We have already blogged about our work on understanding the user needs of the public users of the manuals but we haven't yet talked about the internal (HMRC) users of the manuals.
Yesterday we had a joint workshop with HMRC to look at the manuals and how they might be published in the future. HMRC organised the workshop in Euston Tower in London and it was great to see so many HMRC staff make the journey to London from across the country to take part.
This time we focussed on the needs of the editors of the manuals within HMRC. Attendees at the workshop included a wide range of HMRC staff in the digital services team and the internal communications team who work together to publish the manuals.
Crucially, the workshop also included editors of the manuals from across HMRC. Each of them are technical specialists in their particular area of tax. We had some brilliant contributions during the afternoon and a lot of post-it notes were sacrificed.
Some of the things we talked about included:
- likes and dislikes of the current publishing system
- the user needs specifically of the editors of the manuals
- the user needs of the HMRC staff who read and rely on the manuals in their daily work
Our next step is to record all of the amazing contributions from yesterday afternoon and organise further workshops with smaller groups of users to work on the detail of their specific user needs.
The number of attendees at this workshop was intentionally kept small to ensure that the workshop was as productive as possible. This is the start of the process and we do not want to exclude anyone who might be interested in getting involved in future workshops. If you would like to be kept updated please subscribe to email updates from this blog and email Lynn Shurmur in HMRC who is co-ordinating future workshops.
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