2.1.1. Local Government Digital Transformation Fund
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 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, a more equal Wales
CDPS supported the Welsh Local Government Association (WLGA) digital team in delivering projects selected for funding through the Local Government Digital Transformation Fund in the financial year 2022 to 2023.
We supported both the supply and caretaker management of contractor staff for the following 4 projects:
- content discovery
- digital skills shortage
- digital exclusion project
- implementing a learning management system
Initial planning and resource meetings between local authority project teams and the WLGA digital team scoped the resource requirements. We identified 14 digital, data and technology professionals were needed for these projects. These roles were not already available within local authorities and recruiting them within the timescales would have been challenging.
We provided closer guidance and management of 2 projects – content discovery and digital skills shortage, which closely aligned to the remit of CDPS, with work already underway.
Content discovery
Many local authorities in Wales know that citizens, businesses, and visitors to their area struggle to find and understand their website content. This discovery worked with Blaenau Gwent, Monmouthshire, Torfaen, and Newport councils to understand the problem better, and started to unpick the challenges around content.
The project looked at how content was produced and published in a council. It explored the council tax reduction service to understand the content challenges for a specific service.
Recommendations from discovery:
- Establish clear content ownership and a style guide. The team found that content would be improved if the service area experts continue to own the facts, but an empowered content owner owns the content and manages how that content is provided to meet the end users’ needs.
- Best practice needs to be established in councils and tested. Some items found during workshops which would help improve content included a content request process, a feedback approach and establishing clear metrics and measures.
- Establish a service transformation project that will take forward what was learned throughout this discovery. This discovery demonstrated that by empowering a small team who have the right skills and can focus on a specific problem, you can quickly find ways to make improvements. The team’s recommendation would be to pick a service, ideally one that is shared across local authorities in Wales and use that as an exemplar of how things could be done.
Digital skills shortage
The Vale of Glamorgan, Bridgend County Borough, Carmarthenshire, and Wrexham councils share a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and have worked together on a range of projects to date.
With financial pressures and a challenging and competitive recruitment market, the councils want to find ways to grow their own capability and capacity and explore a shared operating model and a shared skills approach across the councils.
After an 8-week discovery, the team found:
- councils struggle to recruit people due to uncompetitive salaries – this was both in the private sector, but also in other public sector organisations such as health and UK central government
- complicated role descriptions and clunky application processes make it hard for people to apply compared to other organisations
- recruitment materials could do more to highlight the benefits of working in councils
- once employed at a local authority, staff struggled with the lack of career progression
- a lack of the right skills has a significant impact on the speed and effectiveness of digital delivery in the councils – this results in a worse experience for residents and higher costs for the council
- sharing knowledge around skills and processes is already happening, and there is an appetite for more, both within and between councils
- there is an appetite for sharing staff – the main barriers are a lack of staff to share as well as concerns about time and budgets
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2.1.2. Schools' information management discovery
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: Actions to help business in Wales better meet the digital transformation needs of public services
Five Ways of Working: Long-term, integration, involvement, collaboration, prevention
7 well-being goals: A resilient Wales, a globally responsible Wales
All schools in Wales use a management information system to share data with their local authority, ministers, and Estyn (the education and training inspectorate for Wales). The system is also used to manage day-to-day activities in schools such as pupil attendance, exam results and eligibility for free school meals.
Some management information systems are used to send communications to parents or guardians about school trips or sports days or to remind them of teacher training days. In some cases, the systems are used to record and flag information relating to social care.
Local authorities and schools in Wales wanted to explore their options for schools' management information systems to ensure that the needs of users were being met and that value for money was being achieved.
Working with several local authorities, led by Caerphilly County Borough Council, we carried out a wide-reaching 12-week discovery phase, conducting research with local authorities and management information system users and developing a detailed set of user needs and an understanding of the problems being faced.
We then moved into an extended discovery, where we worked with local authorities to explore potential solutions to these problems. This included 2 workstreams, one where we looked at the option of building a ‘once for Wales’ solution, and the other where we explored the marketplace and identified a potential framework for enabling collaborative procurement.
This work has opened several options for local authorities and schools in the future and provided them with tools and resources to help them to make decisions that will ensure they are meeting the needs of their users. We’re excited to see how local authorities continue to work together on this and will continue to support them on their journey.
We spoke to Liz Lucas, Head of Customer and Digital Services at Caerphilly County Borough Council at the start of discovery, who discusses how the process is helping meet user needs.
Transcript
“CDPS has supported us, especially in Caerphilly, to look at discovery phase, which is completely new to me, this Agile methodology, and so they're looking at the discovery to see what it is exactly what we want, what do the users really want from a school's management information system.
Since we've gathered that data then, they've started working with us, and when I say us, the digital leads and the procurement leads across Wales, to see how we can take this project forward to meet the user needs at the end of the day, not just what we think they want, we're actually getting underneath the bonnet of this and understanding exactly what are the user needs.
