November 10th, 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

This week I took some time on Monday to write prep week notes — what I was planning on doing for the week. My goal was to use them as a communications tool with my team and colleagues, with the added bonus of pushing me to be clearer on what I wanted/needed to do Monday-Thursday (Remembrance Day, Friday November 11). Looking back on what I actually did vs what I planned to do, I need to give more space for thinking work and relationship building vs check the box tasks.

Some ongoing thinking work:

• How to support product teams across the ministry with hiring, common architecture and components and strategy — from new teams to mature teams (i.e. understanding and meeting their evolving needs).
• How to approach complex and connected service+policy spaces that span multiple services, products and organizations. How do you build a team and break pieces down into manageable-sized units to do user research, map service journeys and policy and then identify supporting digital systems? Easy peasy, right?
• Reflecting on my role as a leader and manager for a smaller team. The branch’s mission is to accelerate delivery of good services and build the conditions to scale this approach. I’m thinking about how our team can more clearly identify markers for the ‘delivery of service transformation’ and the key structural conditions we want to build out this year. This would give a bit of structure (and sense of progress) to the constant context shifting that can come with the role of an ‘accelerator team.’
• Creating space and identifying some clear steps to link up services and digital teams across the natural resource sector. H/T to the Mines Digital Service team for initiating some design upcoming design jams to identify common service patterns and possible components across teams.

A few box ticks:

• Monthly finance meeting
• Booked a social hour for the division to bring our three teams (strategic policy, indigenous engagement, service transformation) together
• Professional development forms and planning

Milestones:

• Code with Us procurement for a service designer to support a data needs assessment for climate adaptation data is now live — hats off to Laura for pushing this live
• I brushed off some public speaking notes to present on a Public Sector Network’s Digital Government and CX Insights panel. To be honest, my comments felt a bit laden with the jargon and the theory of service transformation and digital delivery. A good reminder to keep it simple and to use real-life examples to bring opaque ideas to life.

On my reading list:

• Hack Your Bureaucracy: Get Things Done No Matter What Your Role on Any Team by Marina Nitza and Nick Sinai
• Smart Brevity: The Power of Saying More with Less by Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Roy Schartz

Kevin’s notes

Short week, but a packed week (as evidenced by us writing weeknotes on the following Monday). I spent most the days with my head deep in either resumes or RFP responses. Resumes, working through a shortlist for MOTI senior UX designer hiring, and responses, for C+E delivery team come early 2023. Both are a lot of detailed reading, the responses especially so. Very technical and requiring line-by-line attention. A challenging shift from the ingrained scanning approach that I employ to so much of the documentation that comes across my desk.

I squeezed in some long-overdue coffees as well: with Meg S (formerly our CleanBC product owner, now at CITZ), rumon carter (intrepid service transformation ED at Parks), and my former officemate Ross (who produced Parks’ brand guidelines for us earlier this year). Other than that, standard meetings cadence and a leadership cohort session. Not too much exciting to report so I’ll leave it there, with a bonus tabs dump to make this entry seem a bit more substantive:

• A Guide to Reforming Information Technology Procurement in the Government of Canada from Dr. Amanda Clarke and Sean Boots. A concise and punch read. Two words: Spend. Controls.
• The Climate Economy Is About to Explode from Robinson Meyer of the Atlantic. I’m no economist by any stretch of the imagine but I do like to keep an eye on macro trends in the clean economy. Exponential View by Azeem Azhar is probably my best source for weekly reading.
• The Age of Social Media Is Ending by Ian Boost, also at the Atlantic. A bit of a hyperbolic headline by the signs do seem to be telling. As an elder millennial who’s seen the rise and fall as part of my own formation of relationality in adulthood, I won’t shed a tear. But like, when we’re sifting through the ashes, can we turn IG back into a time-linear photo sharing app? Thx.

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.