September 10th, 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

We are 6-months old! It’s really 7-months since I started in February, but I affectionately like to take a soft average since Kevin joined us in late March. We’ve embedded ourselves within the ministry, built trust with staff and delivered.

“Try not to become a [person] of success, but rather become a [person] of value” — Albert Einstein

We’ve done a lot in a short time so forgive the length. It seems minimal to put each of these in bullets when they represent tens if not hundreds of hours of work, but here goes my attempt to summarize the value we’ve delivered via some key targetted outcomes — beginning with our guiding principles.

Target 1 — Modernize internal communications tools

The first step in this journey is to modernize and triage the information on our aged Drupal platform and move it into the corporate CMS Lite offering. Working in collaboration with web staff, Sam Terani has led the charge. Our approach was to understand the needs of staff, identify fit-for-purpose technology solutions (e.g., internet, teams, other?), and tackle ongoing governance and maintenance. The result — thousands of assets transferred, new ownership, improved communications, and platform to iterate. This includes:

• New Deputy Minister’s Office and the Environmental Sustainability Divison Sites.
• User feedback on the Climate Action Secretariat (CAS) and Strategic Policy Division — publishing soon.
• BC Parks and Environment Protection Division (EPD) sites planed, with portions published.

Sam also leveraged our internal Common Hosted Forms tool (agile IIT Common Services team product via Christian Evan and Matt Hall as product owners) to launch and support several EPD priorities internal and public-facing. We are on track to finish the majority of this work by the end of the calendar year.

Target 2 — Set a cohesive direction

We need to articulate why we need to make our services easier, more accessible, and put more focus on using data to drive our decisions. We started with an application inventory, knowing what we have early in the calendar year. Working over the spring with the IIT and Elevate Consulting, we produced a ministry digital strategy. We conducted dozens of engagement sessions across the ministry, drafted, iterated, and in June received executive endorsement.

The digital strategy has its strengths and limitations, bridging strategy with a technology plan — but the highlights are clear:

1. We have to shift from the ground up, program-specific, app by app technology delivery model we default to, to building services based on what our users, the public, need.
2. Leading in a digital era requires new/different competencies, and we must embed them to support ongoing change.

This month we are looking to define an action plan with our IIT colleagues and ministry leadership for a Fall 2021 launch.

Target 3— Build internal digital and service transformation capacity

As mentioned above, we know we need different skills to deliver. We’ve taken action to begin building that capacity and awareness inside the ministry.

• Art of the possible — We hosted the first cross-ministry MEGA-THON in May — an environment-themed hackathon. We set out to encourage fun and innovation, give people time and space to tackle new challenging problems and build relationships across teams to inspire new collaborations. We did that, and the result was the delivery of simple solutions and conversations that created new opportunities to work together. For tangible benefit, we saved a quoted investment of $50k in a legacy system by using a form created during the event for free.
• Governance and leadership — Our ADM’s cross-ministry have created space for Service Transformation with a standing Friday update on their agenda. They’ve invited us in to speak at their leadership and all staff tables. We’ve re-pointed the Systems IM/IT Planning (SIP) committee with all the Executive Directors across the ministry to drive our digital strategy. We are now re-evaluating our challenging policy problems recognizing that they all have a human-centred digital element.
• Embedded talent — We’ve hired two new Senior Product Managers / Product Owners into the ministry to lead emerging product development. ESD and Parks have both committed through action (and $$$) to change.
• Digital Era Leadership — In partnership with The Exchange and the OCIO’s Digital Academy, we facilitated multiple instances of the Digital Era Leadership course supporting well over 100 aspiring leaders to learn some good practices and how to lead multi-disciplinary teams in our new reality. Part of this included a specialized Parks session, where our Deputy Kevin Jardine opened the day with a re-articulation of how his passion for service has shaped his career and often tied into using data and technology to improve decision making and outcomes for users.

Target 4— Learn and lead with delivery: BC Parks

Our work with Parks has certainly been about learning as we go and defaulting to delivery. It’s taken a lot of our time and involved a significant commitment from Parks’ leadership and staff at all levels. It started with an attempt to create a coordinated multi-product roadmap. As we dug deeper, we realized we had some hard work to influence the development of a new culture and empower staff before that roadmap would be possible.

