July 15th, 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

Summer Mondays after a weekend spent in the woods and by the ocean always feel a bit shocking. My family spent the weekend on Pender Island, so this week’s first few days felt like a stark contrast to the slow hours and hammock time of Saturday and Sunday.

Always be Aligning — I’m spending a lot of time aligning to (everything) my new role. This means I’m building new relationships, orienting to new service challenges and familiarizing myself with our technical platforms and teams.

This week I spent a lot of time talking to people across the division and natural resource sector to help align to our digital services and approach on issues like improving transparency on mining information and reporting on community energy emissions. It always feels like a lot of heavy lifting upfront when you’re first starting out — but is so worth it to ensure expectations, resources and vision are aligned down the road.

Alignment
— What’s the problem to be addressed?
— Who does it impact?
— Who needs to be involved — what’s the team that needs to work on this?
— What does the team need to succeed?

Chatting with Kevin on Monday helped align our team on some key areas to focus for the coming weeks and months: CleanBC and Environmental Protection Division (EPD). It’s great having him back in action :)

• CleanBC needs strategic design and stakeholder support through this summer in the absence of dedicated Product Owner — we’re seeing the impact of a not having a single role proactively connecting with stakeholders and the challenge it is for senior designers to play both a designer and product owner role.
• EPD is moving through procurement for a new vendor team and socializing their digital transformation work across the division. I’ll be jumping into the product challenges for the team next week.

Reflecting on the practice of alignment, it was great to debrief on Tuesday with folks from the Exchange Lab, Ministry of Health, Public Digital and OXD on work on some alignment efforts between the Ministry of Citizen Services and Ministry of Health over the last 8ish months.

• The project work clarified ministry roles and respective priorities for digital products and services — and helped us understand how product teams are conducting user research and building their backlogs.
• Over the months gain insight on the impact of siloed work and teams, a proliferation of health portals and need for user research as an ongoing practice vs a point-in-time occurrence.
• The debrief itself hit home on how alignment work can be a winding, circuitous journey that leads to a fairly obvious destination — but that it’s the journey that counts. The shared understanding and support for moving in a new direction comes from the work and effort you put in to align on that direction in the first place.

I also had a great chat with the team building out government’s new Digital Plan this week. I really appreciated the discussion around improving service delivery across government and bringing new voices and perspectives into discussions around digital government (i.e. not just chatting with people that have digital/service in their job title).

Team structure — What’s a sustainable structure for service transformation teams? Is there one? Or maybe, we just need to accept that in our current context of so many people moving roles (myself included)and a generally volatile social/political/environmental climate, that sustainability is a myth more than a realistic goal. I think the goal may be building resiliency and depth to support teams as the undoubtedly change over the short-and long-term.

I’m working on defining senior leadership roles to strengthen our team and be embedded in divisions to support both capital projects and ongoing digital services. I had some great conversations this week in the ministry about this, helping me hone in on what need the roles will be filling and how they fit into organizational charts. I’m also keen to chat with folks at Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation as I hear they’re also working on similar roles. Here’s to consistency and clarity on digital roles across government!

Design career path — I finally sketched out a job matrix for service design roles this week and shared it with the Digital Talent team at the Exchange Lab. This has been on my to-do list for far too long — I’m excited to start share it around and start being more clear about career progression for human-centred design roles in government. H/T to GDS’s DDaT (Digital, Data and Technology) Profession Capability Framework for helping inform this work.

The matrix outlines service design roles, responsibilities and qualifications for IS21 (entry level) to senior leadership roles (Band 3/4). It will also require proposing and classifying some new roles (IS30 senior staff) to help round out the career ladder. I’m excited to see design roles evolving to meet the existing standards for developers and a clearer path for ministries to hire for multiple staff roles and more senior level design leadership roles.

