October 14, 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
Another short week spent focusing on a few key pieces:
Building the Compliance and Enforcement Digital Services team — Had a couple of discussions to move forward with adding a business analyst to the staff team to add to our procurement and analysis bench strength. Met with suppliers interested in the current Product Team procurement on BC Bid — great opportunity to hear questions and feedback directly from vendors as we bring this team together.
UX and copywriting to support regional water quality issues —Working with subject matter experts and web designers to craft clear navigation and content hierarchy. More plain language editing to come.
Getting clear on service transformation in ENV — I’ve been in this role for just over three months and am building a bit more of a talk track on the role and goals of our small Service Transformation team. I’ve thrown some slides around for feedback (thanks Kevin and Andrew) and talked through some of these ideas with Amy this week.
We help teams get started on delivering good services, and build the conditions to scale.
We’re helping teams design and build useful services — doing and advising on the UX, writing, strategic design, and policy, data and technology discussions. At the same time, we’re also addressing the organizational hurdles (hiring, skillsets, policy, culture, budget, bringing disparate teams together) that may get in the way so that future teams have a clearer path.
One of the challenges of this approach is prioritization — choosing where to focus so we can deliver the most value over both the short and the long term.
Building out digital leadership training — I don’t mind creating and delivering presentations, as they help push me to get clear on the key principles of the how and why of my work (see above). The upcoming leadership sessions for the Climate Action team will be a great chance to test these ideas with a key audience — managers leading complex and complicated files with many technical touchpoints (but not a huge amount of integration.
I’ll be leaning heavily on the BC Gov/Public Digital collab’s Digital Era Leadership Program aimed at executive for content and alignment. We’ll also be bringing in a variety of BC Gov speakers over the two day in-person sessions to bring life to ‘digital leadership’ across government.
For the third session (delivered online), I’ll need to sketch out a draft path for how leaders can navigate working in internet-era ways — which means what are the typical phases of work, what might a team/approach look like and where they can go for help (budget, design, procurement, development). This in many ways represents some content in a Service Manual, so I’m happy for the deadline to put out an MVP in this space. I’m always (always!) referring to the GDS Service Manual, so would love to start to build out a B.C. version.
A quick note on the value of retros — Jackie led a quarterly design retro on the Environmental Protection Digital Services work this week and it surfaced some key questions and assumptions that may not have be given air otherwise. We spent the hour reflecting on what went well (range of work that had been accomplished, onboarding the vendor team) and what was challenging (calling out some questions about tech choices!). Good reminder that creating the space to collectively reflect gives us the space to move forward in more productive ways.
Kevin’s away this week and next finishing up his residency for his Masters!
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.
