April 22nd, 2022

In the spirit of transparency and candour, Kevin and Jill publish weeknotes reflecting on the what and why for their team.

Guest post alert! 🚨 Excited to have our very own sr. user-research/designer Harry Olson lead us off this week.

Harry’s notes

Hello weeknotes! This is my first guest post and I’ll run through five things that happened this week.

(1) Service Transformation Branch planning session
This week we had our branch planning session (aka year in review). It was an empowering session to be seen, heard, and plan the next steps of our branch. One year has gone by so fast and it’s been a great journey supporting the work we are doing for British Columbians. Big thanks to Jill and Kevin for their leadership and direction of the branch. It’s inspiring to come to work everyday with a talented team of individuals. Thanks to Jill for facilitating and leading.

(2) CleanBC: Go Electric
Last week we completed our first increment of delivery for Go Electric. The sprint was fast-paced and collaborative on all fronts with our content and development teams. Big kudos out to the entire team and program area for the rigor and responsiveness in the delivery. We are in the next phase of test planning and development.

(3) CleanBC: Better Homes
I’m charged and inspired from our team building and ‘show and tell’ sessions with GDX last week. I met our full CleanBC team in person along with our new scrum master. We had two sessions on Content and Digital Strategy. Took lots of notes and left me thinking about how I can improve my process and practice. I’m excited for the next phase as we are introducing new project management tools and ceremonies in this next round.

(4) I met Sam in person
I got to meet Sam in person this week. I’ve been working with Sam with BC Parks and Intranet over the last week supporting him with experience design and new tools during his UX Course. He is such a delight to work with!

(5) Resources this week
Climate Crisis Font: An OpenType font based on real arctic sea ice data from 1979 to 2050. It shows the percentual situation of the Arctic ice pack in variable weights.

Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing The Way You Think. I read this book during my study at Hyper Island and it framed my mental model of beliefs. Highly recommend.

Disrupting Narratives. Ted Hunt is a Critical Designer and Fellow at the School of Critical Design. If you are looking for some thought provoking mental models, I suggest a follow on instagram.

Kevin’s notes

Two short weeks in a row, both highly compressed in the content of each day. I’ve been majority focused on CleanBC, attempting to provide more substantive inputs at the project level while simultaneously thinking/working at the strategic. A high-level rundown from the past two weeks:

• We facilitated a generative session w/ the Energy, Mines, and Low Carbon Innovation (EMLI) team who own and operate Better Homes, our next area of service focus in the initiatives; what are the key tasks for users, what are the main challenges with the service, etc? Glad to get key vendor partner CityGreen involved as well. I don’t do a lot of workshop facilitation these days so it’s both fun and slightly nervous when I do!
• Following this we delved into workplanning, first in estimating what could be accomplished in this phase and then breaking into epics (agile speak) and roughing out a roadmap.
• We also met as a full team last Wednesday for a day of presentations and socializing. It was so nice to meet everyone IRL and share a meal. A full day of social interaction was fairly exhausting, reminding me of the emotional muscle that’s atrophied over the past couple years.
• [sub bullet] one of the presentations was from Kaitlyn Rosenburg of the GDX content design team, storytelling on the experience delivering government Covid messaging through the pandemic, lessons learned and process/structure built. We’re always looking to evolve our collaborations with our colleagues at GCPE, lots to glean from her sage reflections.
• This week Meg and I formalized much of our last phase retrospective into actions we’re taking to improve team experience/delivery. A sampling of key adjustments we’ll be making: slowing down to work more rigorously and thoughtfully, timing our agile ceremonies more effectively, incorporating a new tool in Zenhub (again to rigour), having better-defined guardrails around decision making and approvals, spending more time on the meta-synthesis between the service and the overarching initiative, and iterating on ways to keep exec informed and engaged. I could write a stand alone post detailing the how of it all, so if you’re interested leave a comment!
• We had our first sprint planning with our new scrum master Sid. It was a learning-by-doing process with the value likely to reveal itself downstream. I’m glad we’re taking the time to better estimate and assign; it’s critical to better balancing our velocity and delivery quality.
• Conversations around the new CleanBC MVP with CAS and GCPE. We’re close to a decision and it’s a great place for us to start in delivering a new digital experience for gov climate comms.

