Service Transformation Branch — Year End Reflection 2024
In the spirit of transparency and candour, Service Transformation Branch members publish reflections on the what and why for their team .
STB look back on 2024
For 2024, we’re taking a collective look back on our Service Transformation Branch (STB) work and learnings. Our team spent some time remembering what happened (January 2024 feels like a long time ago!) and what went well, what we delivered (ta-da!), what was tricky, and what we’re musing on for 2025.
We’ve included members of our broader Service Transformation team in this reflection — Environmental Protection Digital Services (Karen Li) and the CleanBC Digital Experience team (Lindsay Windecker and Jenn Sotozaki).
What went well in 2024?
Openness and trust
In 2024, it felt like we really shifted in the role of ‘trusted advisors or partners’ working with ENV teams and across the sector. I saw this manifest through the many small and large engagements our team supported. We also had many ‘call a friend’ chats with program areas on topics like technology approaches, scoping service design needs and governance structures for shared digital teams. As a result, it feels like there’s more awareness and engagement with new ways of working across the ministry and teams are trying out new ways of approaching service delivery. We’re also seeing the program leads of key digital or capital IM/IT initiatives more fully step into their roles, which means we can step back a bit more and highlight their accountability and opportunities to direct their teams towards and through change. It doesn’t feel like service or digital transformation is totally new anymore. ~Kelsey
We welcomed new team members (and said goodbye to some great ones)! We said goodbye (or see you later?) to Lindsay Macfarlane and Martha Edwards as they took on other exciting roles in government. Throughout the fall, Tess Good (Sr. Service Designer CleanBC), Laura Nelson-Hamilton (new Director, Strategic Design) and Sion Lanini (Product Manager, CleanBC), joined the Service Transformation Branch and shared some positive feedback re: onboarding.
- I’m enjoying the balance of clear strategic intent and expectations with empowerment to sense where the value is and make an impact. I feel lucky to have joined such a passionate and talented crew of colleagues and partners doing important work across the energy and climate contexts we support. ~Tess
- I’ve been grateful to be brought into the work and design meet ups by colleagues, and set up with some areas of focus to help manage being in a new city, province, and workplace, while learning about the teams and deliverables we support. ~Laura
- I’ve received a warm welcome from the team during the first couple of days! It’s feeling like this job will be a really good fit for me. ~Sion *writing this in his first week on the job ;)
Working across teams and systems
In 2024 the CleanBC Digital Experience team began experimenting with a team-of-teams approach to optimize how we collaborate with a large number of cross-ministry and external partners distributed across the province.
Key principles include establishing a shared understanding of our context, building trust and strong relationships, and the ability to efficiently adapt to new information. We’ve been testing a blend of synchronous and asynchronous collaboration methods to run efficient policy and program discovery, collaborate on a user research strategy and question backlog, and ensure everyone working across many products and a complex service ecosystem is aligned. Watch out for some exiting user-centred enhancements to Better Homes, the Energy Savings Program, the Home Energy Planner, and Better Buildings in 2025!
Our efforts are not only helping us efficiently frame problems and work toward solutions, but build a strong culture and healthy conditions to tackle complexity. Big shout-out to Kevin Ehman, Director of Strategic Design at the Ministry of Energy & Climate Solutions for empowering our experiments! ~Tess
Throughout 2024, we worked on implementing a data strategy through actions and delivery across teams in ENV and NRIDS. We found common data governance needs across several teams. The stars aligned for EnMoDS (replacement of the environmental monitoring system) with timelines for new policies and other new products. So, the timing was right to launch into developing a full data governance framework that will work for EnMoDS as well as other ENV data systems. We also added “Data” to the Data & Digital Delivery Guild and hosted more spin-off events to connect common needs and interests across ENV and the sector. We also worked with our NRIDS colleagues to co-develop data standards to support sector-wide work in support of streamlining permitting. No data set is an island, so we worked hard to build and highlight connections across teams and systems in 2024. ~Henry
I spent my first three months catching up on three years of deep design research, prototyping, and development. This meant reading heaps of post it notes in boards, reviewing user journeys and service blueprints, attending inceptions, looking at Figma boards, tagging into agile delivery standups, meeting with colleagues in 1:1s, asking a million questions, and listening to colleagues who work in complex policy areas discuss their work and how it connects across program areas, tech stacks, and sectors during design workshops. I was grateful for this blog, and Martha’s weeknotes, which shared out about the complexity of the service environment and the need to be gentle with ourselves as we wade through it. Given the nature of our work in STB, it’s been important to formulate a flexible concept of strategic design, and my role, in partnership with designers and the teams we support. Working with teams in Environmental Protection and Compliance and Enforcement has been super interesting. Already, there’s been one release, with more lined up in 2025. ~Laura
Our partnership between the Service Transformation Branch and Environmental Protection Division has grown stronger in adopting the digital principles. First, continuously learning and improving with a large team in our ecosystem approach to digital services and building the foundations of service transformation. What does that mean? Building diverse teams and internal capacity. Why does it matter? It builds a culture of new perspectives to the work and opens our blind spots to manage risks proportionately.
