Weeknotes July 9th, 2021

In the spirit of transparency and candour, Kevin and Jill are publishing weeknotes reflecting on the what and why for their team.

Jill’s Notes

I love talking about governance and successful digital transformation. It feels nice to be in the circle of trust with my colleagues. But I can’t unsee the basics: Who are you designing for, and what problem are you trying to solve?

I heard a colleague say today:

We have to get the system to where we need it

and I said back, I think what you mean is:

We have to get to where our users need us to be

I know full well they meant that, but language is important. It’s easy to throw out words like transformation, modernization, service delivery, user research and agile. It’s hard to deeply understand what they mean. Then to deeply understand that it actually means you will forever be learning and seeking new perspectives. I see a concerted effort to get better at defining the problem. But over and over, we fail at prioritizing users over time and budget. Usability always seems to take a backseat, particularly when external factors are applying pressure. Why is it acceptable to deliver something poorly and celebrate on-time, on-budget delivery?

Weekly rundown

• Digital Leadership: Carved off sometime this week to tee up some fabulous guest speakers and refine materials for an ENV BC Parks-focused Digital Era Leadership course in late July. It will be great to take a smaller group through this work, connect them to the community of work in this space and tie it to real-world examples. I always forget how much work logistics can be, but the nature of a small branch is a GSD mentality (“Get Sh*t Done).
• Supervising in the BC Public Service: I was excited to be a guest speaker for my PSA colleagues at the Leading Virtual team's SBPS session this week. We talked about lessons learned, challenges and opportunities. I was inspired by the Start, Stop, Continue ideas the over 200 public servants provided following their activity. A stand out for me was the need to be inclusive and accessible in conducting our virtual meetings. A great example is the use of video; though it may be uncomfortable at times, many of our colleagues rely on visual cues when we talk to comprehend. I bet this affects more of your team than you realize. Shout out to Scott Rose, Eddie Ramirez, and Claire Lan for their amazing facilitation as always.
• Sector funding models: We had a good update from Denise Rossander at an ADM's Compliance and Enforcement systems-focused meeting (I was a guest). She discussed the current state, alignment to digital strategies, and potential funding approaches. We ran out of time, but I took away that shared development and working together is important. However, the path to funding it is murky. Everyone wants to support collaborative work, particularly if it helps smaller divisions get the functionality they can’t afford. Still, with strapped budgets, you must know what you are getting before you pay. Makes sense. But in the digital space, we are using a team. Gone are the days of multi-page requirements documents built in a vacuum with a nice tidy dollar value (which was sooooo accurate). The team needs money to figure out the what and the how much. So pay now, get a mystery later. It’s not that dramatic, and it’s worked in some spaces (e.g. Team Falcon). But trust us isn’t a sustainable funding model. Any good ideas from the hive mind are welcome.
• Process & service ninja-ing: I talked with several IIT colleagues this week, including Darren McKellar, Cathleen Freshwater, and the Development and Digital Services leadership team. A lot of it centred around understanding the process (trying not to re-engineer it) and sharing service opportunities. Kevin and I are working hard to understand where we fit and how it complements the IIT. We want to be symbiotic, not parasitic!
• Open-source maturity: I had an interesting conversation with some of my favourite humans about how we mature our management of open source products. It was helpful to discuss some of the pros/cons. In the end, we agreed to bring it back in the fall with some more certainty around the problem we were trying to solve (and if it comes into existence). See, even we miss the mark sometimes.
• Budgets: I met with the CSNR and ENV budget wizard Stephanie Wong, she walked me through how to manage my branch finances. All new to me and super cool to see some of the guts behind the scenes.
• BC Parks: Lots in Kevin’s notes below, but I immersed myself in learning via meetings this week and re-reading a lot of Wardley.

On a personal note, the social drought is certainly gone, and I’m not sure if I’m excited or exhausted or both. A birthday party Wednesday night, a dinner out with my Aunt last night, a pool party in mere moments, and a weekend of adventures. Hello Summer!

