Maintaining content quality at a time of national crisis

I became a team lead at the Government Digital Service (GDS) in March 2020, when our key focus was to ensure GOV.UK was up-to-date and accurate in relation to Brexit​.

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Two weeks later, the country went into Covid lockdown.

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What I did

I was one of 3 content leads for our core content teams - responsible for managing key information on GOV.UK.
 

More than 60 different government departments own the policy that informs this content.​

 

With Covid and Brexit, we needed a strategy to manage impossible workloads. As team leads, we:

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• Wrote a content and communications strategy to keep our key stakeholders (both internal and external) updated.

• Created roles and pivoted experienced senior content designers into them, to ensure that we were across strategic priority requirements

• Implemented weekly planning meetings.

• Deprioritised everything that wasn’t Brexit- or Covid-related, but ensured that all other work requests were kept under review and reprioritised, as necessary.

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The results

• We published key Brexit information on GOV.UK in time to meet the formal deadline, one week after the UK formally signed off on the Brexit treaty.

• We kept our Covid information up-to-date and accurate, so that our key audiences were able to take the important decisions they needed to take.

• Our stakeholders were in the loop on key publishing decisions, including our senior management team.