Balancing today’s services with tomorrow’s improvements
One of the strongest themes from Sprint 67 was the balance between keeping existing services running and improving how we work for the future.
The team progressed day-to-day content and platform work while also tackling accessibility, legacy technology, training, digital inclusion, forms standards and experimentation with new tools.
With significant forms work ahead, continuing to manage that balance will be important.
Sprint 67 showed that improvement isn’t always one big transformation project. Often, it comes from making lots of practical changes: removing legacy content, fixing accessibility issues, improving standards, sharing knowledge and gradually making our digital services simpler and easier to maintain.
What we worked on
- Accessibility and content – improving pages, fixing accessibility issues and exploring new ways to check content for accessibility.
- Forms – developing clearer content standards and preparing for the larger programme of forms consolidation and migration.
- Simplifying our website – continuing to review council tax journeys and rationalise legacy district content, with 80 of 102 district pages reviewed.
- Security and maintenance – addressing security issues, legacy technology and improvements needed across our digital platforms.
- Skills and knowledge – developing training for Page Builder and GOSS and creating more opportunities for the team to share knowledge.
- Digital inclusion – supporting the distribution of 77 laptops to charities and community groups, with another 30 identified for schools.
- Exploring AI – testing how AI and Copilot could support areas such as accessibility and content checking, while considering how experiments fit into our wider approach.
Looking ahead
A big theme from Sprint 67 was improving things while keeping services running. Alongside responding to immediate needs, we’re building better standards, reducing legacy technology and developing the skills and tools we’ll need for the work ahead.
