Service Transformation Branch year-end reflections 2021
In the spirit of transparency and candour, Kevin and Jill publish weeknotes reflecting on the what and why for their team — except this time, it's a 2021 reflection and musings on what's to come.
Kevin: in keeping with our new conceptions of time, 2021 seemed to both fly by and also somehow take forever. I worked on school, ran a lot, moved houses, the pandemic ebbed and flowed, there were heat domes and floods, new normals stabilized and fell apart, and we entered the holiday break with the Omicron/snowstorm combo really making for a quiet stretch of days. I remain firmly rooted in gratitude, cognizant of my privilege and good fortune, resolute as ever in our need to reach for new ways of knowing and being if we're to find some equilibrium on spaceship Earth. Oh yeah, and I've been director of strategic design at ENV for 9 months now and have loved (almost) every minute of it.
Jill: I don't think I'll miss 2021, but who knows what comes next. We added a puppy, overdid the staycations, frolicked all over the island with a 12-year-old, and were fortunate enough to escape [fingers crossed] all but the emotional impacts of the multiple states of emergency in BC. I managed to clean out a solid year+ worth of emails in the last week, and it certainly brought back some emotions. In my first 11 months as an ED, there was a resolution to 99% of those emails. It may not seem like success but the sheer fact that most of what was in my inbox was redundant, resolved and no longer relevant means we are doing exactly what we set out to do — except moving to MS Teams for transitory communication, but hey, you can't win them all. We have shifted the organization such that what we were fighting for on day 1 is an accepted fact today. It's embedded. That is progress. That is building organizational change one piece at a time. I can confidently say we have delivered. Now to 2022, how do we learn, grow and expand?
Introductions aside, let's dig into 2021 reflections.
We had a great year leaning into our ministry.
Kevin: I feel really good about the relationship-building processes which underpin so much of what we do at ENV (and across gov). Creating the conditions for successful transformation exercises requires a foundation built on trust and understanding; this is hardly new news but is worth emphasizing as a new unit (and new faces) in our ministry. Who are we? What are our skills? Why should you work with us? What value can we co-create? These are important (often unspoken) questions to address before delving into disruptive, resource-intensive, and often challenging project work. Jill and I are people people, and I think we did well endearing ourselves to our colleagues, developing durable relationships, and showing/proving how we do the work.
Jill: As Kevin notes, the conditions for success are so important. They can't be rushed. You will miss the mark if you look only at deliverables or products. I look back at the hours spent building relationships, sharing experiences, and walking beside other leaders as they learn (and I learn) with a smile. They are the most draining, challenging, and rewarding parts of the work. We are trying to build an empowered organization, albeit with branch and divisional pockets, ensuring we aren't contributing to more organizational debt. We approach the new challenges with humility, curiosity, and the value placed on the people. Always. We are certainly still in that showing/proving phase, but particularly in BC Parks' capacity is growing. It feels like we are approaching a new stage. We find ourselves doing less showing/proving and more supporting and validating the good instincts of established and emerging leaders.
We would have liked to deliver more live products and services, but it will come.
Jill: What kid doesn't like to run around showing everyone their favourite toys? They don't tell you how impactful their relationship is with their best friend or how patient they were with their brother while he learned. Culture and organizational capacity are complex, and they take patience. That is the truth, and it sucks because I want to show you shiny new services and websites. We had a few — BC Parks launched its first built and managed in-house tool for Day Use passes, and we modernized the intranet for nearly the entire ministry. We also shut down a few bad apples, an app and CMS that were not trending to the standards of design and delivery that would make the ministry proud. In doing that, we re-aligned program areas, focused back on the org capacity to sustain delivery and built a shared understanding. In our lack of delivery, we have teed up 2022 for the right kinds of delivery.
Kevin: The strategy is still delivery, period. And I personally felt a bit underdelivered on this front in 2021. But as addressed above, so much of what we're on the arc to accomplishing as a ministry (and sector, and holistic organization) requires an almost-paradigmatic cultural reorientation, skills building, team construction, public/private partnerships, exec support… the list goes on. While we have yet to launch what would have been our big fish in 2021, it's close, and the lessons learned help guide our way. I've got a delivery focus; it's baked into my professional DNA. I'm much less bureaucrat than the production agency hustler I became right out of undergrad. But I've learned enough over the last 6 years or so of working with the public sector to know that driving to delivery without the groundwork of common understanding and alignment is a fool's errand.
Designing the organization is part of the job.
