made some changes ready for next year and are also looking to design, develop and deliver more courses on a range of topics relating to the Digital Service Standards for Wales.

Hear from Jonathan Pinkney, former Programme Manager, Digital Medicines Transformation Portfolio about what he learned from our training: 

Transcript

“It was very interactive session, and it was helpful that we're in the room, or in the virtual room with people from across public services in Wales and that cross-pollination is really helpful.  

A real take away from me was putting the Agile methodology into a really non-software-based scenario, really providing how it can work in an effective way to deliver non-software solutions. 

So, it's been helpful to apply some of the Agile principles and methodologies and tools that we learned on the course, particularly working in the open, we've decided to take a bit of an approach on an engagement project that we're running as part of the e-prescribing program. And to this end, we're thinking about doing some show and tell events that will really help us tell our users what we're doing and why and really increase people's knowledge about the challenges of implementing an ePMA solution.”

Objective 3: Work with others to develop a digital workforce strategy for public services in Wales and support practical measures to create a pipeline of skilled professionals 

Five Ways of Working: Involvement, collaboration, prevention 

7 well-being goals: A prosperous Wales, a resilient Wales 

Digital skills are in high demand, and it is acknowledged that the public sector in Wales is facing a recruitment and retention crisis. We have set up a steering group with members from Welsh Government, NHS Wales, and local authorities to collectively address some of these issues.  

Two things on our roadmap that we’ve been working on is sharing best practice around digital recruitment techniques and using CDPS’ recruitment partner to support the public sector to fill urgent, short-term roles. 

We ran a 3-part webinar series on attracting, recruiting, and retaining digital, data and technology (DDaT) talent in the Welsh public sector.  

We have published blog posts and resources, including how to attract talent to DDaT roles, how long the recruitment process should take and how to keep staff happy once in their role. Our resources included examples of best practice job descriptions, sifting, and scoring templates and an exit interview template.