June + July 2023: A reflection
In the spirit of transparency and candour, the Service Transformation team publishes reflections on the what and why for their team.
Kelsey’s notes
I have to say, I miss weeknotes. But, a (somewhat) monthly reflection cadence feels more doable.
Over the last twoish months, I’ve been focusing on:
- Hiring and building multi-skilled teams
- The journey to become a service organization
- Learning and growing as a leader and public servant
- Carving out time to think ahead
And, I’ve now been with the Service Transformation Branch for a year! Time flies — I’m excited about all we’ve accomplished (retro on that soon) and what lies ahead.
Hiring and building multi-skilled teams
A core tenet of service transformation, digital transformation, agile development, product delivery — generally, modern digital teams — is that multi-skilled teams produce better results. This means bringing together people from different job classifications with divergent perspectives and skillsets to collaborate on designing and delivering government services.
B.C’s Digital Principles note this in Principle #9: Build diverse teams and internal capacity.
The UK Government notes in its Service Manual that, “to successfully build and run a digital service, your delivery team needs to be multidisciplinary and have a range of skills.”
Multi-skilled teams are not the norm. Government teams are usually designed around role or function types.
- Policy roles are grouped together to solve policy problems.
- Finance folks are grouped together to solve finance problems.
- Communications roles are grouped together to solve communications problems.
- Etc, etc.
We’re not organized to solve for services or deliver services (and services usually contain a bit of every type of problem). It’s not common to find a policy role working on the same team as a communications role or data role outside of short duration projects.
Over the last while, I’ve been working to create these informal and formal multi-skilled teams across our ministry. It’s hard work. Digital roles traditionally live in tech shops (Information Management Branches/IMBs), so pulling them into program areas to collaborate on service delivery goes against organization norms. And, creating net-new roles and job descriptions with a focus on data, design or technical development requires us to work closely with HR teams to help them become versed in the why/what/how of building teams to deliver great government services.
This work is happening all over government, at all levels. It’s slow work — but so incredibly important, as it lays the foundation to build new, modern teams to meet the need to deliver modern digital services. Here are a few things we’re working on:
- Adding service design roles to program teams to support them to align policy with how services are delivered to the public. *Workaround: using an ‘administrative’ role so it can be embedded in a program area and on their org chart vs a ‘information systems’ role that typically lives in an IMB.
- Adding a Lead, Data Strategy role to build our capacity to share and use data across the ministry and sector. *Update: Received classification for this net new role, expect to post the role/open for applications shortly!
- Adding a Solutions Architect role to build common approaches to digital applications and services. *Workaround: On paper this ‘information systems’ role will live in an IMB, but it will be operationally a part of the Service Transformation Branch and be dedicated to supporting ENV agile product teams and digital services.
- Establishing a Product Owner role in ENV to convene the digital experience of CleanBC-related services. *Update: Received classification for this new new role and it’s now posted and open for applications until August 16!
- Adding a lead role to connect across the natural resource sector on tools to support compliance and enforcement inspections tools. *Workaround: On paper this role will live in an IMB Project Management team, but operationally report into the Environmental Protection Digital Services team — soon to be posted and open for applications!
Becoming a service organization
To become a service-focused organization, we need to look up from the digital products we’re building and maintaining to make a through line from policy to operations and digital delivery. This shows up in governance, roles and responsibilities, team make-up and measuring what good service looks like.
Over the last month, we’ve made steps to:
- Clarify the vision and strategy to improve how the Environmental Protection division delivers services — particularly outside the scope of the capital IM/IT work driven by the agile product team (i.e. public engagement, sharing information with the public, the foundational legacy systems)
- Consider a portfolio or service-based approach for how we manage products based on key services within the ministry (specifically the Environmental Protection Division to start). What might it look like to have dedicated staff roles, governance and funding that support a portfolio of products that underpin service delivery? I.e. putting the portfolio and service first, before the product. H/T to Karen Li and Shashank Shekhar for leading this work.
- Plain language service transformation. It should be a simple story to tell about how we improve government services — but it’s cluttered with We need to speak to this work in short, easy to understand ways. Even starting at defining what a service is. I especially need to work on this: I received some great feedback from my division colleagues that our branch actions and goals are VERY jargony.
Learning and growing as a public servant
In June, I took participated in Scrum Alliance’s Certified Agile Leadership courses. There’s never a good time for professional development, it seems (it was a busy week), but it always feels good to take time to connect with others and reflect and learn about how you show up as a member of a team.
A few reflections on the pre-work and reading:
- Showing up as a leader and coach means signalling intent, not giving instructions. Move authority to where the information is.
- The immense value of co-creating and communicating the vision for how a team operates and its principles. Being clear on how we want to work together and constantly revisiting it/promoting sets the direction for team culture. A leaders’ role is to provide guidance and support.
- Understand your strengths and how you show up as a leader. Take an inside-out approach to transformation (i.e. focus on growing self-awareness to grow the team).
The courses were online and cohort based over four days. We took a ten-minute break every hour throughout the three hour class. I really liked that approach — it didn’t feel like marathon stretches of content. And, our teacher, Bob Galen, was a very engaging teacher and we had some great participants in the course, which it made it fun and lively (essentials for online training, IMO).
Some key take aways:
- Agile leadership….is just good, modern leadership. This is so obvious (and should be to me, as I deliver digital leadership training), but I think the term ‘Agile’ has taken on a life of its own these days. I signed up expecting to learn some Agile methodologies and ‘new’ things, but really, these sessions were about how to approach team building, servant leadership and constructive conversations with openness and humility. For me, it re-grounded Agile in actually representing agility, nimbleness, adaptiveness, openness — and not something that only technologists can do.
- We made mind maps! I love mind mapping and we did a great exercise reflecting on where we’ve come from, where we are and we’re going (in our career, our values, life in general). This rooted me and connected me back to my base values — openness, connection, humility, tangible impact and balance — that inform my choices today and tomorrow.
- Don’t just say things, strategize the landing. This speaks to getting ahead of how you’re delivering feedback, presenting an idea or building support for a decision. It’s the pre-work we all need to do to better understand others’ perspectives and ensure what we’re saying lands in the way we want (or need) it to. As a part of this, “better culture starts with better conversations.” ~ Gustavo Razzett
- Eat that frog! I can procrastinate…so this approach resonated with me. I need to work on making time to tackle the trickiest stuff early in the day, before I get to the other pieces that are sometimes easier to check off the list (but perhaps less impactful).
Carving out time to think ahead (i.e. my to-do list)
Reflection time: Somewhat inversley, to think ahead, I actually need to carve out more time to look back. I need to take stock of what we’ve done to inform where we might need to go. Re-starting month/weeknotes is part of this.
Onboarding: This fall we’ll be bringing several new people onto the team — I’m looking ahead to think about:
- A team agreement — the what/how principles and guidelines are team is committed to
- Roadmap and goals — revisit our roadmap, where we are, what’s next
- Defining new roles and areas of focus — setting aside time to work with new staff to set intent and support
Priorities: We need to get clearer on what our top 3 priorities are. Working across the ministry and at all levels of a service (from policy to delivery) means we’re working on with multiple teams that all have priorities — it’s not easy to say no and be more targeted with where we put our energy, but it needs to happen.
This means, setting time to look at where we are and where we’re going — and what are the key areas we need to move forward in the short, mid and long-term to achieve our goals. I’m scheming on a September team session to bring these pieces together.
Looking ahead, the team will be heading out for some much-needed summer R+R over the coming weeks/month — happy summer!
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.