Kevin: this is a conversation I have with designers in gov every time we get to the part about surviving the bureaucracy; you have to look at designing the grey matter of the org as part of the brief. It's never been told to you explicitly, but manipulating the substance of the system is critical in seeing the whole of the challenge (and creating practical bounded spaces to work within). Allot time for this. Find joy in its grind. Celebrate small progressions. Keep morale high when the team is caught in the churn cycle. Architecting the conditions for success in opaque systems rarely comes with a playbook, but learning by doing and intentionally influencing the environment for better outcomes is absolutely a core part of this gig.
Jill: I have to repeat — celebrate small progressions. Yes! Designing the org is Kevin's jam and, frankly, why we work well together. We balance the big picture and pull the levers required to achieve it. I get bored quickly and don't do well with instructions — Lego is the exception. I do have to get better at writing the playbook so others can follow through. My superpower is putting the pieces together, greasing the wheels and working across the entire organization to build momentum. I like to spend time understanding relationships and structures. I use them to identify where we should focus our attention. We both spend a lot of time looking at org charts but nowhere near as brilliantly as Marianne Bellotti describes in Hunting Tech Debt via Org Charts. I'll be working on my party trick as we lean into our next set of projects.
Building fit-for-purpose teams is still challenging.
Jill: This one is loaded. We've used the term surge capacity before in describing the branch. All change requires capacity (as repeated by Pia Andrews, this is a fav). A good part of that surge capacity is simply playing the performative IT paperwork game required to wade through the bureaucratic processes necessary to get a team on the ground. We need to continue to prioritize bringing the right skills into government and helping our senior leaders see the value of high-performing teams. I want to propose adding the term permeable shield to that branch description. We are constantly protecting and defending our program area staff as we build teams and our teams from the processes. We put our hands up first, volunteer to dive into the cross-government talent conversations, and forge meaningful relationships with our partners in and out of the BC ecosystem. As much as I hate the term, we attempt to de-risk the team formation process. The risk is we just become another bureaucratic layer. It always slows us down; I have no wise words or plan, just a commitment to persistently questioning why a process exists and where that policy is written down, if we can shift it, and why we can't break it.
Kevin: This is a conversation about the velocity of project delivery not aligning with (glacial) HR/procurement structures and the resultant inability to spin up the teams we need. This is also a conversation about the (continued) lack of seasoned internal talent to draw from for the hard work and our continued over-reliance on vendors who (frankly) don't have the same skin in the game and shouldn't be expected to see larger, systemic implications. That's not to say we don't have a cadre of trusted, proven external partners, but boy, do we ever need more experienced 'technologists' in gov — full-stack devs, architects, and service/UX/UI designers, product owners, scrum masters, etc. We need senior leaders who have worked with high-performance teams and know what that looks like. We need more nimble org reconfiguration mechanisms to piece together teams when and where they're needed most. The risk-managing, waterfall-esque formative team process of gov continues to be to our detriment.
The BC Public Service is trending in the right direction for the digital era.
Kevin: The above gripes aside… I think there's very positive signals out of the BCPS in how we're leaning into the urgency and realities of digital-era ways of working and their associated competencies. For example, the recent human-centred design community of practice I attended had a turnout that far exceeded expectations. There are mature delivery teams in pockets across gov (Mines Digital Services, Osprey at Parks, BC Registries, etc.) who have proven, repeatable processes for reference (not to mention high-functioning products out in the world). We have senior leaders who clear the path for delivery and give leeway to mistakes and learning (we've been the beneficiaries of this ourselves in 2021). We see the beginnings of a major operational shift in staffing models to the kind of talent and skills we need to respond in our contemporary context. There is so much to build upon, and I'm excited at the momentum and buy-in I see all around me.
Jill: The pandemic has helped fuel the awareness and demand for better digital services. That awareness is driving a need for change in pockets across the org. We made significant progress this year on several multi-year files in the BCPS. Whenever we talk about large-scale digital transformation, two things crop up immediately as systemic barriers: funding and talent. We are gaining traction on a modern digital funding model — with new leadership across many of our senior digital positions. We have a dedicated product owner and team for digital talent leading cross-ministry eligibility lists and challenging the existing (often unwritten) policy. Oh, and we created, proved, and now have permanently funded positions for a Service Transformation Branch in ENV.
We've had three states of emergency in BC this year, and it's taken a toll.
Jill: It's pretty incredible that we've had any time, much less the ability to trend in the right direction. In all the chaos, there has been a clear operational camaraderie and strength built within the BCPS. Public servants are resilient. With that said, the feeling of fatigue is palpable. Change fatigue is real, and it becomes one of the most important considerations when picking and choosing the branch's priorities. It's left us jumping back and forth a bit between projects, pushing a little, then allowing time to breathe. It's an important tactic. We risk having too much work in progress—a source of self-made fatigue.
