September 29, 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 saw me zooming in and out of the work — the classic service design pattern working on the micro and the macro to make sense of a space.
It feels like the teams across the ministry are really leaning into our work as service transformation vs digital transformation. Meaning that the often disparate lines (and teams) of policy, delivery and operations are coming together as a single team to deliver on a common goal or user need (ahem service!). I shared this story to multiple groups for the Environmental Protection Digital Services team, including division and ministry executive.
I also joined a number of demos from existing Product Teams across the Natural Resource Sector/government (Mines Digital Service and NRS Common Services) to help understand their roadmaps and work to date. Fantastic to see how other teams are operating, what they’ve accomplished and alignment with the work of the EPD Digital Services Team — lots of shared steps/processes and users across the Mines and ENV lines of service.
Continued work to formalize digital leadership roles and structure to support the Climate Action Secretariat.
Continued supporting plain language web content to support greater transparency on regional water quality issues (this was the micro work!).
CleanBC roadmap planning — talking about what’s next after the launch of the MVP. Excited to define Release #2, build out the team and confirm the governance of this work going forward. This includes expanding on the idea of this as a connected service journey — what is the user journey related to accessing climate change information and services? Some great opportunities related to tying in industrial reporting and data.
While I’ve been working with the folks at GeoBC on a few files, a quick meeting this week helped me scratch the surface a bit more to get a better understanding of the role and potential of the team and ArcGIS platform to help make government data more accessible.
Had a great in-person working session to continue to build out the CAS Digital Leadership training agenda and delivery. We’re at the three week countdown, but our agenda feels strong and now it’s time to start building out our presentations and activities!
It felt really good to bring together the ENV digital delivery leaders (read Product Owners and Directors) for our inaugural monthly touch-base. Hoping this space will be a chance to share ideas (procurement, staffing!) and move us forward collectively on the transformation front.
Attended Kevin and Jackie’s Design Community presentation on the Environmental Protection service design work — fantastic to hear them tell that story to a broader audience — and it made me think we need to tell it more often internally at Environment as well!
Continued to support the Digital Investment Office to build out their Digital Plan through discussing actions, goals and metrics to support government to work embrace internet-era ways of working. This was a wide-ranging conversation, but left me feeling excited about the support for building out a foundational knowledge of government service journeys and users.
I also took some time today to talk my son about Orange Shirt Day and the impacts of Residential Schools on Indigenous Peoples across Canada. This is an ongoing conversation with him — it’s not easy to talk about what it might be like for him to be taken away from our family at 5 years old, but it’s nothing to those that actually had to live it. Tomorrow, on National Truth and Reconciliation Day, I’ll spend some time reflecting on our past, reading through the Calls to Action and attending community events on Vancouver Island. It’s a time to reckon with our past and commit to learning from and amplifying the voices of Indigenous People.
What I’ve been reading this week:
- Following along the Service Design in Government conference via #sdinGov (such a great conference!) — and cheering on BC Gov’s Martha Edwards for her presentation on design maturity in government.
- Firming up my thinking on service lines and service ownership via Create Change’s videos
- Reading Jeffrey Allen’s It’s Complicated, not complex series on policy and service design
- Re-reading Five Little Indians by Michelle Good
Kevin’s notes
Another short week, with Friday off to honour the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. Everywhere you look in this country the inequities and injustices wrought by the legacy of colonization are apparent. From the systemic intentions and failures which led to the recent violence at James Smith Cree First Nation, to the veneration of the crown through the recent passing of the queen, our infantile history as a colony born of dispossession and brutality is a visceral and unfolding reality, not something merely in history books. The work of reconciliation is an urgent call to action for all settlers on Turtle Island, to demand more of ourselves, our politics, and our society. Only through transformative change can we meet the complex and interconnected challenges of our time; without justice for Indigenous peoples there can be no wider social justice, no climate justice. As long as inequity and oppression exist for some it diminishes the promise of better futures for us all. This is the mindset I take into Friday: to continue to wrestle with my accountabilities and potential for impact in our collective journey towards real and lasting reconciliation.
To the work-work: I much of the week prepping our BCPS Human Centred Design Community presentation with Jackie (title slide seen in Kelsey’s notes above!). It was fantastic to engage in this process with our whole team, through the content drafting with Jackie and test runs with Laura and Harry. Special thanks to Harry for the help making the slides look nice, such a bonus to have his visual design capacity in-house. Working with very ambiguous briefs and problem spaces is not uncommon in design research so it was nice to bring some legibility and process to folks across gov through this talk.
Tuesday we met to continue building the CleanBC roadmap. Kudos to Allieren for the facilitation and the team for the pre-population.
If you have more than three priorities, you don’t have any — Jim Collins (oft heard via rumon carter)
And we certainly have more than three important action items in the CleanBC ecosystem. A great first step is to collaboratively lay it all out through a rubric, and I’m glad we’ve made the breadth of work visible. I’m optimistic as we chip away at the structuralization of the product team and its continued work of aligning stakeholders and delivering both business and public value; this model is still novel in the BCPS and it’s fair to say we’re generally constructing the plane as we’re flying it!
Back to EPD, big thanks to Robin Howe (NRIDS) for arranging demos of parallel product work in the sector. Mines Digital Services is especially impressive; such a mature team of teams in their delivery journey, with many service patterns for us to drawn from in our work.
As Kelsey mentions above, STB continued to prepare our digital era leadership training for the Climate Action Secretariat. Grateful I have the HCD presentation materials to repurpose for my piece!
I enjoyed a coffee with Alex Ritchie at Transportation learning about their ground-up Ministry-wide efforts towards service transformation. Short version: it’s a meta-project! I volunteered to be on a panel to hire their first-ever in-house service designer, and I’m excited to contribute to this small piece. The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (or something of the like).
I attended a prep call for the Public Sector Network’s digital government Victoria roadshow event, at which I’ll be on a panel discussing Overcoming Internal Barriers for Digital Adoption. It’s in real life at Laurel Point! Come join us, it’s free for public servants!
I also had my final one-on-one call with Andrew Greenway from Public Digital (for now at least). Having this biweekly free-form space held to discuss the work, the dynamics, his experiences and references, my thoughts, goals, and ambitions; it has been so much more than ‘professional development.’ I’ve come to value Andrew as a friend and confidant and I look forward to reconnecting soon!
A smattering of other stuff happened as well but we’ll leave it at that. Wishing you a reflective, restorative, and affirming weekend.
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.
