The digital services team
- Our role
- Transforming customer experience
Our role
Our role is to help drive the council's digital transformation to make sure that our residents, employees, businesses and visitors can access council information and services online. We:
- manage and update all council websites
- work with teams to identify digital improvements which can help our colleagues and customers to do more online
- help residents to find what they're looking by creating sites which can be easily found by search engines
- continuously use user research and data to understand how people access and use our services to improve their experience
- create great digital marketing campaigns which promote services
- set our digital standards to ensure accessibility, consistency and ease-of-use
How we can help you
Contact the team and see how we can help with:
- service redesign
- developing new digital projects
- data and analysis
- writing and creating new content on our websites
- updating existing pages on our websites
- providing advice on email marketing campaigns
How we work
We use agile methodology
The digital team use an agile scrum (opens new window) approach to project management to deliver our digital services.
With agile working we build new processes quickly, test them and improve them based on staff and customer feedback.
Before we launch a digital service, we map out the process from beginning to end to make improvements that meet the needs of all of our users. We build processes in our non-live environments and make sure they are tested before they launched. We then continue to iterate our work based on feedback and further user testing.
By working in and agile way we can make changes while we're building digital services and when they are live on our website.
We work in squads
The team is organised into two squads, C squad and G squad. Each squad has a digital product lead who co-ordinates the work of the squad and identifies future work priorities. In each squad are digital experts in the fields of service redesign, content, development, and design.
The two squads meet weekly to come together as one team to update each other on work to date and to share best practice. See the work areas that each squad covers.
Working in sprints
We break our work down into two-week sprints. At the start of each sprint we put forward the work or improvements that we want to get delivered during that sprint. The focus is on breaking work down into smaller chunks with a definite deadline for delivery.
Each squad meets daily, either online or in person, to discuss progress, feedback and future work. We also discuss any issues that prevent us delivering the work in the sprint.
At the end of the sprint there is time for reflection. We look back to see if there was anything that we can improve for future sprints. The final stage is a show and tell. This gives us an opportunity to show our internal stakeholders the work that we have completed and to take on board their feedback.
Working in sprints means our work is organised and planned. But as we work in an agile way, we can be flexible and adaptable when new challenges appear.
At the end of each sprint we host a retrospective. This gives the squad the chance to discuss what went well, what didn't go so well, what were our blockers and what learning are we going to take forward to the next sprint to continually improve.
See our digital services work programme
Back to the floor blogs
Recently, members of CMT have been invited to spend time with us here in the Digital team as part of 'back to the floor' sessions. Read their blog posts below.
My next stop was with the Digital Team which was a real eye opener for me. Who knew that the council were already using Agile project management approaches and delivering excellent outcomes as a result. Whilst the approach was effectively applied to the digital transformation of services it could easily be adopted as a project management approach across the council, adding significant value. It never fails to amaze me how much we all could learn from the work that is already going on within the council and we really need to think of ways we can share the innovation across the council going forward better. Dale Owens
Transforming customer experience
We've created a video to demonstrate how digital is transforming the experience of our customers both internally and externally. The video explains the progress of our 'Digitising Customer Experience' programme from the launch of our digital platform in 2016 up until 2022.