An attempt at how it all fits together, at the beginning.

Kevin has led nearly all this work directly in one way or another, from writing Privacy Impact Assessments (PIA’s), to hands-on design work, to managing design teams and writing and evaluating procurements. The key pieces:

• Repeatable and robust user feedback — Kevin worked closely with Becs Hoskins and her team to establish two repeatable approaches to recruiting users to provide site and service feedback. I was personally surprised by the rigour and detail required to set up truly balanced qualitative research. The team reached out to a diverse set of community user groups and received over 50 submissions. Continuing to connect with a diverse range of British Columbians, a call to action was launched on the main bcparks.ca webpage. This is no light task involving multiple reviews from Privacy, GCPE, and senior executive approval.
• Privacy is important — in partnership with IIT’s Privacy shop for the Natural Resource Ministries, Kevin created an overarching PIA that will enable public-facing research and service design activities. This tremendous amount of work means not having to do this every time a new activity is spun up, saving hours of effort and enabling just-in-time research.
• Design system and information architecture — We brought in OXD Consulting (who are amazing!) to tackle the information architecture and our internal Government Digital Experience (GDX) service design team (thanks, Meg Stiven) to continue the work that feeds into the CMS project below.
• BCparks.ca Content Management System (CMS) project —This is hard to describe and will be fleshed out in a project retro to come. Safe to say, we aren’t where we want to be. However, we’ve made a lot of progress, and after a lot of reflection in the past weeks, we know that Kevin and I have 1) embedded the users into the delivery of a new bcparks.ca site, pivoting from just an infrastructure project; 2) secured additional funding from the OCIO to expand this work; 3) learned with our leadership and the organization how and how not to deliver incrementally, and 4) positioned an experienced team to keep this work going. These lessons are already positioning Parks for success. And lastly, shout out to Number 41 who have stepped in late July to add design horsepower and flesh out the design system.
• Content — It does not matter how technically sound a CMS is if you have poor content. Staff have stepped up with Kevin’s guidance to re-think the way information is communicated. In particular, with the Indigenous Relations team on how to better represent the reconciliation journey of the org and the unique stories of Nations as content on the forthcoming site.
• Capacity, capacity, capacity — We’ve advised on new and emerging organization structures to support better service delivery. This includes bringing in a new Senior Product Manager / Product Owner Jessica Wade and Team Falcon. Without them, the CMS product would have been yet another abandoned digital product, orphaning the ability to implement new designs and ultimately make bcparks.ca more accessible and user-friendly. Falcon also used Common Components and GC Notify in May to deliver a POC for Parks.
• Brand standards —Bigger than just a digital product, we are looking at the full-service experience. We posted the long-awaited brand standards RFP, and work is underway. A great asset and north star for Parks moving forward.
• Bigger than bcparks.ca — we’ve continued to lead and structure a project to deliver vastly improved services to Parks users. It is high value, research-driven, and will further build capacity and a platform for iterative service modernization. It’s not just tech. It’s policy. It’s place. It’s people.

Target 5— Focus on the needs of our users

At every opportunity, we have to look for connecting to who we are delivering for. A few real examples:

• We connected multiple disparate legacy systems replacements in a single concept case for a shared set of users for EPD. With a deep cast of supporting figures, a pair of directors, Karen Li and Danielle Grbavac, the concept case lives and breathes the BC Government Digital Principles. This case was developed over the spring and submitted in July to the OCIO.
• Building on the case, we just penned a procurement for a design team to dive into how these legacy applications can be re-imagined around user needs and good service delivery practices. Thank you, Laurel Nash, ADM EPD, for supporting this work and onboarding a full-time Product Owner.
• Rinse and repeat for complaint management: a very complex space. Sectoral reach, regional and centralized ops, legacy systems, data quality, analog interactions, an array of public touchpoints, perception management, political implications. We facilitated a problem definition session and coordinated the development of another concept case.