Kevin: BC has emergency fatigue, no question about it. The private individual certainly, but also public servants. We work in the natural resource sector, with its hot button issues at the best of times; throw in unprecedented floods and infrastructure destruction/environmental disaster, and the org has to prioritize response and resources. We simply can't expect a sustained focus on service transformation priorities when these connective externalities cascade into two years of crisis. I'm not sure what the answer is, but most people are a bit burnt out — still showing up and performing amazingly, but in need of some 'normality' to be able to think proactively and structurally.
Looking forward, these are some of the big questions we're mulling over.
How do we work effectively across gov to address our shared challenges?
Kevin: The million-dollar question. I've tackled the disconnect of corporate to ministryland in this forum before, and believe it or not, we haven't cracked that nut in the interim! A cross-government view and network is one of the most important and impactful soft skills a public servant can develop, in my opinion. We create a wild amount of redundancy in the duplication of processes and the building of things. Initiatives like common components are helping bridge our gaps but there's still so much work to be done. I don't think more corporate influence is necessarily the answer, but rather context-aware practitioners at the ministry/sector level continuing to communicate, work in the open, and be proactive in sharing how they get things done. More self-organizing communities of practice. More attendees to The Exchange excellent Quarantine and Quaffee series and the monthly Digital Government call. No paint-by-numbers solutions to offer but I feel an urgent need to bring more cohesion to how we tackle the common, interconnected challenges of transformation.
Jill: I had to explain what I did to a friend's parent for work over the holidays. After the elevator pitch and some back and forth questions, he said, "oh, so you are a silo buster." For some reason, it made me recoil. Yes, I want to work effectively across government, leverage my network and break those traditional silos. But silos sometimes exist for a reason; programs have mandates, and sometimes that is the most effective way to deliver a program quickly and efficiently. Not all silos deserve to be broken, but they should be purpose-built. We do a poor job of ending programs or retiring services. We can add value there. I'm still working to find that just-in-time way of working effectively across gov, to combat information overload and perform that necessary connective tissue function. It continues to be a process of experimentation, sharing, and re-evaluation.
And as our common challenges grow in scale and complexity, how do we accelerate our response?
Jill: I like our current branch size, we have some gaps, but we are nimble and succeed in placing the ownership for change where it belongs — in the program area. To accelerate, we have to replicate capacity (among many other things). Though it is hard to measure, our work in spreading digital era leadership ways of thinking is essential. We need more public servants that understand modern ways of working, those that will question our antiquated norms and practices. Those people who value building a culture and frankly delivering the digital components of a program expected by the public. We can influence a more systemic focus on delivery across the organization and not just within a single program. This work starts with our partnership with the Digital Academy. You are beginning to see the challenge. None of the above has anything to do with pumping out more widgets or only the work our branch can do alone. So much of accelerating is about deepening our networks across governments and public sector organizations and bookending our approach by working through our various senior leadership tables and onboarding new digital talent. All of this requires more considerable broader support. Kevin succinctly lays out the challenge of scale in our complex environment.
Kevin: Per notes above, more bodies isn't the answer (although in certain circumstances, it very much is). Let's pull back for a moment: challenges we're experiencing in understanding the ecosystem of a broken product or service, designing better approaches that tangibly address user needs in context, and applying sustainable solutions that don't just repeat the same cycle and pattern — these are not unique frames and missions to the BCPS. Furthermore, the landscape of languishing government services is exacerbated by complex intersecting externalities; climate crisis, social dissolution, exponential technology, etc. The pace layers of change do not align to keep us with the times. Our rulebook isn't compatible with this (post)modernity.
I'm not quite saying burn the rulebook, but civil servants cannot deliver critical services via civic tech without some kind of minor revolution in the halls of power. All systems are designed and can be redesigned — the ways we build and deliver services are no different. In BC, I believe it will take cabinet-level political understanding and expediency to move us on to a different playing field. I'm not the first to broach this idea (HDL probably did about a decade ago), but senior political pressure to ramp up change and delivery quality can help knock over the policy dominos which currently exist as blockers. Until the systemic web of accreted rules and organizational inertia is itself transformed, it will be damn difficult — if not impossible — to truly deliver on the promise of the work we do. Regardless, we'll keep pushing forward, unapologetic in the imperative to do better for staff and the public alike, and bullish on the good practices which will point us there.