So, at the moment we're looking at a number of options which include build for Wales or procure for Wales. The value for me has been around project management, to do anything on a collaborative basis is very challenging but what CDPS have done is bring clear project management and decision making around what we need to do, and I think now, as we work into our two work streams of procurement or build, it will bring a discipline and timeline to it, that maybe we wouldn't have on our own. It's also brought about the knowledge of Agile workstream and methodology, which like I said, someone like myself is new to it and so they have taken us on the journey.”
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2.1.3. Cost of living crisis: making it easier for people to access advice and support
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 4: Using the output of the landscape review to shape CDPS priorities now and in future, with a particular focus on collaboratively solving shared sectoral, or geographical, issues and concerns
Five Ways of Working: Long-term, involvement, collaboration, prevention
7 well-being goals: A prosperous Wales, a resilient Wales, a more equal Wales, a Wales of vibrant culture and thriving Welsh language
“Here in Wales, we have chosen to support people through this crisis by providing targeted help to those who need it most and by supporting everyone through programmes which put money back in their pockets.”
Following a meeting with Welsh Government officials in September 2022, we worked with the WLGA digital team to design and run a cost of living content workshop. The objective was to understand how we could make information related to the programmes mentioned by the minister easy to find, navigate and understand.
83 people attended with representatives from Welsh Government, every local authority, and Citizens Advice.
Immediate impact
We had fantastic feedback about the workshop, and it was great to see some local authorities making practical changes as a result.
“We are now refreshing our cost-of-living hub so we can offer our residents the best possible support. Using learnings from the workshop, we plan to update the structure of our landing page, taking a mobile-first approach. We will split information into key topics and include short descriptions to help residents navigate our content.
We will track our analytics to identify popular topics and front-load our content, so the most important information is easy to find. We will also review the reading age of all content using Hemingway Editor.
We learnt a lot during the workshop and would like to see this approach used to address other shared challenges in the future.”
Emma Willis, Content Designer, Welsh Local Government Association, discusses some of the indirect outcomes of the workshop.
Transcript
“There were some great, kind of quick turnaround, direct agreements coming out of the workshops, particularly around everyone agreeing to consistent naming of the services to follow Welsh Government example and we've now got some work to do to make sure that's enabled and embedded, but it was great to have that conversation and that agreement.
There were also longer-term outcomes agreed in terms of Welsh Government and local government working together to design cost of living content, which again, alongside CDPS, we're interested in continuing to support that and make that happen.
Interestingly, there were quite a few kind of, indirect outcomes that I think have been beneficial. We've heard from a number of authorities that they feel they have a better understanding of design and content good practice, and also some of the research and good practice we presented has helped raise that case for change and in addition to that, I think there was a general feeling from the day of the power of collaboration and also the appetite for shared, single consolidated solutions, so that's something we're going to take out and bare that in mind for future work.
We're hoping to run more sessions working together and to kind of capitalise on the dialogue and the momentum that we have in place and there are a number of actions that came out of the session so we're going to work with CDPS on putting those into practice so that we can drive some kind of tangible impact and outcomes from this session and from future ones that we run.”
2.1.4. Co-designing content
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
Five Ways of Working: Integration, involvement, collaboration
7 well-being goals: a prosperous Wales, a resilient Wales, a Wales of more cohesive communities
Following a workshop in November 2022, it was clear we needed to find ways to facilitate collaboration and co-design of content across Wales to make it easier for people to find, navigate and understand.
This was no easy task. We started small and tested ideas on how to co-design and collaborate on one specific service.
Recognising the challenges of designing bilingual content, we learnt from colleagues in Natural Resources Wales on their experiences of trio writing.
Our goals were:
- improve the methods of designing bilingual content
- create a framework for collaborating and co-designing user-centred content
The service we worked on was Welsh Government’s School Essentials Grant. This was identified in the workshop as one of the services with the most inconsistency across Wales with the user being confused about eligibility and what the grant was for. With Welsh Government announcing the new name from the former Pupil Development Grant, this was a good opportunity to co-design this content as all local authorities would be updating their content around this time.
The outputs from this work were:
- a co-designed, shared piece of user-centred content for local authorities to use on their websites
- School Essentials Grant content toolkit for local authorities for co-designing and working collaboratively
- a refined methodology for trio writing and designing bilingual content
“Working together with CDPS showed how a user-centred design approach can make the most of our resources to produce more usable content [and] how much this approach improves the content performance.”
“It gave me the freedom to be a creator and make sure that both languages are equally considered.”
Ceri also wrote a blog post on her experience of designing content using the trio writing method.
Next steps
- Sustainably scale a way of co-designing content across Wales.
- Provide guidance, toolkits, and resources for people to design accessible, inclusive, quality, user-centred, bilingual content.
- Identify ways to move beyond content and the initial challenges of service delivery.
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School Essentials Grant content toolkit for local authorities