Target 6 — Connect our work to the wider service delivery ecosystem

We work in a system, but we usually sit in a silo. We take poking holes in those silos seriously, and we do it by connecting within the ministry, government, and beyond. We spend a lot of time meeting and chatting with our colleagues to understand what is going on elsewhere. Some standouts are:

• Connecting our ministry to the BC Data Council and Alex Ritchie and team are doing on data strategy and governance.
• Working more closely with the Climate Action Secretariat, their partner ministries, and our colleagues in GDX and GCPE. Running ecosystems mapping workshops focusing on the operational environment-driven reporting CAS completes to support their various workstreams.
• Applying and sharing the lessons learned from Mines Digital Services with Jesús Hernández Tapia to an engaged group of agileists at a Business Agility Meetup in Berlin. The common thread, empowering our executive leadership with the tools they need to lean in (or out) just in time.
• Discussing how the experience of getting results will change an organization with Ari Hershberg (you can listen to the podcast here).
• Working with IIT’s Development and Digital Services staff on how we can bridge the great divide (see June 11th post) and build the capacity and structures for a well-resourced intake team.
• Discussing growing non-technical leaders into digital champions, lessons learned, and the dreaded obstacles at the Public Sector Network Innovation Show — Prairies — sponsored by Code for Canada. Some great takeaways are noted here.

That is a lot.

Buoy — also 6-months old and not nearly as impressed by our progress or the length of this post.

Light-weekly run-down

• Branch finance: I got a tour of how to ED from our CSNR colleagues. Learning about the details of branch finances (wow, the charges hidden in those line items are pretty unreal). As always, I appreciate the opportunity to learn more about the inner workings — especially how vacation carry-over and leave banks are debited and credits. Consider my mind blown.
• BC Parks & Falcon: I’m very excited to formally welcome team Falcon this week to Parks and especially product owner Jessica Wade. It’s been a gift getting to work with her and watch her learn and grow over the past three years. Looking forward to more challenges together. And my trusted techy Mark Lise — always enjoy what I learn and your ability to inadvertently make me feel smart while simultaneously reminding me I have no clue the real workings of the cloud. The shift of Team Falcon re-surfaced the value of high-performing teams and the importance of the whole government working together and supporting one another. Thank you, Julie Chace and Andrew Rollo, who were open to the idea, Andy Calarco for enabling the move, and Rumon Carter for taking it over the finish line.
• Talent, talent everywhere: I spent this week reconnecting with many colleagues internal and external to the government who are keen to lean into meaningful work. Katie Reid, a senior product manager working collaboratively across our Ministry and Emergency Management BC, is certainly one of those individuals. We managed to unexpectedly connect for over an hour this week to talk strategy, delivery, connections, and of course, how we store and don’t store stuff to avoid ending up on an episode of hoarders. Chatting with like minds is refreshing.

Final musings (I promise!)

All of the targets and work above are in progress—lots more work to be done.

I’m excited to welcome our new team member Harry! His arrival this week and the crunchiness of the last week inspired me to share just how proud I am of our small team. Most importantly — warning cheeseball moment en route — I’m proud of every single person we’ve met within the ministry. They have opened themselves up to change, which is certainly not easy. They’ve taken ownership over the continuous learning journey that working in a digital era requires, approached it with curiosity, and they’ve been kind enough to invite us to learn with them.

There is a bright future for the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy as we become a more open, collaborative and digital public service.

Kevin’s notes

I’ve always found the best way to get myself out of a funk is with action — and this week brought no shortage of opportunities to make things happen. First up, welcome Harry to the team. Harry brings a deep practice and a passion for civil design to the Service Transformation Branch, and we’ve thrown him right into the Parks problem space. There’s much on the go w/ design at Parks digital — from the completion of the bcparks.ca design system through research for Parks as a platform, enabling V.next of camping services — it’s going to continue to be a time of rapid change in the way Parks conceptualizes and delivers services to users, public and otherwise. Big thanks to Harry for the inquisitive and constructive start to work in the BCPS; certainly an interesting week to join the team!

