Weeknotes May 28th 2021
In the spirit of transparency and candour, Kevin and Jill are publishing weeknotes reflecting on the what and why for their team.
Kevin’s notes:
It’s Friday, my email hasn’t worked all day, and I’m feeling the existential friction of being in a new role, on a greenfield team, in an organizational/operational context that I’m still coming to understand. Design, by definition, is working through the ambiguity–the gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what could be.’ Sometimes this is laden with hope and opportunity, other times fraught with anxiety and perceived risk. This week landed somewhere in the middle. Anyway, on to a more tangible capture of my goings-on!
- We’re working on some speculative design and development for a thing we can’t talk about publicly. It’s connected me with an awesome team inside of gov and it’s been inspiring to see their velocity and efficacy. I hope to work with them more in the future; these kinds of high-performing, multidisciplinary teams inside of gov are the future.
- Design review for bcparks.ca! This is really coming along. Excited for the new UX/UI, informed by real user needs and contemporary best practice. These first applications of our systems look *chefs kiss*
- Deeper digital service collaboration with the BC Parks Foundation. I feel a renewed sense of urgency in defining the [shared] roadmap, value set, and collaborative opportunities. A crunchy task for early next week.
- I briefly caught up with my old friend and colleague Rommel Agbay from the PSA’s Innovation Hub. Rommel was my first supervisor on the Service Design team at GDX back in the day and taught me so much about how to government. I’m grateful for our rapport and candour; he’s been the voice of reason to my tangentiality many a time. They do great work at the Hub and it’s encouraging to see them empowered in their explorations, crossing the river by feeling the stones.
- Complaint management: a very complex space. Sectoral reach, regional and centralized ops, legacy systems, data quality, analog interactions, an array of public touchpoints, perception management, political implications… it’s a big thing. We held a problem definition session to try to work out the users, context, and value:
Big thanks to the stakeholders who participated. Great engagement, inputs, and a lot of learning (for me). Now to define the next steps…
Weekly musings
This week we poured some further thought into how we engage across the ministry, from our ‘biz dev’ strategy through to intake criteria. This goes to many variables and checkboxes, aligning with the brainstorming we showed you back here. As well, and perhaps the most concrete thing to come out of our ranging conversations this week was the notion that perhaps a different team model is emergent, more bifurcated than embedded. The process of self-definition and the associated formalizations is ongoing at the Service Transformation Branch, probe/sense/respond.
Jill’s notes:
It was a short week for me after an extra-long weekend. Today was my first non-100%-9 hour meetings day where I had some space to check some boxes (mostly in the process space shipping emails and churning through mandatory work). I’m still looking for the elusive time to ‘think strategically’ this week. It was a bit of a struggle. A few quick updates to cap the week:
- MEGA-THON Follow Up: I promised a bit more information on our mega-fun cross-ministry hackathon. For those who want a bit more info check out this quick summary video — and our open Trello board. Overall, incredible participation and the event brought some joy (and some cool stuff) to those who participated.
- New Stuff: Kevin facilitated a great session on a comprehensive and complex issue — complaint tracking and management on the land base. We’re still working on the next steps. We have a visit to the cross natural resource ministries Compliance and Enforcement (C&E) Executive Directors committee next week to discuss how to move forward.
- Meetings Galore: I learned more about bcparks.ca CMS and met with several program area staff across ENV to understand their priorities and make connections. I’m struck by how common the work is, yet how specialized it can be. The continued presence of knowledge silos is tough but I was inspired by the passion and amazing instincts of those I met with. Great questions like “aren’t the people who access these programs the same?” and “we can’t be the only ones thinking about this!”. So I’m choosing to re-frame for next week and look for opportunities.
“The question isn’t who is going to let me; it’s who is going to stop me.”
— Ayn Rand
With that, onto next week and channelling as much positivity as I possibly can while playing with these two nuggets!
