Weeknotes June 11th, 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:
This week had great moments, necessary moments, and breakthrough moments. All in all, it was a productive week. It was a healthy mix of feeling progress on some tough problems and slaying some necessary bureaucratic processes. As much as those processes can sometimes drain you, checking that box can be so incredibly satisfying. The biggest win for me this week was really starting to carve a niche for our branch. Some key themes emerged:
Goodbye silos, hello users
I mentioned last week that we had some incredible aha! moments lately where the service was clearly identified as the priority and the system(s) recognized as simply a part. I have to give credit to my colleagues in the Environmental Protection Division who are leading the charge here. With a deep cast of supporting figures, a pair of directors, Karen Li and Danielle Grbavac, are crafting up a shared concept case that lives and breathes the BC Government Digital Principles. Their case takes an ecosystem approach (not just branch by branch, system by system), plans to empower public servants through multi-disciplinary teams and commits to embedding design and delivering simple, effective products and services. As we work through the pain of bringing together multiple branches and breaking from a traditional way of thinking, it can be tough to remember the why. I couldn’t be more excited to help his team move forward.
Kudos Danielle, Karen and the team, for your leadership and initiative!
Crossing the great divide
So above, I said “embedding design and simple, effective products and services” — YES, but how? This was our aha! moment this week as a branch. It was recently brought to my attention that we have a legacy system, with legislative requirements (of course) supporting multi-billion dollars of industry. It has a dependency on a mainframe being retired in 2022 (double, of course). The program area has been raising the red flag for years, and a cadre of vendors and IIT have been working on options for those same years. You can imagine my confusion when 1) we are down to 9 months, and 2) we haven’t solved the problem, nor do we have any viable options.
Enter the great divide! — the murky black hole of a place where a lot of things live like — what the user needs, not just what they've done, how that system fits into the broader services ecosystem, and the translation of the technical speak into plain language.
This deserves a full post with some thoughtful references to the literal thousands of articles, books and videos out there for this exact problem, but here is a teaser. Program areas know a lot about what they do and usually who they do it for. IT, business analysts and architecture are amazing at digging into the technical details of the current state, getting the requirements from the business, and knowing where we can go in the market. But they don’t speak the same language, and they are missing one essential thing — the REAL users and the interactions in the broader services ecosystem (ministry, government, community, region, and beyond). There is no knock here. Everyone has done an incredible job of doing what they are empowered and resourced to do. There is simply no built capacity to conduct real service design or design in general within the ministry. Similarly, the program area doesn’t understand the tech language, nor do they have space or time to stop running the operational program and situate themselves in the bigger picture. So we are stuck staring at each other looking for answers. Enter the Service Transformation Branch!!!!!
In this type of scenario, which I’m sure you’ll agree is commonplace, you typically end up with a rushed solution that delivers a “modernized” version of the same thing. No transformation, limited improvement, but the fire is dampened, and we all move on.
NO! — we can’t accept that anymore, nor do we intend to. We are leaning in, we are going to crack this and support both program areas and IIT to highlight the gap, fill it, and move to make it the common approach — not the anomaly.
Weekly worklist
With a lot on the go — here is a rip at some one-ish-liners, and Kevin’s has the rest:
- I had a great chat with Mike Brodie with the Government of Alberta on modernizing park and recreation tools. We shared some of our work and are excited to collaborate on what not surprisingly are very similar challenges.
- Team Falcon, led by Jessica Wade, gave us a great demo of a prototype reservation tool they’ve built and of course, using GC Notify — check out Jaimie Boyd’s latest post re: Common Components.
- Met with Dea De Jarisco at The Exchange and Amy Kirtay to firm up our re-organized and newly augmented digital leaders course for this Tuesday.
- I got the latest update from IIT on ENV application health, and the final draft of our digital strategy is headed to exec in the coming weeks.
- Crushed some HR paperwork, drafted a budget, started a capital change request, and a few other pieces of administeria.
- I got an update on the intranet and the internet from our lovely Sam Terani, and the Web Steering Committee respectively.
The next step, build off this week.
