Winter Heating Payment is to help people on low income benefits who might have extra heating needs. Social Security Scotland pays this to people living in Scotland.
It replaced the Cold Weather Payment from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and has the same eligibility requirements.
I joined the team in July 2022 and the service went live in November 2023. I was involved in designing different types of content across the project, including:
A lot of the notifications and gov.scot content had already been designed when I joined. My main focus was therefore the operational guidance.
We were tasked with creating over 300 pieces of operational guidance in approx 60 working days. The deadline was based on a national go-live date which had been advertised publicly.
The plan included the work of 5 CDs. I organised a brainstorming session, where I invited all the CDs. We talked through the task and brainstormed some ideas. This included our strategy for ways of working, consistency across the content, working with others such as policy and legal, UR and peer reviews. We did an initial review of the 300+ tickets. We got rid of any duplicates, and challenged any there were question marks over. With the remaining tickets, I created a plan based on the deadline, working backwards. I worked with the team to allocate the work based on knowledge, experience or themes. We also had to take into account sign off processes and UR. From my previous work on guidance I could see a lot of repetition in terms of the steps which most tasks required. I suggested a content pattern library to save time. I hosted a session where we brought examples of existing content that was essentially the same but written slightly differently. We agreed on a standard and documented as a reference moving forward. I also suggested we peer reviewed the work of other CDs that related to processes we were working on. The result was that we hit the deadline. It was a big push, but a huge achievement. We also got some really positive anecdotal feedback that advisers really liked the content and found it clear and easy to use.