Procurement — And, what’s a week without a procurement chat?! It was fantastic to chat with Steve at the Digital Marketplace to help me put together a Code With Us opportunity to bring in a WordPress developer to support CleanBC through this March 2023. I love the quick turnaround and ease of Code with Us — we’re hoping to have the opportunity posted by next Wednesday, with a developer starting the first week of August.

Kevin’s notes

If week one was drinking from the proverbial firehose, week two brought on the existential angst; where can I best create value for my colleagues and teammates? What are my core competencies in these problem spaces? Am I even really needed here at all? Finding a sustainable, persistent, and meaningful rhythm in large, complex, opaque organization environments can be challenging: some days you’ll feel too in the loop, other days out of it. Sometimes you’re being pulled in competing directions, other times you can’t crack the nut of the thing you’re intensely focused on. And more simply, some days feel motivating and productive, others deflating — even Sisyphean. I was reminded of a recent Emotional Agility newsletter from Dr. Susan David:

In tough situations, we often get tough on ourselves. Our culture makes no room for “unpleasant” feelings like self-doubt, so we often suffer through these moments alone. We wonder why we feel so incompetent when it seems as though everyone else has their lives under control.

It’s easy to get hooked on feelings of self-doubt, treating our sense of inadequacy as an immutable fact. Other times we ignore our self-doubt and miss the lessons it could teach us about ourselves, our values, and our goals.

In times like this, it’s important to slow down.

In my recent thesis research I pulled from the work of Donald Schön on reflective practice; the intentionality behind slowing down, the reflection-on-action involving the semi-methodical personal interrogation of an experience, situation, emotion(s) or phenomenon after it’s occurred. For me this manifests as journalling, dog walks, tinkering in the garden; activities that explicitly create space for reflection or are more of an active mediation, enabling a sub/conscious processing and (hopefully) resolutions pathway.

CleanBC: I’ll keep my work updates exclusive to this file this week as it’s where my majority focus has been.

• I’ll be acting (de-facto) in the PO role over the next while until GDX can run a competition to hire for the persistent team. We (the team) are not excited at the idea of a bandaid fix in the interim; onboarding an outsider (contracted or internal) to fill a gap can often inflict more hard than it solves for. And this domain is complexity+ with all the governance challenges, with service areas across government. I’m excited to lean in but am still feeling the blindspots developed in my two month absence.
• The team ran an excellent demo covering progress in the last sprint. Prototypes for MVP look great! Kudos to everyone for a well-prepared/executed session with a wide stakeholder audience.
• We rolled right into sprint retro and backlog refinement. With MVP hard set for a mid-September launch, we’re really in waterfall mode, organized by sprints. Is this ~wagile? Possibly.
• Finally, GCPE upped the ante with net-new must-have content inclusions to correspond with CleanBC campaigns launching in September. Better to know now then later! This clarity of purpose will be helpful in driving our delivery; no more over-attended meetings, no more decision churn, strictly production is the mission.

Other wise this week I further caught up on EPD, had a few coffees with colleagues former and current, and helped Parks on a hiring pannel. And picked berries to help organize my thoughts 🍓

This week in tabs:

• Baby Pics, Life Lessons, and Obits: What Happened to LinkedIn? It’s true, why has the LinkedIn feed become so personal? As someone who basically has no deviation between work and outside-work self, I’m ok with people keeping it real with their online professional network, and yet, I don’t have that inclination for that whatsoever.
• Running inclusive retros: 10 tips for growing as a team! From the Canadian Digital Service. A short/fantastic piece on how to up the quality of your retrospectives.
• Enterprise architecture is dead. Is Sean Boots the most important public sector digital/transformation writer going today? Highly likely. This is a long read but very worth it. For anyone who’s played the game at the organizational level there will be a lot of head nodding.
• Returning to craft. Something I think about a lot as I get further from the daily, hourly doing of design, a mode in which I spent many years. I’m often anxious than distance from practice renders me unqualified to comment; this is the malaise of many design leaders I think. It’s something I’m always working through and this piece is a well-articulated reminder to stay engaged in the craft, for myriad reasons.

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