Finding the right people to make an organization design work takes time and finding people with the skillset amongst the current and future dynamics is a puzzle in itself. Having Laura join the Service Transformation Branch has proven a positive change in how we are approaching complex problems and the complexity of the work and making small iterative changes to make lasting change. Challenges that have a high degree of complexity presents the opportunity to go slower to stay course of the goals and outcomes of designing the right thing — unknown and something I did see recently. ~Harry
What’s was on our “ta’da list” in 2024 — what did we deliver?
Here’s a not-exhaustive list of the team’s collective delivery wins this year — with a bit of an additional commentary and some favourites from the team!
Product
- Supporting a pilot launch of a digital system to management Compliance and Enforcement public complaints to the Conservation Officer Service and the Compliance and Environmental Enforcement Branch.
- Facilitating collaboration an working towards consistency in ENV and sector teams approaches to spatial/mapping products.
- Publishing the Climate Change Accountability Report on CleanBC.ca.
Helping organize and implement the service/content design Actions You Can Take work gave me a lot of confidence in doing research. ~Jenn
- Shifting BetterHomesBC.ca to an in-house supported platform vs vendor.
- Supporting the delivery of various smaller services for the Environmental Protection Division (OrganicsInfoBC.ca, air quality index statements, flood debris management, mining operations).
Governance and funding
- Delivering governance models for shared digital systems across ENV and the sector. It feels like we now have a fairly repeatable approach to work with teams to define shared governance systems — which is great. When we’re clear on who can/should be making a decision, we can (hopefully) get to that decision faster, which can lead to better product management. ~ Karen+Kelsey
- Identifying key roles and processes to manage data across ENV products and services. Created guidance documents on how ENV data teams should interpret and act on central policy (e.g. Data Management, software and hardware authorizations). We’re building connections with the Ministry of Citizen Services and the sector to better understand governance expectations and figure out how it will work in ENV. We’re being proactive and will have the opportunity to set the trend for our sector. ~Henry
- Developed a streamlined and client focused process to manage the funding of IM/IT improvements via the ENV operating overhead funding budget. ~Karen
Training, community building
- Leadership and community support for the BC Design Community via leading design crits and calls. The various BC Design Communities means there is always a space for people to connect. Hosting guest speakers and design critiques (crits) point to the various ways to engaging with and how government’s design practice is maturing.~Harry
This year I helped launch the 2nd iteration of small crit groups for the cross-government design community. Connecting people and growing practice has felt great — in 2024, 50% of participants are in their first year at BCPS! ~Tess - Data and Digital Delivery Guild (ENV-specific bi-monthly call showcasing data/digital topics) hosted by Service Transformation Branch and partners.
- Helped coordinate ENV Agile Open House, a one-day showcase of ENV agile and digital delivery teams — May 2024
- Hosted Virtual Skills Week, a series of how-to and deep dive topics on foundational digital workplace skills like writing clear emails, data governance and agile 101 — June 2024
- Contributing to a booth on Agile Teams in ENV at the Public Sector Innovation Booth — November 2024
- Attending the Government of Canada Policy and Service Conference — November 2024. STB folks tuned into the conference to learn from our peers in the Federal system about the leadership, organizational design, and broader mindsets that help bring policy and service design together. We were impressed by keynote speakers, picked up on spicy themes, and reflected on our work in STB. We’d like to thank our Federal colleagues for offering this conference in the open, recording it, and making it available online for ease of access. It helped us participate while managing day to day workloads in the Pacific timezone. ~Laura
What’s felt tricky?
