January 14th, 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
Four days back from a quick weeklong break, things are certainly at full speed. I came back fresh and ended exhausted. All around, a good week.
#DigitalBC Livestream
Happy to guest host this month's #DigitalBC Livestream with Honey Dacanay. We talked about policy and legacy modernization, but I was mainly captivated by her stories and the sheer experience of this space. I highly recommend checking out her writing on Medium. Next month we are chatting with John Jordan re: Digital Identity in BC, and I'm excited that Marianne Bellotti, author of Kill It with Fire, will be joining us in March. If you aren't registered and want to subscribe, do so here.
Climate Action Secretariat
The CleanBC Digital Experience work is well underway led by the immensely talented Meg Stiven. We've started to build a more persistent team model, define the scope and will be circling back with the first formal meeting of our cross-government steering committee next week. For those who have heard me rant about steering committees before, this is precisely the type of project that needs one. It's got ties to many independent and separately mandated initiatives, and the central budget is limited and heavily supplemented by complementary work inside branches and divisions. This necessitates that priorities are discussed at the right level. We've taken a thoughtful approach to assemble decision-makers within program areas for the committee to ensure the accountability and actions require as few hand-offs and games of telephone as possible.
I also learned more about the Climate Partnerships and Engagement Branch, Community Energy and Emissions Inventory, and several new programs under development. There is no shortage of engaging work in this space. With limited capacity, our role is unclear at the moment, but I'd guess it's likely a connector/lubricator within the organization.
Environmental Protection Division
This week, a massive milestone with the submission of our draft Business Case for EPD digital and service modernization. A huge congratulations to the entire team, especially Kyle Murray, Karen Li, Danielle Grbavac, and Amanda Wright. I'm particularly proud of how we've started demonstrating the vital work it takes to build out a business case. This submission was not just the paperwork exercise of writing an excellent business case. During the process, we've started the foundational service design, done a deep dive on the architecture of our legacy systems, exposed the organization to digital era leadership courses, and invested in proactively building the organizational capacity to embrace change. We have a long way to go, but it is worth celebrating. Cheers to the team!
Mega-thon success story
In May 2021 we organized a cross-ministry hackathon with ten teams and over 15 challenging business problems. We've succeeded in creating new connections, launching a few in development solutions, and sharing existing common components. The EPD Annual Use Report for Licence Holders form is a great example, launched in December 2021.
Okay, shifting a PDF to online might seem trivial, but the downstream effects are incredible. The form was created using the Common Hosted Forms Service (CHEFS), a DIY form-builder tool that allows staff to quickly develop and publish web forms. The IIT's Common Services team helped integrate the form with the Government of Canada's Pesticide Product Information Database through their open API, meaning no clumsy, error-prone copy/paste operations into Excel or other datasets. Program area staff can now manage form applications entirely online, supporting digital transformation goals and without piles of emails and paper to deal with. What does this all mean? Hours saved, better data, and the ability to integrate data with other systems and decision support tools. I'd say there Mega-thon was worth the time even for just this one output!
The rest of it
A couple of notable things from the week:
- We met with our colleagues in the Business Improvement Unit. We identified the problems we tackle, key activities, partners, resources, success metrics, and where we may collaborate/ensure we do not overlap. We agreed to stay in touch with a short weekly and that we share common value propositions around objectivity, multi-disciplinary problem solving and supporting best / emerging practices across government.
- I talked about talent and the excellent work underway in the Exchange Lab and Digital Academy. Re-starting some of our training initiatives and re-thinking how we hire digital talent. Specifically what barriers exist, or don't, in the organization. We are moving the dial on so many of the initiatives we started or discussed way back in 2015 when I joined the government. It was a great meeting to start a day.
- We had our second Strategy Execution Team meeting and identified a laundry list of work in progress directly tied to our ministry Digital Strategy. We intend to tie key initiatives into our progress reporting and improve visibility into the excellent work already in flight. Shine a spotlight on the good stuff, if you will.
- Many year-end finance and procurement talks with colleagues across the government as we tee up new work and coordinate what has been committed. It's that time of year where if you said you'd spend it, you better have the plan.
I finish the week struggling to turn off my brain. I am in the “what about this” and “I forget that” phase of the fiscal year. For those public servants or vendors that work for gov, you know exactly the year-end pressure cooker that starts to fire up right now. Every year we promise it won’t be like the last, that we’ll plan a bit better, that we’ll make sure we think about that in September. Yet here we are. Groundhog day. And if I’m honest, this is what I love. I’m good at this part. Albeit I won’t come back to that realization until April, will likely add some grey hairs and log some long days — So do me a favour and remind me that I said this, okay?
Back by popular demand — Shark and Buoy — enjoying absorbing all the sand they can.
Kevin's notes
It's been a long couple weeks since the holiday break. I'm feeling the cognitive fatigue that comes with days of back-to-back meetings; not so much the meeting itself, but the context switching moving from one domain to the next. Our public sector normative model of hour-long meeting blocks that stack up like calendar jenga isn't always super effective — I often find myself back channeling with someone from the previous meeting, trying to close a thread or come to some sort of action that we weren't able to establish in our 60 min. This aside, it'd been a great start to Q4, with the delivery velocity speeding up in the way that only the fiscal year-end pressures can provide.
Rather than giving a playback of the past 5 days, I want to dive a bit deeper into a hot topic from a group discussion this week: what exactly do we mean when we talk about 'service transformation'? This question has been a source of low-frequency churn as things evolve and create minor misalignments.
I'd hope I have something tactile on offer, given the phrase is literally our branch title. But there's no Merriam-Webster reference to lean on, and truth is, we're most often defining it along the way. It's contextual to the teams and organization who are living it. And while I'm all for emergent understanding and consensus, sometimes we need codified definitions to rally around. Rather than crouched in the texture of the deliverable, here's some first principals instead.
Service transformation is user centricity. It's a (re)orientation of the organizational culture towards an unflinching prioritization of the external (public) user. But it's also accounting for the internal user experience and its place in service sustainability. It's understanding that digital systems and products are services interacted with by real people, and valuing a qualitative understanding of context to design for better experiences and outcomes.
Service transformation is continuous improvement. One part cultural shift, one part formally resourced ongoing process; nothing is ever done, and services don't function in a vacuum. How will we measure success? How will we learn from users on an ongoing basis? How do we harness big analytic data and synthesize with the qual? What kind of a cadence does this operate on? How is it resourced? How is it reported up? How do we hold ourselves accountable?
Service transformation is working in the open. Honesty is the best policy; we've been trying to live that in these weeknotes. But working in the open — not just transparently, but intentionally, across silos — is still novel practice in the BCPS. It's like any other habit that requires time to solidify, and ideally it should mean accountability to the public as well, dialogic, humble, and responsive.
Service transformation is designing for the whole of the system. Designing the policy frameworks which inform the service boundaries and interactions. Designing for the bureaucratic context and our value exchanges. Thinking truly end-to-end in a service, beyond just the platform and interface. And bringing cross-functional teams to bear who are equipped to work in such ways.
Service transformation is driving towards sustainability. Operating models which build teams around products, not projects. Multidisciplinarity and diverse experiences informing the design, delivery, and administration. Platforms built around technology which may be more durable to obsolescence than our legacy systems. Open source, componentized, interoperable, supported by teams with the competencies to apply proactive best practices in service excellence.
Service transformation is doing better today than yesterday. Incrementally and iteratively. It's rejecting the big reveal and delivering value continuously. It's closely aligned with 'true agile' but not being hung up on process orthodoxy. Anything that makes for better value — experientially monetarily, perceptually — is part of an ongoing transformation which understands that the only constant is change.
