This week, we made a change to how we sprint plan. Normally, they run from Tuesday afternoon to Thursday of the following week. However, we’ve found that this timeframe leaves us with little time to complete everything in the sprint. So, we’ve moved sprint planning sessions to Monday mornings, which gives us an extra day and a half to do the work.
Charlotte led the sprint session and chose ABBA as the theme. During the planning, we listened to ABBA, which helped the team feel upbeat on a Monday morning. We also discussed our favourite ABBA songs. Dancing Queen was a popular choice!
We're only at the end of week 1 in our two-week sprint cycle, but moving it to Monday’s has already allowed us to accomplish so much.
This week we were able to test out our new communications framework to support delivery teams when working with CDPS. We recently recruited two delivery managers and an interaction designer so this was the perfect opportunity to run through the framework with them.
They really enjoyed learning more about bilingualism and working in a Welsh context, as it’s not something they had a lot of experience with before as they had a variety of experience of working with a comms team. They also fed back that it was really helpful to do this session in their first few weeks of joining CDPS as part of their induction so they know who we are and what we do from the outset.
At February’s community, we mainly spoke about eligibility criteria - a subject suggested by colleagues in Welsh Government. As content people it’s good to get into the weeds of our craft every now and again.
Eligibility is complex, and we need to present the criteria as simply and plainly to users. We also need to be considerate of their time when structuring the eligibility criteria. We agreed that presenting the most commonly failed criteria first was a possible way to do this.
We also spoke about syntax and presenting eligibility with ‘ifs’ - “If you are [a person] then you can [get something]”. It’s a common way of writing, and it works. But there are other ways. Frontloading sentences may not work - as the eligibility criteria may be missed after the call to action. Sometimes presenting the call to action as a separate sentence following the eligibility criteria is better.
It was fascinating to me, anyway!
Speaking of eligibility criteria…
If you’re working in content, and interested in content design, you can join our community - contact [email protected]
This week, we held our monthly communicating digital community of practice. It was an open floor session and we welcomed colleagues from Digital Health and Care Wales, Social Care Wales and Rhondda Cynon Taf County Borough Council.
Topics we discussed included: