November 26th, 2021

In the spirit of transparency and candour, Kevin and Jill publish weeknotes reflecting on the what and why for their team.

Jill’s notes

I must admit the week was a long blur, but it had some highlights.

This isn’t just a new tool, this is a fundamentally different way of approaching our work

— digital-era leadership participant

Yes! I love seeing our colleagues show up and lean into our digital-era leadership course. This week was the first of two sessions for the Environmental Protection Division. We aim to discuss how we integrate digital into our every day and NOT just call it out as the “IM/IT component” of the project or service.

Kevin and I prepped our deck and talking points for the Public Sector Innovation Show — British Columbia on December 2nd. I hope you can join us, and if not, I can guarantee we’ll be taking it on a bit of a roadshow. Thanks, Harry, for making our chicken scratch look beautiful.

Aaron Unger and I had a great session with the Forestry Modernization team as they stand up a scaled agile approach to modernize over 60 business applications. As always, putting people and users at the centre was our narrative. It’s vital to pivot away from this idea that we only stabilize the application, re-platform, and then modernize. Ugh. I revisited several highlights, but over 60% of what we built for mines was not in the legacy system — and plenty was left behind and the data archived. Some other key points (that probably seem obvious if you’ve been following along):

1. Start with one team, don’t scale too fast, build a team, deliver, then scale. We had about eight months between our first and second-team onboarding in Mines Digital Services.
2. Think about a hybrid team over a fully staffed team. This structure gives you time to find the “right” resources and not just the available resources. This talent market is tough.
3. Throw your “NO” in the garbage can. If the team needs something before you say no, understand what barriers it removes and how it can help. For example, the team needs testing software, and it’s going to be $5k a year — GREAT if that is what will get us well-tested code and a happy team — do it and quickly. The Product Owner should be able to make those decisions with the team. It doesn’t mean skipping the privacy, security, or procurement implications, but it does mean we don’t get in the way because that’s how we’ve always done it.
4. Write down your outcomes and how you will measure them. Even if they are your best guess, that’s okay. Revisit every 3–4 months with the team and exec at release planning.
5. PUSH every boundary on what you think is possible in the public service. Be ruthlessly open, flatten governance, no briefing notes, only decision records, put the team and your users first, and do your best to live the agile principles.
6. Oh, and governance, as Fraser says, these are just the steps to being a good manager:

Digital or simply put, good governance

Finally, my wife had an epic milestone birthday with, I think, three parties (hence the all-consuming weekend), including hosting a dozen of our closest for American Thanksgiving. Very ready to dive in this week (yea, it’s Monday morning) — with a fresh brain and full heart.

Kevin’s notes

This week flew by! I was in a great mood the whole time — loving the tone, texture, and pace of the work right now. So many exciting things on the go. Some quick hits:

• Digital-era leadership curriculum with Environmental Protection Divison leadership Monday and Tuesday mornings. Jill led, I co-facilitated and delivered my human-centred design overview. Awesome group, super engaged, and lots of a-ha moments relating the big ideas to the practical realities of program and service delivery. It was a great experience front to back.
• Updates and strategy on EPD design discovery as this current scope drives to recommendations. Great work team!
• Parks: leaning back in with various design streams. It’s going to be a high velocity next few months for the team-of-teams and the intersecting delivery priorities, looking forward to being more involved in strategic stewardship and an eye to the whole service ecosystem.
• Public Sector Network Innovation Show BC next week! Jill and I have our narrative roughed out, and Harry whipped up a beautiful deck, per usual. Hopefully, a couple of dry runs early next week will have us feeling solid; this is material near and dear to this team’s heart, so it doesn’t take too many reps to feel confident in what we’re looking to convey.

I’m caught up in the whirlwind of packing and finalizing all move logistics (we move—thankfully just inter-neighbourhood—mid next week), so I don’t have too much spare brainpower for reflection right now. That said, I did want to briefly riff in defence of meetings.

We meet a lot in the public service. Like, a lot. Sometimes exec’s calendars are, as I like to put it, completed ‘bricked,’ meaning all day every day is booked solid. I’m certainly not defending that volume of meeting s— we all need time to actually do the work, be it consider/making decisions, writing, or deep thought (sidenote: freeform time to just think [ideally generatively] is an undervalued use of time in government). And ‘Zoom fatigue’ is very real, with all our meetings being online. I find more than 2–3 hours contiguous of the screen-based meeting to be quite cognitively tiring. Humans are built to move! Active reset time helps bring back the ability to focus and meaningfully contribute.

That said: when meetings are right-sized, with the right people, with a clearly articulated purpose in pursuit of a shared outcome, they can be exactly what’s required in furthering the deep alignment necessary in complex problem spaces. We have a semi-rule — when chat threads go longer than 4 or 5 replies between two or more parties, it’s time to get in the (virtual) room. We often think of meetings in gov as being predetermined to 30 or 60 min blocks, but a responsive 10 min chat can do wonders for shared understanding.

This week I enjoyed a few very productive meetings that pushed forward our collective goals through both building out relational fabric and getting crisp on the tasks and outputs. This doesn’t happen over chat or via email, and it’s tough to dial in our wider standups. Outcome-oriented/motivated meetings are requisite glue for us social creatures; interactive, constructive, validating, and clarifying. I hear a lot of hate for meetings, and I get it. But when done right, they can catalyze the trajectory for what we’re looking to achieve.