As these things roll on at Parks… an overview:

• Brand: our final internal interview regarding experience with ‘brand’ over time at the org and some progress on consolidation. This is the smallest scope of work on the go and also the smoothest… coincidence?
• Camping: we met with colleagues from another province to talk about their recent experiences managing the space. Very interesting stuff — validating, challenging, reassuring, the whole gamut. I’m always over the moon to learn from folks in other jurisdictions working on similar problems.
• We continued analysis of design research conducted w/ the public over the past weeks regarding the camping experience. Kudos Melissa (GDX), applied to this work for the quiet expertise; I’m really happy with how it’s come together. Also shouts to Sam (STB) for his critical supports and inputs! A great learning experience in the service design process.
• bcparks.ca: design system. There have been many hands on this piece and sub-optimal process. But we’re getting there via better stewardship and an understanding of how this enables work across the Parks digital ecosystem.
• Team transition continues w/ Falcon taking the wheel. I cannot thank Jess (product owner) enough for the investigatory work over the past few weeks; the documentation, the meetings, the delineation of accountabilities, and the construction of pathways forward; we’d be in some trouble without you and your crew rolling on. My confidence level on delivery is increasing tangibly.

On the side of all this, I’ve been continuing to think about CAS and prepare for a series of workshops w/ stakeholders from watershed management and data. But really, it was another Parks meta-week.

Ownership is a curious concept for us at the Service Transformation Branch. I, by nature, am an ownership-inclined person — sometimes to a fault. Guilt (and its cousin shame) are not particularly useful emotions in the professional context, and overly-developed feelings of ownership on an initiative where you a) don’t actually formally own it and b) don’t have a line of sight across all component parts (and not the expertise, even if you did) only sets yourself up for perceptions of personal failure. I had many good convos w/ Jill this week where we dispassionately inventoried all the value we’ve created over the past 6 months — no small list (see above!). And yet, I get hung up on any semblance of under-delivery. Perfect as the enemy of good? It’s like going into a job interview and saying your biggest flaw is that you’re a perfectionist — when it’s actually true.

This gig of service transformation in the public sector isn’t for folks who like big wins or instant gratification. I (somewhat) joked a few times this week that we actually aren’t in the winning business but rather the relentless grind in the spirit of incrementalism and continuous improvement. Unforeseen setbacks are inherent to the game — it’s how you respond and refactor that defines your leadership. So what does this have to do with ownership? Well, as a cross-ministerial service, we don’t actually own anything. We’ll always be outside expertise, strategy, capacity, and momentum for the business that actually owns the problem. We share joys and frustrations, but at the end of the day, we’re going to move on to a new problem space. It’s a different dynamic than consulting as we’re so much closer to the core, and we work for the same org as our colleagues. I’ve always been one to marry myself to the challenge, and it’s something I need to manage as we inevitably back away from Parks projects with care and purpose.

This week in tabs:

• Managing complexity (and chaos) in times of crisis: A field guide for decision-makers inspired by the Cynefin framework. This is something I will make the time to read.
• Designing a scalable design organization. “Design is finally getting the spotlight it has deserved for a long time. Designers are in high demand at the moment… in addition to the accelerating increase in demand, design talent has historically been limited for many reasons. Design leadership talent that understands the business and is capable of building scalable design organizations is even harder to find.”
• First Nations Systems Thinking. “Systems thinking is to view the natural environment, human relationships and non-human relationships with a systems lens. When First Nations communities think in systems, we see how interrelated parts of an ecosystem or set of knowledge relate to one another and are continuously shaped by these interrelationships.”
• Digital Transformation at scale: why the strategy is delivery (updated 2nd edition): “The second edition goes into more detail about which institutions had a more effective digital response to Covid-19, and why. It also talks about some of the topics that were emergent in 2018 but now loom larger in a digital team’s thoughts: things like digital sovereignty, inclusivity and growth, and how to structure the data underpinning the whole edifice.” This is essential reading, and it’ll be worth purchasing the updated edition.
• Zoom vs Teams? Here’s Who Is Most Sustainable. Dang, and here I am preferential to Teams for UX reasons 😢