August 27, 2021
In the spirit of transparency and candour, Kevin and Jill publish weeknotes reflecting on the what and why for their team.
Jill’s notes
And we’re back. With three weeks of reflection under my belt, a few indulgent days of food and drink, and a new respect for the cooling effects of aloe vera, here we are.
In full transparency (as always), this week hit me hard. I’ve noticed a post-vacation pattern and will use it as a frame for my notes this week:
Monday
You return from vacation, block some time to wade through hundreds of emails and meet with your team. Ease into the week. You’re pleasantly surprised by how well things are going, how little is on fire, and how calm everything seems.
Tuesday
A bit busier, back-to-back meetings, but still some space. The catch-ups are a priority, lots of casual chats, and you begin to remember “why” you have a job and “what” you were doing three weeks ago. Yet still, you remember the lake, the relaxation, and the “new” approach you’ll take to limit stress.
Wednesday:
It hits you like a cold shower — “oh right, work!”. While you panic about the two light days you had, the real “to do’s” start to hit you. The real stories of what is in flight and what might be on fire emerge. The respect for the post-vacation bliss has faded, and your team is ready to let it all loose. I found myself hammered with tasks—some strategic, some admin, and incredibly time-consuming. I have to remind myself that starting a new branch is labour intensive. You create new positions, hire new people, and work through all the processes and approvals that that entails. Every public servant out there just eye-rolled at that statement and knows exactly what I’m talking about.
Thursday:
Save me. Or don’t. I’m so confused.
It’s a rollercoaster of amazing meetings with local vendors — shout out to Button, who re-ignited my passion for meaningful work and left me with several golden nuggets — and debilitatingly frustrating realizations that there is SO much work left to do. I had some tough conversations and caught myself saying “really?” more than once.
Friday:
We made it! Oh, Crap, there is so much to do, but I’ll do it next week. All in all, the week was solid. It was busy, and there were plenty of tough conversations.
Weekly musings
None of the above recognizes the incredible work of my team and many of my colleagues who kicked butt that past month. We work with some absolute rockstars. I was beyond excited to see the products that have been delivered, particularly in our emerging BC Parks work. Always amazed with the talent that surrounds us.
Speaking of talent, the highlight of my week was Sam Terani presenting solo for the first time to a group of Executive Directors and Regional Directors. He prepared the deck, took feedback, and practiced. Sam impresses me every day. He’s an emerging star who shows up with an incredible work ethic, a willingness to lean in, and a curiosity that I certainly take advantage of. Thank you, Sam; we love having you on the team!
Next week, a six-month reflection on what we’ve accomplished (yes, the end of august marks just six months). Until then, we’ll continue to dive into the amazing opportunities ahead. I needed that vacation. I feel more balanced and ready for what lies ahead. Service transformation? Bring it on!
Kevin’s notes
I’ll say, three weeks away from these weekly musing and it feels like I’ve never written a word in my life. Bear with me as we ease back into things.
It’s been an unchill month, honestly. And this week I should have been in the Bugaboos on a dream climbing trip, which unfortunately fell through as my climbing partner had to go and get a job after some time searching (editors note: I’m not actually mad at him for this). As such, I’ve been hand on the tiller, stewarding and advancing current and forthcoming work. Let’s take a walkthrough.
BC Parks
In what is a slight reveal compared to what we’ve been alluding to previous, I’ve been working on framing up and procuring exploratory and discovery design scopes for camping services. It’s no surprise to anyone that our digital experience needs an upgrade — it’s been a challenging couple of seasons for everyone, from the visiting public to Park Operators and Parks HQ. We’ll be defining the problem space, pathways to transformation, and establishing a solid base of research to drive decision-making. This is (obviously) a much bigger undertaking than a paragraph can convey. Much more on this to come.
We’re also driving hard to deliver the new bcparks.ca. It’s was a tough go the past week, no lie. I wouldn’t have expected anything else though. A decade of complex digital project experience has taught me that it’s always hard, especially in the homestretch. Throw in the public sector context and you can expect communications lapses, misalignments, competing prioritization, etc. How do we get through? Continue to communicate, ad nauseam if required. Document. Trust the standout talent and the leaders, formal or de facto. Level set up the org chart. And most importantly: be honest. Misrepresenting things will only ever be to your detriment. There’s a lot to celebrate in this project, though. The CMS is the modern, extensible platform we need it to be. The new UIs look amazing. The revamped information architecture is future-facing but accounts for the breadth of legacy content which must come with the site (this was no small feat). The design system is strong and user-focused. There were a lot of organizational lessons learned throughout this project, and we haven’t delivered yet — but with focus and proactivity in these critical final sprints, we’re going to get there.
The brand standards projects continues to move along, with great progress made in compiling the breadth of brand assets at Parks and beginning to see the forest for the trees. I was glad to sit in on interviews across Parks branches, coming to understand the range in opinions on ‘brand’ and how it’s manifested across touchpoints. Super excited about where this work is headed — while small in scope, it’s important stuff.
Climate Action Secretariat
We’ve run a couple of ecosystems mapping workshops recently, and per usual, the value of the exercise is not the artefacts themselves but the conversations they enable. Reporting at CAS is an opaque operational environment driven by legislative requirements and the various policies and workstreams they produce. These reporting outputs are driven by parallel teams who often lack line of sight into each other’s initiatives. Compound this with expanding remit, political spotlight, and public demand for climate action information, and you need more effective and user-centric processes. We’re just at the beginning of this journey with CAS, and I’m excited to see where it leads.
Environmental Protection Division
Procurement! I’m helping spin up a design team to take things apart and put them back together again this fall. I’ve met some awesome design talent from our vendor collaborators recently, and I’m looking forward to embedding top-tier talent with the division. This will be ‘crunchy’ work in government parlance — deep dive legacy application dissection and reconfiguration around user needs and contemporary service delivery best practices.
Reflection time
I’m trying to remember life before working from home — can you? How did I manage hours and hours of back-to-back meetings without my bathroom and kitchen an arm’s length away? I was always a WFH skeptic, enjoying the white noise and sociality of the office (or, in the past few years, co-working space). But over 2020 and into this year, I’ve come all the way around. Maybe it was the fancy chair and standing desk, or all my houseplants and lunchtime dog walks, but I’ve ended up loving working from home. However, I noticed new normative behaviours that come with the remote lifestyle, some that aren’t ideal yet already seem standard practice. One of these is answering emails/DMs during a meeting. You would never do this in a room with other living, breathing humans. However, when alone in your home office, with two screens for maximum efficiency, why not? It’s easy to argue that with calendars stuffed with meetings, doing the actual work (the work-work) requires some multitasking if you’d like to avoid 12 hour days. Also, it feels pretty innocuous to send a quick reply while listening to a presentation. But what about honouring someone’s time with your attention? And the deep listening required for us to really understand? I’ll admit, I’m a damn octopus when it comes to my workday, doing numerous things at once always, further enabled by the WFH context. Is this a good thing? Time will tell.
As summer winds down and the realities of balancing work and grad school come back to the fore, I leave you with an image of me in my happy place, with the gifts of singular focus and attention requisite in the vertical realm.