Work in progress
We had a lot of work in progress over many program areas. At times it felt hard to see where we were making one or two big steps forward on delivery, vs a lot of smaller steps, or behind the scenes foundational work. Both approaches have their strengths, but I felt that too many small steps can sometimes be lost in the forest and hard to manage (if you’ve got more than three priorities, you don’t have any priorities…)~Kelsey
When working in a complex service ecosystem like CleanBC, it can be hard to move forward at a consistent pace. Some components may be blocked/moving slowly due to dependencies beyond our team’s control, while others moving fast because they have a window of opportunity. This can clash with the ‘ideal order of operations’. But, such is the life of a public servant. It’s helped me soften some perfectionism tendencies, get creative, and lean into agility: finding incremental opportunities, while keeping the big picture in mind ~Tess
Finding the right balance of using common components vs specialized software. A lot of ENV work (e.g. water monitoring) is also done by our counterparts in other jurisdictions so there are many COTS (custom-of-the-shelf) and SaaS (software-as-a-service) products that meet specific needs. However, this leads to more reliance on outside support and specialized knowledge to maintain infrastructure. More common components across the sector reduces maintenance effort as well as ensures greater interoperability. So how do we find the best of both worlds? ~Henry
There’s a lot of work underway in the Environmental Protection Division, and a huge demand for digital delivery. It’s been tricky to go with the work, and think about the work, and ground strategic design all in one go. I found the quiet over the holiday period to be a really important moment in coming into the work. It gave me time and space for deep focus, which is rare to find in the day to day. Building with existing teams, from where they are, while generating a shared ‘big picture’ is what’s in progress, at the moment. It is a lot of zooming in, zooming out, and looking backwards and forwards. Ultimately, it is about asking questions, surfacing mental models, and having conversations. ~Laura
Communications and uncertainty
Language is a challenging area when working with multi-disciplinary teams and role-holders. Everyone has a different lived experience. New terms and topics arise between people and their disciplines (ie: Business, Design, Research, etc). Ensuring we are speaking clearly, timely, and taking the extra time to communicate with intention is meaningful change. Acronyms and jargon does not serve a purpose. When we change our language we change the world around us. Language is important and when we spend the extra minute and pause to respond and not react it is worth it. ~Harry
The election created a degree of unknowingness and expectation around what might be next. ~All!
At times, it was challenging to move work forward or make product changes. Lots of reasons for this (see above). And, still seeing space to grow understanding and support for design-led approaches with program areas. ~Tess
What’s coming in 2025?
Tying things together
In 2025, I’m looking forward to focusing on more ‘front-end’ work that helps support ENV teams to see the ‘full-stack’ of service transformation. I see us leaning more into program problem spaces to help identify problem statements, build a common understanding of user needs and then take action on key leverage or opportunity points. I’m aiming to focus on 1–2 specific outcomes to direct our energy towards to delivery tangible progress that improves services for staff and the public. ~Kelsey
The CleanBC DX team will be joining the new Ministry of Energy & Climate Solutions. I’m excited to orient to our new mandate, organization, and dig into some primary research! We’re proactively laying the groundwork now to align service delivery and digital experiences with the needs of people in BC as we all adapt and respond to climate change. ~Tess
I’m looking forward to seeing ENV teams leverage the Ministry’s rich datasets in 2025. This would likely come about through implementing traditional AI/machine learning as well as some cautious exploration of generative AI tools. In any case, AI output is only as good as its input, so ENV will continue managing and cleaning its data well to make the best use of these tools! ~Henry
Laura and I are building a research plan to connect specific teams together and how we engage with our program areas. This is building confidence and proof of work into our service delivery. Transforming and shifting cultural mindsets to an experimental (test and learn) plans takes time. ~Harry
I’m not much of a fortune teller, but if I had to guess, I’d say there’s going to be a lot of high fiving this year. An all stream roadmap is helping leaders and teams work toward a launch together, and digital leaders in EPD have created space for weekly updates that are helping to look at the details, align timelines, and prioritize. When something gets tricky, STB is there for surge capacity, or to create space and materials to help work through it. We’re doing a lot of listening, a lot of surfacing, and are going to be doing a lot of cheering. Something someone said when I first started comes to mind a lot: that people working in this Ministry are here because they care about the work. When things get challenging, it’s good to remember that. Sometimes, things are challenging because people care enough to say what’s needed. We all have high expectations of ourselves, and our work. If we can remember that, everything will be okay. ~Laura
Onwards! 2025 is the year of…
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.
