August 12, 2022

In the spirit of transparency and candour, we publish weeknotes reflecting on the what and why for the ENV service transformation team.

Kelsey’s notes

Short week this week — I’m writing these on Thursday afternoon.

• Connected with the CleanBC team to chat about a future operating model to support the service platform — lots of incomplete thoughts, but a foundation to build on. And, we welcomed Allieren to the team as new Product Owner!
• Had some conversations about data strategy and the evolution of the Data Innovation Program (spoiler — lots of discovery research kicked it off).
• Great Service Transformation Branch team meeting to discuss where we’re at, our priorities and what’s happening in the service transformation space across the ministry and natural resource sector.
• Strategic design discussions with the Environmental Protection Digital Services team — meaning we talked about distilling key elements of the services and identifying common patterns, working in the open, onboarding the new vendor team.

A bit about weeknotes:

Kevin and I jammed a bit on weeknotes and why we write them. Full credit to Kevin — much of this is his thinking with my comments peppered in here/there. But — I thought it useful to post them as a record of why and how we draft them if others want to join on the weeknotes train.

Weeknotes are notes, not blogs. Weeknotes are an overview of what we’ve been doing this week. They are a simple way to work more openly, which aligns with B.C.’s Digital Principle #5.

Weeknotes are personal reflections. They follow no set format. We write them in whatever style feel appropriate that week, although we have established some conventions. We write them for ourselves, for the team to have insight into our thinking, and for the wider organization to learn from our challenges and breakthroughs.

Value propositions:

• They hold space for us to reflect on the work, learn from it, and make incremental improvements in our strategy and decisions.
• They create new connections — people who read them get a deeper look into what we are doing and can get in touch to help or ask questions.
• They’re a record to look back on to see how our work, strategy and approach evolves over time
• They show we are willing to working openly and share. This vulnerability is rare in an organization that is risk-adverse and over-indexed to privacy. We have similar experiences and patterns in our work across the BCPS, and it’s nice to learn from others and know you’re not alone!

Considerations:

• Weeknotes start from the premise that open is better — but, we also recognise that not everything can be open. We’re not open about confidential work in progress or internal issues — or anything else that may feel sensitive or inappropriate.
• We’re clear these our personal views and not the views of government (see the disclaimer at the bottom of our notes)
• We want to support and advocate for our colleagues — this means we’re constructive when we reflect on our conversations and activities
• We try to be constructive and honest. Service transformation work is hard — we’re pushing for change and it’s helpful for us (and others) to be open about what feels hard about the work.

Kevin’s notes

Another high velocity week, which runs against gov norms for August; usually there’s a slowdown due to vacation inertia but our teams have been largely intact. We’re certainly seeing a gap in the availability of senior decision makers but at a strategy and production level we’ve kept it humming. Rapid fire for the week:

• Allieren came about as acting product owner for CleanBC! 🍾 cause for celebration indeed. Formerly a director for digital at GCPE, her deep experience in high-touch, fast-moving political spaces is a major asset to this work, especially in navigating our MVP through approvals from all stakeholders. The team needed a dedicated PO and we couldn’t have landed with a better person.
• We worked on the future CleanBC operating model; owned by GDX, the time will soon come for our current team, a patchwork mostly comprised of STB, to roll off. What is the right composition? What supports will they need? What’s the roadmap? All questions what need advancing but it was good to fire this conversation back up.
• I spent a lot of the week strategizing on demos and approvals sequence as we run up to MVP. Big thanks to Kelsey and Allieren for the collab; it strikes me that the black box-ness of approvals tends to rear its head in every initiatives I’ve ever been in; always contextual, always novel, always learning by doing. Approvals are part and parcel with governance but the process tends to become more acute when it’s actually time to launch a thing.
• We kicked off late-stage user testing ideation for MVP; easy to deprioritize in the dead sprint to deliver, we need to validate our work with users before launch, period.
• As Kelsey mentioned, we had a full-team STB session, long overdue. Great to reconnect with how our work fits within sector priorities and start to think about the suite of work which may come next.
• On a related note, I was fortunate to spend 1–1 time w/ Amy (our exec lead) to dive deeper into sector strategy and emergent practice, especially with regards to Indigenous engagement. It’s an exciting time in the natural resource sector (is it ever not?), and I’m always grateful for the opportunity to talk things through w/ senior exec. My work is ever more impactful if it’s systemically connected to patterns and priorities across the organization.
• Kelsey and I spent a good amount of time further integrating ourselves into the EPD agile team inception strategy. Big thanks to Jackie and Haley for humouring all my basic questions; it’s a privilege to get to ask these of folks who’ve been living in the domain, and we promise to make it useful through the course of the project.
• This included a session with Jordan from the Lab to better understand what their current corporate service offerings look like, and how to access. A session that I’d been keen on for a while, my understanding of their model received a much needed update.
• Parks! I’m finding my way back. I attended yet another excellent sprint review and chatted w/ Leah about current opportunities to bring beta.parks.ca over the finish line and sunset the current info services site. More on this to come in the weeks ahead but suffice it to say, I’m thrilled to be back in the mix.
• Finally, 1–1’s, lunch w/ a colleague, some office time with its serendipitous conversations; good human connection this week, always outsized value from investing in relationships.

May your weekend be open trails and expansive views, however that might manifest.

From the High Divide, Olympic National Park (Washington State).

The opinions and views expressed in this post are solely the author’s and do not represent those of the Province of British Columbia or any other parties.