Code For Canada fellowship
In 2019 I was brought on as a Design Fellow with Code For Canada.
My fellowship and I spent a month onboarding in Toronto before heading to Calgary for our project placement. There we worked in the Canada Energy Regulator to build Agile and design thinking skills, facilitate change management and improve internal/external data access and presentation.
2019 - 2020
Objective
Improve REGDOCSs, the internal/external data library holding all information related to federal energy projects in Canada. While doing this teach and improve organizational capacity for processes such as Agile, design thinking, iterative approaches and introduce new technologies, and make space for future digital government projects.
This project was facilitated by Code For Canada in partnership with the Government of Canada, and directly included my fellowship teammates, Ivan Duka and Lequanne Collins-Bacchus,
Exploration
Starting with a month of springboard training and preparation in Toronto my team and I worked to flesh out the basics of our problem space and start airing assumptions about the project. We met with some of our new staff partners from Calgary and collaborated with them and other fellowship teams on mini-sprints to get the ball rolling and sensitize our staff partners to our workflows. We also received mentorship from past and current fellows in other cohorts who were part way through their fellowship terms to get the lay of the land and learn more about how to do our best work.
Once we arrived in Calgary we immediately started connecting with staff to build relationships, do research and lay good groundwork. We collectively had over 100 sit-downs in our first month and did everything we could to invite people in and learn where and how we could be most effective. We also introduced ourselves to the the Board of Directors by running an intensive design research workshop on our second day with support from our VP of Data to get their buy-in and insights.
Research
At our partner organization we worked in the open, pinned our work up on our walls, posted to a blog and had constant open office hours - there was a near constant stream of people walking by our studio to get acquainted and figure out what we were doing. In this time we met plenty of people who had work that overlapped with ours and talked to many managers about ways to feed our work in together for better business outcomes, better data and lower workload across teams. We brought partner org coworkers along to research sessions build skills and confidence.
In addition to our internal research we also conducted external and secondary research including interviews, co-design sessions, card sorting, system mapping, internal and external user testing, expert panel discussions and listening to a lot of podcasts. In our project about making data easier to access librarians turned out to be a key expert group and we connected with librarians championing indigenous and innovative cataloging systems from small towns in Australia to big cities in North America and special collections around the world.
Iteration
The ability to change something already in motion was among the key ideas we brought with us - an Agile approach that allows for iteration and pivoting rather than classic waterfall methods. We worked in ways designed to be flexible, such as using a chrome extension to iterate our partner organization’s website in a cheap, cheerful and low impact way. Including humour, like using the extension to change all the site images to sparkly kitten GIFs, helped the big changes move forward later on. We did live iterations to our test site for other staff and user testers to take the pressure off and demonstrated how staff were already working in iterative ways to secure buy-in and build confidence along with their skills, and invited people to come to us with ideas, tools and questions.
We also brought our skills outside our projects and had dedicated hours every week to work projects outside our main product, such as a week I taught the staff librarians how to use A-frame, an easy VR program, to iterate their library setup to secure project approval by providing multiple detailed views and making it accessible to people who process 3D spaces in a variety of ways. This helped build up a lot of good will, get people interested in us and our work, and set up future opportunities.
Analysis
We pasted our research notes up on the walls of our studio and demonstrated sticky-note taking, affinity mapping and how to pull and make libraries of insights. Managers from areas across the org were brought in to help us analyze these and understand where insights ran up against features and bugs in organizational processes. We worked with data science and visualization teams, and ran large meetings with staff from across the organization to gauge capacity, get their buy-in, build skills and understand what we needed to do to support long-term longevity for our project. We also built external relationships with local civics and technology communities to provide support and avenues for work for our partner organization, and attended events such federal government-organized hackathon in Ottawa to bring more new tech and design talent into the public service.
As part of skills development as well as our own testing needs we constantly tested the product and our research through hallway intercepts for interviews, user testing and casual research check-ins. Building pattern libraries of both visual and interactive elements but also research insights and design principles, and we worked with a variety of teams to establish them and help connect them to other projects.
Outcomes
Although all fellowships come to an end, my team and I were lucky to be offered more time at our partner organization to continue our work and implement more of our design outcomes and digital practices across our and other teams. We left the Canada Energy Regulator with detailed documentation of what we’d done, explanations of the processes we’d used along the way and libraries of research findings, our implementations and suggestions for next steps in the future of our product.
See our final demo presentation at the 2020 Code For Canada summit in Toronto here.