Brand refresh for CDPS

This week we published ‘A brand refresh for the Centre for Digital Public Services’ – How do we explain CDPS to one of our relatives? Or someone who hasn’t heard of us before? Visual Designer, Josh Rousen, explains the need for a brand refresh in this blog post.

Website: Preparing for next show and tell and beta testing

This week, the website team designed the visuals that will be part of our interactive show and tell on 28 February. We started planning for our first beta testing week (6 - 10 March), held further workshops with Welsh Government to refine our visuals and design for the website, so that they meet Global Experience Language (GEL) guidelines, and continued reviewing our current content on our development site.

Sign up to our next show and tell on 28 February 11am to share your feedback on our new website and homepage designs.

Comms show and tell

We held the latest comms show and tell on Thursday. As a team, wanted to show how we use our comms framework for organisational wide pieces of work and presented how we’ve supported the ‘Attract, Recruit, Retain’ workstream.

The show and tell was an opportunity to show how we can add value and the impact our help and advice has on things such as engagement. We included top tips and advice on making presentations look good. Josh ran a fun quiz to encourage audience participation.

Sprint retrospective

On Thursday we had another sprint retrospective. It’s pretty amazing how much work we’ve done in 8 days.

What we learned

• In this sprint, we only committed to publishing content that has already been written. This gave us more time to edit, translate, upload, promote and share the content in the sprint. In the past, we have found that the writing takes up most of the sprint, leaving way too much activity to do in a few days at the end of a sprint. We think this is the way forward, and we will be trying to work in this way from now on.
• We need to account for the time we spend researching and planning for future work, but we don’t find it worthwhile to add these to the sprint board as pieces of work. It’s easier to keep this in mind when thinking about our capacity for the sprint.
• We think slightly longer sprints will help us to work better. We'll be trying this from the next sprint onwards.
• We’re in a good position to see and hear about connected things that go on across CDPS, and we need to do more of this.
• The comms help channel in Slack is really helpful for us, especially when we get lots of notice for work that is coming up.
• Trello and the Comms Framework continue to work well for us.
• We didn’t feel this time that we overestimated our capacity. Let’s see if this continues.
• We really value each others’ well-being. Taking time off when we need to is important. We’re a team who can pick up work for each other if we need to.

Lunch and learn - testing your services