Weeknotes June 25th, 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:
The heat is here, and it simultaneously seems to bring joy and exhaustion. While the week seemed to speed by, it was good to reflect on just how fast we are moving. As you’ve seen, Kevin is flying in BC Parks — can you believe that he’s only been bum in the seat for 3 months?
This week we took a step back, looked at all of our work in progress, and refocused on some key priorities.
Strategy is delivery
We hit a milestone this week with a successful senior executive committee endorsement for the digital strategy! YAY! It is just a start, a continuous work in progress, but the hard work starts now — delivery. Through our ministry governance, we’ll draft an action and engagement plan that gets to the doing (my favourite part). Two keys:
1 We have to shift from the ground up, program-specific, app by app technology delivery model we default to, to building services based on what our users, the public, need.
2 Leading in a digital era requires new/different competencies, and we must embed them to support ongoing change.
Thank you to our IIT colleagues Denise Rossander, Fraser Marshall, and the Elevate Consulting team for the multi-month work to get here. We had a fantastic engagement from the ministry, and we’ll take this as a win!
Weekly Rundown
- Public Sector Innovation Show — I had a chance to connect with my Prairies roots this week at the Public Sector Network Innovation Show — Prairies — sponsored by Code for Canada. Partnered with Darcie Harding (Canadian Energy Regulator), we discussed growing non-technical leaders into digital champions; lessons learned and the dreaded obstacles. Some great takeaways are noted here.
- Mines Digital Trust — I attended an awesome demo for the Mines Digital Trust team with my former colleagues and Product Owner Matt Hall. They are doing some incredible world-leading stuff. The biggest takeaway for me — embed policy talent. I was so blown away by the thorough and thoughtful jurisdictional research driving the team's work. The team has two policy analysts embedded, and in such a complex domain, they add tremendous value. I wonder where else this type of “bureaucracy hacking” horsepower could add value?
- Ugh — Natural Resource Inspection System (NRIS) — forgive the frank emotion. I feel like NRIS is following me everywhere I go. Partnered with the incredible Jeff Card (Director Architecture @ IIT), we finally embarked on a full architectural review of the system. Thank you, Chris Robinson, for diving in deep on this one! One can only go so long saying, “I think it’s a disaster” before taking a real, objective and dispassionate approach to review. That is what we did. The results are in, and there is A LOT of work to do. The good news is it’s doable, and this review is the first step towards a path to remediation. Most importantly, it’s the first step towards creating a performant and shared tool that barely meets our expectations — but exceeds them (let’s be honest, I’ll take meets). And, of course, all of this ties nicely into our proposed compliance and enforcement capital concept cases. Better NRIS = Better ability to share consistent data and information with the public and stewards of the land.
- Concept case update — speaking of concept cases — our ENV IT governance committee got a preview on Thursday. It was warm and supportive reception with more work to come preparing for July 30th submission to the OCIO.
- And, of course, Parks — I’ve been spending some time thinking and aligning resources and teams in the background while Kevin dives into the detail below.
Finding balance
Personally, this week was tough. I have to admit I’m not great in the heat. It activated some health challenges for me, and coupled with a medical procedure mid-week, keeping my head in the game was hard. I did, however, get a killer surprise from a colleague (thanks, Maral!) who had fresh baked Cookie Guy cookies and ice cream delivered to my house midday — how can you be upset about that? My wife was all too eager to be a co-beneficiary.
All in all, it was a great reminder — as important as our jobs are, taking care of our mental and physical health has to be number one. No exceptions.
Kevin’s notes:
Heatwave — what else?! I’m moving into my parent’s basement for the short term, as living on the top floor of a character house (without AC) isn’t recommended when the temps hit the mid 30’s. As for last week,
BC Parks: lots of great things happening per usual. I’ll break out some key activities in the bullets.
- Analytics: major advancements in our expanding analytics program on bcparks.ca, with the implementation of a Google Search Console and deep click tracking metrics. Thanks to the GDX crew for facilitating an orientation session for the Parks web team. I am so excited to help develop a program around these new tools as we look to model continuous improvement across the digital service priorities. Analytics are great and all, but it’s an understanding of how to parse the data and push deductive enhancements that makes all the difference to the public user—this, and using the insights as a jumping-off point for more qualitative investigations.