Other things

• Leadership cohort! I had my ‘homeroom’ ( persistent team over the next year) kickoff and my 360 review. Whew, so much to dig into from the 360… to the surprise of no one (least of all myself) I score low on composure and high on authenticity 😬
• EPD design discovery final findings and recommendations presentation. Great work Jackie and team! Such an impressive scope.
• What might STB and Parks’ collaboration look like over the next while? Where is the emergent need? There’s certainly much opportunity with the recent sector reorg, placing Rec Sites and Trails in the same division as Parks. Readiness, alignment, timing, prioritization, all part of this discussion.
• As everyone will mention in this post, we held a STB retro and some light planning with our new Exec Lead Amy in attendance. I really enjoyed meeting Amy, learning about her experiences and expertise, and spending time with the team talking about our very positive last year serving ENV and ways to improve!

This week in tabs

• The No Handoff Manifesto: No-handoff builds on a rich body of Agile insights, tools and methods, with the specific goal of eliminating project handoff between disciplines — especially from designers to developers.
• Code for America: Policy designed for the digital age. Great to revisit this piece by Jennifer Pahlka, thanks for the reminder rumon carter.
• The dilemma of designers’ empathy delusions by Jason Mesut. The notion of authentic empathy for a designer to leverage in their work came up in conversation this week. As with most things, I’m a critic of this reductive/methodized ‘tool’ in our processes.

Jill’s notes

I have to put this right at the top because if you only read this far it’s worth it. Listen to Brené Brown’s Dare to Lead Podcast: Leading with Purpose in a Digital Age with Dr. Linda Hill. I started writing highlights but it looked a bit more like a transcript. I will be picking up (let’s be serious, downloading) a copy of Dr. Hill’s book Collective Genius: The Art and Practice of Leading Innovation.

On transformation, this thread with Pia Andrews and rumon carter caught my eye today. On point.

Okay back to it, over the last 8 working days here’s the good, the bad and the ugly.

The good

• I got a new boss, Amy Avila, and she joined our team for a great irl planning session on Wednesday afternoon.
• In that session, I couldn’t believe how energizing it was to meet in person as a team. We spent our time doing a retro on our first year and sharing our observations and insights with Amy. I’ll certainly share our reflections once I’ve synthesized them next week.
• I committed to space last week for deep thinking, and I did it. There were a few hiccups re: not checking in and a bit of phone time. I’d give myself a solid 70% on the first attempt.
• A few great one-on-one sessions with my colleague and peers over the last two weeks. Highlights are, the darn government is small, everyone knows everyone, talent is abundant if you just look, and estimates are a gold mine of information.
• BC Data Council gave a great walkthrough of its history, accomplishments and next steps. Kudos to Colin Newall and Alex Ritchie for the great walkthrough.
• Digital Era Leadership Program led by Amy Kirtay and the Digital Academy is rolling and we are pitching ENV as a pilot cohort. It’s targeted at senior leadership and is being co-designed and delivered by the Digital Academy, Public Digital and Imprint Consulting.
• I had several positive HR experiences this week. Yes, repeat that. A few great conversations on files that are well over a year in the making and looking like they are getting to a resolution. And, high praise for our colleagues in the Digital Delivery Unit for their speedy and welcoming approach to hiring and onboarding. Chris Evans, our agile team lead, deserves special recognition!

The bad

I self-checked a fair bit this week. I was running a bit hot on some of our initiatives that aren’t trending to the timelines I’d like. I had to remind myself that wasting time on things I can’t control is not productive. Time for a refocus.

The ugly

It’s not really ugly but it sounded like a great trio of headings — I’m starting to panic re: Kevin’s leave. We have a great plan coming into place and I couldn’t ask for a more diligent and thoughtful person to be setting us up for success. Regardless, it’s a good reminder for me to set appropriate expectations (and personal boundaries) with our executives and colleagues.

Next week I’ll be running a digital era leadership course for the Digital Investment Office in our OCIO. The theme is one-part concept intro and overview, and one part “what signals should you be looking for to provide help”. The branch is taking serious ownership of partnering with program areas on modern delivery. It’s always been the ‘plan’ but in previous years I’m not shy to say the collaborative model from our OCIO peers has felt more like a ‘distant oversight’. This shift is welcome and necessary for us to move forward.