Kevin’s Notes

As I write this, in transit, without time for decompression and reflection, it certainly feels like a wild week. Maybe it was mostly today (Thursday), attempting to move some major initiatives forward as we work through complexity, time pressures, political dimensions, and sub-optimal resourcing. That is to say, a common operational environment in government.

First, Climate Action Secretariat. A very productive week defining the scope of the roadmap deliverable, rallying the team and mapping an emergent process. In the name of discretion, I won’t go too much further into detail, but there’s an amazing opportunity coming to life to couple design research with the marcomm production prowess of Government Communications and Public Engagement HQ. It’s a model that Karl (ED, Digital Communications) and I first chatted about ~4 years ago when I was working at GDX. Deep qualitative understanding absolutely has its place in landing priority communications collateral, especially when we’re asking the public to dig a level deeper in the materials than a simple scan. With a quality layer of desk research in hand via previous CAS engagements, I’m confident we can drive at public wants and needs with regards to climate action and make sure this marquee digital comms piece converts on its mission: informing and empowering British Columbians.

Environmental Protection Division: I spent some time this week mapping a robust discovery phase this fall to lay a solid research foundation for their forthcoming transformation initiatives. I’ve scoped this kind of process and activities for many years, and I still find myself cross-referencing the Province’s amazing Service Design Playbook. In speaking with folk out in the BCPS, many still don’t know this exists, almost a decade later. It’s a remarkable resource and I encourage you to bookmark it! While design isn’t paint by numbers, a context-specific ( BC gov) guide to best practice is an invaluable asset in planning your projects.

BC Parks:

• We continued to refine the brand guidelines RFP. It’s a bit of a side-of-the-desk process right now, but we’re getting closer.
• We met with our colleagues at The Exchange (the Exchange Lab, out of the OCIO), continuing discussions about onboarding the overarching digital transformation efforts at Parks to the Lab, be it virtual or a physical space come fall. The benefits and details of this potential collaboration warrant much longer exploration than I’ll offer here; a post for another time.
• Branch meeting! It was super cool to guest at Park’s (monthly?) org-wide meet and hear about challenges, wins, and initiatives across ecology, infrastructure, fire response, community engagement, policy, Indigenous relations, and digital. I knew it before, consider it validated: this team-of-teams does a lot. There’s so much going on behind the scenes in our parks system, fuelled by the passion you might expect from folks who love BC’s wild spaces and the dynamic value they provide to everyone.
• Deploying the new bcparks.ca CMS to regional staff to push advisories: in this burgeoning wildfire season, getting direct access to the CMS by regional operations to push pertinent info to the public is a priority. We’re working on the governance model and training, with the hopes staff can be populating and publishing advisories to the web directly in short order. This is to replace the current model, where advisory info is sent to central web admins who publish, but of course, at scheduled to work banker’s hours… something floods and fires don’t always cooperate with.

The thing we can’t really talk about

Yes, that. Simon Wardley has been a consistent reference point in our planning and exploration thus far. Crossing the River by Feeling the Stones is a brilliant introduction to Wardley’s theories, and I highly recommend it as a starting point when trying to absorb the Wardley Mapping framework. What is a Wardley Map again?

A Wardley Map is a representation of the landscape in which a business operates. It consists of a value chain (activities needed to fulfill user needs) graphed against evolution (how individual activities change over time under supply and demand competition). A Wardley Map represents the situational awareness and shared assumptions being made about a context and hints at what strategic options are available.

(via Ben Mosior, the preeminent WM tutor)

We also spent some time with Wardley’s Doctrine:

We are most certainly in Phase I, deconstructing and understanding the system we’re immersed in. All the principals in this phase are resonant to the designer; systematic learning, a focus on user needs, and contextual understanding. Thinking in systems, capturing the details. I feel like I still have a lot to learn with the depth of Wardley’s theories and practice, and I’m grateful to be partnered with some folk who run deep in leveraging the methods.

Sensemaking in the face of intense complexity is a challenging process, to point out the obvious. From my experiences with Wardley Mapping in a couple of projects previous, it’s a critical exercise in a) understanding the system’s component parts and b) articulating risk and cost to stakeholders, in a highly legible manner. Much more to come on this work, but we’re making great progress.