March 4th, 2022

5 min readMar 7, 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

It was a heavy week outside of work with the weight of the world these days. But, a great week inside. For real. So many positives coming together and I did not feel that crazy pre-vacation push. It could be I just don’t have it in me, but I think it’s that everyone is busy and everything is changing. We all need a bit of time to settle and re-align before gearing up.

Three more Fridays to fiscal year-end —if you haven’t planned it now, it’s too late.

Things accomplished:

Had a great conversation with Marianne Bellotti, author of Kill it With Fire, on the #DigitalBC Livestream. She is recording a podcast with Ari Hershberg as I write this to dig deeper into all the great questions. It’s a must-watch (yes I’m biased and fangirling). I started pulling out quotes to highlight and there were too many! You just have to watch.

I participated in a panel on Product Management and Iteration with students from the Master of Public Policy in Digital Society (such a cool program if you are interested) at McMaster University. Thank you Honey Dacanay for the invite. The panel was so talented — Kathy Pham, Deputy Chief Technology Officer Us Federal Trade Commission, Ayushi Roy, Deputy, Technology Modernization Fund, US General Services (and co-author of this gem 18F Product Guide), and Spencer Daniels, Senior Product Manager at the Ontario Digital Service. We covered a range of topics in an open 90 minutes session with great questions from the professional students. One of my favourite questions:

Given current events, I feel the urgency of ethical product management being taught from the get-go. From your point of view what message is government continuing to miss around adoption of product thinking and iteration?

Met with our colleagues at Public Digital to chat coaching and mentorship re: ENV Service Transformation. Incorporating their cross-government and international experience driving and delivering digital change initiatives will help take the branch to a new level.

Things I don’t know how to solve [yet]:

On the subject of new level, I’m struggling with what that it looks like and how we build a sustainable service transformation model that can be scaled cross-gov. I know it’s been done before in many spaces, but what is the balance between going rogue and going together?
What role does our branch play in the public-facing internet for the ministry?
Recreation Sites and Trails is new to our ministry, how much can / should we lean in to learn and support this integration and the seamless experience for the public across some of our most important provincial asserts?
Amortization and persistent and embedded delivery team funding. Umph… Need I say more.

Things to look forward to:

Speaking to our internal colleagues at Bright Bytes or BB8’s on Digital age leadership: Building trust through delivery. This one is internal but I encourage you all to join me. The intent is to share some stories and field our questions re: digital-era leadership, building trust through delivery, and fitting these concepts into our current plethora of steering committees and governance structures.
Launch of our new camping reservations service in late March!
Setting up and new Environmental Protection team and onboarding new design team members for Compliance and Enforcement.

Next week, I’m off for a much-needed sunshine vacation to recharge and ponder our next year as a branch (or possibly just recharge). But one last thing — Buoy turned one this week, a great week indeed for the sorta little guy.

This tippy tapper is official 1 year old. He’s gone from calendar management to chomping on sticky notes with a clear desktop. Good on ya Buoy.

Kevin’s notes

Quick notes from me this week as any excess brain capacity over the weekend went to my thesis (sorry!).

First and forecmost, BCparks.ca! A major release for the beta site/service. I’m over the moon at this increment and very excited for the full rollout over summer. Huge kudos due for team Osprey, Parks Web, our main vendor partner OXD, and everyone else who lent a hand.
CleanBC: In-flight reviews as the team rolled into round 2 of user testing/interviewing for GoElectric and concepts for the new CleanBC digital experience. Looking forward to more structured group crtiques
Compliance and Enforcement: continued discussions around governance structures, the boundaries of the problem space, and honing in on optimal outcomes from disovery. C+E was part of the NRS reorg over the past couple weeks so we’re waiting for the dust to settle a bit before digging in.
As Jill mentioned above, we met with folks from Public Digital to discuss coaching opportunities. I didn’t have much on my mind going in, and ended up saying a lot. Turns out we have big ideas for how to scale our model, and I’m excited to get PD’s seasoned advice in doing so.
Jill hosted an amazing DigitalBC with Marianne Bellotti. Check the steam posted above, and also worth a watch is this session from FWRD50 last year.

Things I should be thinking about

What’s the design program at Parks following the successful deployment of the camping reservation system? I have a lot of ideas but we need a leadership regroup on overall transformation roadmap in April to align and refocus. Jane (OXD) and I had a great first chat this week about how we could focus these efforts and I was glad to hear we had the same general ideas.
Speaking of which, I should start work on my Bright Bytes presentation: reflections from a year of embedding human-centred design at the heart of BC Parks.