Kevin’s notes:
My word for the week: velocity (I swear I wrote or said it a few dozen times). It really felt like we gained tangible momentum across many of our initiatives over the past 5 days. A lesson hard-learned, some weeks are mired in inertia, some fly by with numerous small victories, and it’s all a part of the same marathon. Important to remember when you’re feeling stuck in a tough stretch.
Where to start? How about BC Parks.
Service design with GDX. We finalized the research plan, codifying some overarching principles for what we’re building (foundationally) through this work. That is,
- Establishing a pattern in BC Parks of being user-driven in respect of any digital product and service design
- Establishing persistent user research and testing cohorts for both (a) public and (b) internal users
- Simplifying, streamlining, and modernizing the experience of users of BC Parks’ digital products and services
I sat in on a session with our intrepid service designers Elizabeth and Allison, collaborating with a visual designer from our vendor partner to produce straw dog interfaces for our user research. A great rhythm already, excited for these to get real feedback next week!
Content is a recurring theme at Parks. That is the gap in stewardship (and production, aggregation, strategy, etc.). Things got real in our quest to address this critical need and big thanks to the GDX content folk for the productive discussion. We’re looking at modelling the position in the short term to embed it in the long, as part of a dynamic, cross-functional team. The importance of content expertise at the heart of an organization (with a service culture) cannot be overstated. I know we’re swinging for the bleachers with our ideal candidate, but I’d like them to bring:
- Web writing /editorial excellence
- Approaches for reducing/synthesizing bulk of legacy content
- Content design acumen vis-a-vis a UX toolkit
- Strategic vision for public-facing content coherence across all touchpoints (digital and physical)
- Approaches for governance and internal workflows
- Stakeholder coordination, prioritization, and stick handling
- Collaboration w/ digital folk at the org for a continuous improvement cadence via analytics, ongoing user research, etc
Hand in hand with content, we’re making moves on the BC Parks brand. It suffers from what I might call ‘brand debt’:
If you are representing your brand’s product or service and have the responsibility to design or deliver its experience to customers, you risk accumulating Brand Debt. Anything that is “not on brand” adds to this debt. While “irrelevance” and “insipidity” has eroded many brands, “inconsistency” directly impacts brand trust. [source]
We have some work to do to regain coherence in the Parks brand, standardize its application, and produce the single-source-of-truth documentation which the whole organization can rally around. Grateful for early signals from the experts at GCPE that they’ll be along on this process with us.
Analytics! Progress. Thanks Dan for firing our new features up, excited for much deeper/wider data on bcparks.ca. Game-changing.
And way back on Monday, we previewed the recommended new information architecture via user research from our friends at OXD. Very strong work, and looking forward to the full Parks stakeholder presentation Monday.
Other stuff
Concept cases — see Jill’s notes from last week. I spent time with Complaint Management and Contaminated Sites, reviewing problem framing and talking about discovery approaches.
We also regrouped with our DDS friends at IIT about the place of design in an intake process. This is a recurring theme across conversations on initiating design projects in the public sector; what is meant by, and in what order, should one run alignment/exploration/problem definition type processes when team building — pre-contract [collaboratively] or in a more traditional project management style? Hopefully, in the near future, we can flush out the generative workshop I have rattling around in my head for rinsing out the business challenges and developing an early pattern language in the project cohort.
I keep meeting UX folk from across the sector, many at the DDS’ monthly chapter meeting last week. I’m always curious to hear about design practice and how projects are structured. I’m looking forward to leaning in further, especially with the service design analyst crew at Application Infrastructure.
And last but not least, the thing we can’t talk about. This had me reflecting on the delineation of system and service and the need to bring legibility to the complex present in order to envision preferable futures. Cue the cone:
Finally, some browser tabs from the past week:
Public Digital: Why your roadmap should have a ‘Not doing’ section.
Canadian Digital Service: Exploring the conditions for digital service delivery.
Wired: How to Protect Species and Save the Planet — at Once.
And lastly, a big shoutout to the team who launched BC’s Common Components Directory this week. This is the stuff that concretely moves the dial on our journey as a digital government. Chapeau! 👏
