April 29th, 2022

6 min readMay 1, 2022

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

Jill’s notes

We finished the week (yea, it’s Sunday again) with a great team dinner — including our newest member Laura. Realizing now we did not take a single group shot IRL, nor did I capture the unintended team bonding exercise of prying sourdough out of mini baking tins. Sam made it look easy, Harry literally dug in, and Laura would ‘not be outdone.’ Success by all.

Kevin and I overlapped a fair bit as his last week before heading off to the academic workspace for a few months, so I’ll endeavour not to duplicate.

The [very productive] highlights:

We had a great working session with the CleanBC Digital Experience team. Some things work better in person. Unstructured meetings geared around a few key bullets/barriers are among them. I can confidently say I don’t think we would have got there online. Mural/Miro board or not. Great session.
I delivered the first half of two Digital Eral Leadership sessions to our Digital Investment Office at CITZ. We shifted the frame and focused on aligning each topic, such as human-centred design or agile, to three things related to their support role for our government-wide digital initiatives: 1) what behaviours might you observe? 2) what language might you hear? And 3) what questions can you ask?. The goal is to build out an actual or mental checklist of sorts to help onboard and support ministries. Sport red flags, but more importantly, spot yellow flags and dig in before it’s too late. With their permission, I’ll report on the outcomes after next week.
I had a few great catch-ups post work with Jaimie Boyd and Carol Prest. Great to link to the work of others and get a better sense of what’s going on in the ecosystem. I feel like I leave every conversation with Jaimie with a solid list of reading/research ‘todos.’
We continued our monthly connections with Mines Digital Services and the Forestry Digital Services team. It's great to hear what is going on across the NR, even if it was only a power fifteen minutes!
We have liftoff! Endorsement on Friday from our exec leadership re: our pilot participation in the Digital Era Leadership Program for senior executives starting in June. I just typed and deleted ‘stoked’ four times, so here it is.
Three-year modernization planning is in flight, and I’ve had some great meetings with our NRIDS colleagues. We met Friday to chat about progress. Though it was 3 pm on a Friday, I left feeling confident and happy with the progress. Kudos to Daryl, Darren, Shannon, and Clover for making this happen.

homework

I charged the DIO crew with the following. If you are so inclined, put 30 mins in your calendar and go at it this week.

Watch Honey Dacaney talk governance at FWD50 — (17 minutes) 44 to 1:03 (watch the whole thing if you have time)
Read Delivery-driven Government — Jennifer Pahlka (8 minutes)
[Bonus in the Tabs] Five Koans of Software Architecture and the No Handoff Manifesto (from Kevin’s post last week)

close

As Kevin reflects below, our team truly is hitting their stride and has an outstanding balance. It’s a model we will seek to define further over the coming weeks. I believe the model is capacity, and I think the model doesn’t have to be with just our skill sets, given the endless scope and needs of various ministries. It must be scaled but not replicated if that makes sense. How do we balance growth and new skillsets and, quite frankly, have more of an impact? What does Service Transformation 2.0 look like? So many questions to ponder!

Kevin’s notes

And just like that — I’m on leave for two months, with a thesis to move forward and some time on the road to enjoy. While there’s never really a good time to step away from the work, it feels especially bittersweet right now as I feel we’ve just turned an important corner with CleanBC, making important strategic decisions to better enable conditions for successful deliveries. It’s been a real pleasure to work alongside Meg in leading the teams, and I know there will be plenty to delve into once I’m back.

It’s a useful juncture to reflect on the Service Transformation Branch’s value as a (still relatively new) unit at the ministry. Fourteen months in, I believe we’ve found the rhythm — critical deliveries are the priority and driver, and supporting high profile initiatives is our mandate. We’re a small team but the right dynamics are at play; Jill working with senior exec and engineering the organizational conditions, myself leading design initiatives and helping build capacity, and Harry/Sam/Laura leaning into the doing, providing outsized value wherever they go. In my (very biased) opinion, every ministry should have a team like ours: experienced digital-era practitioners on hand to support complex and tenuous service delivery challenges, part of a rising tide which lifts all boats.

But before I go dark for the next bit, here’s the high level of the last week:

First and foremost, Laura joined our team! We go way back as service designers at GDX, and she comes most recently from the Ministry of Health Innovation Lab. I’m thrilled she’ll be leaning into CleanBC in my absence and bringing her deep government design experience to bear in this continually emerging space.
Monday concluded our sprint planning for the Better Homes and CleanBC streams, with the team quickly embracing Zenhub as our new productivity management tool. Big shoutout to Sid (scrum master) for coaching us through planning and the nuances of the platform.
We continued to work through MVP for the CleanBC digital experience. While it likely won’t be the forthcoming climate adaptation strategy, we’re feeling better about a nascent plan for prototyping our speculative IA through the first couple of levels. There’s a whole sub-post to be written on the ongoing question of MVP, but the short version is — this is a service (an information service) where incremental delivery doesn’t make as much sense as, say, a multi-pathway transactional product. Fragmented topic/content areas which should seamlessly interconnect need to be complete(ish) to make sense as a public experience. So much of the work here is content strategy, and its interdependencies within the mental model we’ve established don’t make for easy discrete deployments. We still have work to do to deliver continuous public value and avoid a protracted internal design/review phase before a big reveal.
We worked on governance and team model as a leadership team, with Kelsey (GDX) and Jill joining. A very useful session which helped us move the bar on some sticky HR/finance issues.
Our collaboration with GCPE continues to crystallize and deepen. Gratitude to Karl Hardin, especially for embracing us as equal partners in the visioning of this important government brand/platform.
Harry, April, and Audrey delivered a process/outcomes briefing to the BCPS Human Centred Design community of practice regarding our work on Go Electric. I sat in on a dry run earlier in the week and was so impressed with how they packaged the narrative in such a concise and accessible way. Great job, team!

Non-CleanBC things:

We kicked off the Compliance and Enforcement design discovery with our partners from Versett! It’s been challenging to get this scope off the ground, but I’m very excited at the talent and direction now that we’re running. Big kudos to Steve Kot for his stewardship of this process.
There were a couple of lively meetings regarding Parks digital/ transformation roadmap and its current state realities. It’s imperative to transition the beta information services site to the primary experience ASAP. It’s also critical the holistic architecture of the org supports a stable and sustainable trajectory. No easy answers, but we progress through continued discourse and alignment.
I delivered an HCD overview as part of the Digital Era Leadership curriculum to the Digital Investment Office at CITZ. I always enjoy this piece and the process of updating my presentation to better tailor it to the audience. This group does such interesting work, and design should be a cornerstone.
I talked to a handful of trusted confidants about gov stuff. Change is the only constant in this organization, and it’s wise to keep your eyes on the horizon. I count myself lucky to have built a strong network that’s responsive and empathetic; advice from peers is a precious commodity indeed.

So long for now folks, take care of yourselves and each other. I’ll see you here again in July.