- Research recruitment, round 2: we’re close on launching a new recruitment push via a wider net, a CTA button on the header of bcparks.ca. In presenting our information architecture findings recently, Jim (Parks ADM) noted that our research participants didn’t include many ‘new to Parks’ users, an important, rapidly increasing demographic over the past two summers; part of wider societal trends and dramatically accelerated by the pandemic. Again in the spirit of continuous improvement, we’re looking to continue design research activities through the fall as we explore other aspects of Parks service touchpoints and opportunities for the future. Including the experiences, wants, and needs of new Parks users is critical in understanding how best to frame up and deliver the interconnected suite of Parks services, digital and embodied.
- Strategic planning: zooming in, zooming out; what are the key strategic planning activities and associated artifacts [maps, charts, etc.] that will help us keep lay the conditions for success as we continue to deliver tangible service improvements at this rapid velocity? There’s a lot of work to be done, from understanding the breadth of the service ecosystem (broadly defined) and its dependencies to envisioning the organizational model (through staffing and supports), which can uphold new levels of service delivery and improvement in sustainable ways. In short, there’s no shortage of strategic value to uncover, but these things take time through collaboration, reflection, consultation, investigation, etc. When the org is bootstrapped (I’ll come back to this in a minute), is this a good use of time, when calendars are already overstuffed, and folks are pinned between holding the current things together, and making the new things which will make life concretely better, both staff and public alike? I’m not sure it is, which is why we’re taking a pause during these hectic summer months. More to come in planning a better future state for Parks services, but we keep driving at delivery in the interim.
What else? I met with potential collaborators from the Climate Action Secretariat, GDX, and GCPE to discuss designing and building public-facing materials in a dynamic web format. Lots of work to do and a tight timeline, but I’m confident if we align quickly on approach and resource appropriately, we can create something awesome.
I also sat in on the presentation of our ministry’s digital strategy (see Jill’s notes above) and continued to talk about the role of design in project planning and execution with our friends at the Environmental Protection Division — looks like we’ll be working together this fall, excited for that!
Reflection time: the unit of delivery is the organization
A famous mantra in digital government over the last decade is “the unit of delivery is the team” (credit GDS/Jamie Arnold). This is absolutely true within the context of agile delivery teams pushing hard at a defined objective. As stated in Digital Transformation at Scale (p. 45),
There are really only two golden rules for putting together the right group of people. If all the people in that team are good at different things, you’re probably on the right lines. If the team is collectively good at solving different types of problems over time, so much the better.
How does this translate in a bootstrapped organization like Parks? That is, with staff working across teams, never fully dedicated to one project or objective, but rather contributing knowledge and labour to many intersecting (occasionally amorphous) initiatives running concurrently? This is where I believe the principals can be scaled up to the organizational level. In his book Team of Teams, Gen. Stanley McChrystal writes:
Cognitive “oneness” — the emergent intelligence — that we have studied in small teams can be achieved in larger organizations, if such organizations are willing to commit to the disciplined, deliberate sharing of information. This runs counter to the standard “need-to-know” mind-set.
Parks is operating in complexity — centralized and regional operations, overlapping service lines, political dimensions, huge public demand, etc. — in this service ecosystem, both maintaining and transforming at scale, the unit of delivery has to be the organization. And I don’t just mean Parks; I’m talking about our key collaborators/ninjas from corporate, ministerial/sectoral partners, and our trusted vendor network, all absolutely critical when additional capacity/virtuosity is required. With what we’re doing, at the pace and intricacy, we simply need the support of the wider body we’re nested within — hence my persistent mentions of the folks at GDX who’ve been invaluable in advancing the work.
This is why we need to work in the open. This is why we need platformed technology. This is why we need design principles, standards, and systems.
When we’re enabled with trust, purpose, and a shared consciousness — at whatever depth, be it operational norms or a more existential intention — we can do truly great things.
