Weeknotes May 7th 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 a question I should have been able to answer with ease stumped me.
How does what we are talking about today in this [digital strategy] workshop fit with the service transformation you’re doing?
I could swear I saw tumbleweeds and heard crickets for a moment. I gave an answer. Not a great one, and I knew I needed some deep reflection. How could the digital strategy, the “North Star”, the inspiring document we were developing not fit?
Digital Strategy + Service Transformation
We were knee-deep in digital strategy workshops with divisions and the conversations were not going how we hoped. The material that had been gathered via interviews was driving us into a tactical, pain-point framed conversation, and worse, it was completely missing who we were doing this for.
The approach had been used and led by our vendor (Elevate Consulting) and Information, Innovation, and Technology (IIT) partners in two other ministries to develop draft strategies. Strategies are being completed across all natural resource ministries with the following purpose:
- A digital strategy is a tool to help the business achieve its objectives
- It identifies our business capabilities and helps us to decide what digital solutions will support where the business is now, and where it is going in the future.
What is service transformation: Kevin and I spent some time this week thinking about what we are aiming to do. How we will show up for program areas. Namely, how do we differentiate from our ‘keep the lights on’ needs with respect to digital tools, how do we prioritize the right work with our leadership, and what governance will take us to the next level? All questions with varying levels of “it depends” answers. To start, we came up with this:
Back to the question (see I’m still avoiding it): The output and understanding of business capabilities and future technologies is incredibly important. The strategy will clarify that and identify what technologies are coming at us and the workshops have been incredibly valuable to deepen our understanding of the real ministries' issues.
However, to get real commitment and create the level of excitement we need to shift the way we work, we’re going to start with delivery. The real hands-on result of work is our superpower. Our role is facilitating how we apply new models in such a way that it inspires that shift.
Plan it, Do it, Talk about it.
— A wise ADM
By applying new ways of working and necessarily designing new organizational structures we are actively identifying barriers, pain points, and opportunities. That will feed into the evolving strategy and the broader government community working towards the same goals.
Weekly musings
- Teams and portfolios: I was reminded this week that working with multi-disciplinary product teams in broad cross-ministry portfolios isn’t obvious. The value of a shared team over single resources is a totally new and often foreign way to work. Especially when resources are tight, work is plentiful, and pressures are real. Seeing (and justifying) the value takes time. My task next week is to revisit this topic leveraging my community colleagues with some rehashed material and fresh eyes. Thank you to Catherine Chernoff and J-P Fournier with The Exchange for digging in with me.
- MEGA-THON: Our first MEGA-THON, aka a really big hackathon, will take place next week and we already have 40 talented humans registered to join from a variety of backgrounds — tech, GIS, scrum masters, designers, product owners, and a few others. Kudos to Jessica Wade (Product Owner for Team Falcon), Katie Menke, and Jesus Hernandez Tapia for their help wrangling the backlog together.
- Internal Comms: Sam is plugging away at internal communications and has drafts of our intranet ready to publish next week.
Kevin’s notes:
While Jill and I continue to define our team’s mission and vision, and Jill works across the ministry on overall digital strategy and how it ties back to delivery in the here and now… I try not to collect too many proverbial rocks.
If you want to deliver change, it is imperative you set a single, clear goal of something you will deliver, preferably by a specific date.
— Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery
bcparks.ca is again where most my efforts were focused this week. In no particular order,
- Information architecture: kicking off a new scope with the pros at OXD, integrated into our sprint cadence. We’re going to work with both public and staff users to test a straw dog expert IA to see how it aligns with existent mental models; then we’ll take it apart, put it back together, and do it again. I’m really glad to be digging into this high-value piece which will reverberate across our research and design efforts to come.
- Design system: establishing a minimum viable set of brand elements, page templates, and content types for the new site, aligning to the corporate design standard and systems. The site must be coherent across page experiences with minimum (preferably zero) ‘unique’ layouts. We’re doing the groundwork to establish the component set, not only in the name of consistent UX, but also so the site is easily maintainable in the future — no mysteries, just plug and play.
- Cross-organizational learnings: I met with Nino Samson at the Ministry of Health to learn about the Patient Voices initiative, a design research community that works with his team on a set of interrelated service delivery projects. I’m hoping to set up a similar program at Parks moving forward, to lessen the workload of recruitment for future research and testing initiatives. Harkening back to last week’s notes, this recruitment is time intensive, but the quality of your lists is causal to the quality of the research outcomes: it’s worth doing right. Thanks for taking the time to walk me through your work Nino!
- Community Engagement and Education: this amazing team’s work is inextricably linked to bcparks.ca, and they carry deep insights from their time in the field with some of the most active members of the Parks community. It’s been a pleasure spending time with Rike and Becs and I’m looking forward to the stronger integration of these units moving forward, understanding the systemic relationships and shared value creation within the Parks services ecosystem, broadly defined.
Weekly musings
I was able to attend two of the aforementioned digital strategy sessions facilitated by our Elevate. Kudos to their real-time adaptations and pivots through the week, strengthening engagement with the process. I also attended my first of Jaimie Boyd’s Digital Government Monthly Update calls and was impressed to hear about the work in the Justice sector over the past year! For me, keeping up with progress from across gov is vital — any opportunity to hear folks tell their story is welcome and appreciated.
I enjoyed a couple virtual coffee catchups with key members of my gov braintrust (read: talk therapy sessions). I’m grateful for colleagues who’ve become close friends; committed to this work, for the long haul, through their belief in the value of public service — it’s both validating and inspiring.
A couple gems from the weekly newsletter roundup: this post on the role of governance in transformation, and this piece linking systems theory principals to visual design — the lens we’re applying in our current Parks work.
On a personal note (and after much consumer indecision), I finally picked up a ‘real’ digital camera, after exclusively shooting fim for the past decade or so. Murphy is already unimpressed at having it pointed at him constantly.
