This week, the long-awaited Osian started with the comms team as senior content designer. Osian joins us from Cardiff University where he previously worked as senior digital content producer for the digital communications team.
Osian will be working on our content production process, the monthly newsletter, weeknotes, the content design community of practice and the website redevelopment project.
This week, the comms team started regular standups using Emily Webber’s ‘4 Ps of effective standups.’ (Before this we were using an app called Geekbot via Slack). We’ll be taking it in turns to facilitate and discuss what our goals are for the day and any blockers.
The comms team are also experimenting working in sprints. We’re not a product or service in the traditional sense, but we are a comms service. It is very rare that we work on things in silo in the team. So, it’s important we plan as a team but do it in a way that will be most effective to reach our goals and outcomes. We also feel it’s important that we practice what we preach. If we are telling our audiences about the value of Agile, we feel it’s important that we are embedding those principles into our day-to-day work. It’s been a learning curve and we’ll blog about it after our first retro next Friday.
Are you a comms team that work in this way? How do you do it? We’d love to hear from you.
This week, the comms team met face-to-face to discuss team objectives and design a vision board. A great day, with lots of learning, debate and discussion. We’ll publish the outputs of the day shortly.
https://twitter.com/Gemma_CDPS/status/1583397333982597121
We held our monthly comms team show and tell this week. We covered what we’ve been up to over the past month, new ways of working, an overview of our framework for delivery teams, our September comms report and what we’re working on next.
The comms team are responsible for identifying, coordinating and providing support to staff with all external speaking opportunities at CDPS. This is an important function for the wider organisation, as it not only helps us to amplify our message of ‘what we do’ and ‘how we do it’ to new audiences, but it helps us to start building trust and credibility.
Last week our Business Director, Simon Renault, met with members of the Public Services Boards to chat about the work of CDPS and how we can help them meet their responsibilities under the Well-being of Future Generations (Wales) Act. It was a good ice breaker, with the majority of people in the virtual room having heard about us but not really knowing what we do. It shows there is work to be done with how we communicate our vision and purpose to our stakeholders in Wales, but it’s something we as a comms team and wider organisation are working on.