Team Update – August/September 2021

This is an update from the Welsh Local Government Team for August and September 2021.

Updates

Working Groups

We started eight working groups in September.

This blog post covers details about each group and what we’re focusing on. We are very pleased that over 200 people have joined these working groups, representing all 22 local authorities in Wales, with officers from Data Cymru on a couple of groups too.

LMS/LXP

We are a good way through the Learning Management Alpha now.

Sarah, our Delivery Manager on this project has been blogging about the progress of this project after each sprint which you can find on our website.

This project has representatives from every local authority and has had fantastic engagement from many services areas in each local authority.

Image Library Discovery

We have just completed a discovery on the requirements for a shared image library for all local authorities. We have done user research with communications, marketing, web, and digital teams.

We are currently working through the recommendations to take this project to an Alpha phase and are engaging with the Welsh Government to scope if this will be shared with the Welsh Government or if the next project phase will just focus on local government.

Events

We continue to host monthly meet-up events and regular show-and-tell sessions.

To view the events we have hosted, or to sign up to any coming up, please visit our Eventbrite page.

Recruitment and expansion of our team

We are interviewing during the week beginning 11 October to add a few more people to our team, including a new Content Designer role. 

Libraries discovery completed

We have completed a discovery on the Library Management Systems used in 20 of the 22 Welsh local authorities and have fed this back into the library management group.

We will be publishing the findings to our blog soon.

The bigger picture

CDPS are now in their Alpha phase of a landscape review.

This project is looking to understand the landscape of digital services across Wales. They are defining a “service” as the end to end process an individual goes through to achieve a goal via engaging with the government.

This review is intended to help the Welsh public sector to set priorities, to identify where we can join up teams and services, and identify opportunities for digital investment, with the end goal of creating a costed roadmap setting out the most valuable areas for CDPS and other Welsh digital leaders to support over the next few years.

The team are hoping to learn about the services run within Local Government and understand how their delivery might differ between Local Authorities (LA’s).

To achieve this goal, they would like to speak to the people most responsible within each and every LA for the following two services:

• Refuse collection
• Registration of children for school places

CDPS are looking to engage with service owners via a focus group methodology, where multiple service owners from different LA’s come together to simultaneously complete a survey, then have a discussion of common challenges/opportunities. The focus groups will last approximately 1 hour, and multiple sessions will be offered to maximise attendance.

If you or your local authority would like to get involved, or if you have any questions concerning the review, please direct them to henry.holms@digitalpublicservices.gov.wales.

What is on hold

Digital maturity assessment

We’ve designed a digital maturity assessment that local authorities can use to understand where their strengths are in digital. It covers culture, leadership, user centred design, and delivery.

If you are interested in trying it out and helping us to develop this tool, please do let us know by emailing digitalteam@wlga.gov.uk – we would be keen to get feedback.

Leadership masterclasses

As part of our engagement with Chief Executives, we were asked to develop a series of masterclasses. We have designed and developed a cloud masterclass which is currently being reviewed by a few of our CEOs.

Coming soon

• Food Poverty Project
  Working with Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council, Data Cymru and charities to understand how we can use data to solve the problem of food poverty.
• Service Blueprints
  This is a project to review different delivery models for local government services and to share best practice from across Wales.
• Life Events
  Almost all local authority services are connected through life events. It could be moving to a new area, having a child, having a new disability etc. When these life events happen, often the person or family involved connects with many services across a local authority. This project will explore these connections from a user journey perspective.