Exchange Lab Operations (Alpha)
We have a new website!
Official communications about the Exchange Lab and associated Digital Plan and the office that directs modernization in the BC publilc service can be found at Digital.gov.bc.ca
We are known as a lab and a community of people working in the open and learning how to improve service delivery in the BC Public Service, together.
We are also the home of the BC Developers’ Exchange, known for producing innovative procurement tools (Code with Us and Sprint with Us) and a thriving community of GovTech designers and developers.
Our Mission
Government, through the BC Public Service, can be trusted to respond to change and meet peoples’ expectations for excellent service delivery. A modern public service that embraces digital mindset and practices is one way to achieve this mission.
The Exchange Lab partners with government programs to deliver high quality, modern services by supporting people to learn and apply the best available design and delivery methods, tools, and technology.
The results we seek center around:
- Creating high performing, cross functional teams.
- Delivering high value public impact through excellent digital products and services.
- Maximizing the return on public funding to modernize the public service through technology investment, policy improvement, community building and organizational development.
- Connecting an ecosystem of public service oriented people and agencies - inside the BC Government and beyond.
Delivery Model
We apply BC’s Digital Principles. We also borrow generally accepted modern standards for service design and delivery as a “playbook”, pioneered and practiced by other government digital service agencies around the world.
The Exchange Lab operates within a model of continuous improvement, centered around a value chain that delivers teams. Explore the phases of Exchange Lab residency and the variety of resources we produce to support teams in each phase of partnering with us.
We continuously refine and adapt Lab operations to the specific context of program areas we partner with. There is no single, consistent path. We operate in high degrees of complexity and create the conditions for a positive, productive trajectory through the application of:
- experimentation;
- collaboration; and
- emergent practices and standards.
This diagram illustrates broader connections to our delivery model.
Delivery Community
A community of people committed to learning and building public impact value together is essential to our mission.
The Exchange Lab is an anchor in a broader “Digital Delivery Network” that we refer to as a community. It also includes a variety of specific communities that may be sharing practices, mentorship, or specific supports related to digital tools, such as the DevOps platform.
Delivery Teams
Agile product delivery teams are most successful when they plug into the Digital Delivery Network and communities that are relevant to their practices. The Exchange Lab team actively connects these teams to each other as well, so they can share learning and solve common problems together.
Delivery Partners (corporate services and products)
Underlying the success of these teams are a variety of centralized services, common components, or platforms for building excellent services. The Exchange Lab supports connection to these agencies, which include:
- Accessibility – working to make accessibility part of the DNA of the public – both in the digital and physical environments.
- BC Behavioural Insights Group – applying behavioural science to behaviour-based policy problems by making small tweaks or “nudges” to a program or service.
- Corporate Privacy – supporting employees in balancing their need to collect and share personal information while meeting their privacy obligations.
- Data – supporting employees to develop their ability to collect, manage, share, analyse, interpret and present data.
- DevOps – enabling BC Public Service digital delivery teams to fully control the deployment of their applications.
- Innovation Hub – supporting a more innovative workplace culture by inspiring and empowering employees to reimagine their work now and into the future.
- LeanBC – improving business processes, from the simple to the complex, and reducing red tape for citizens and businesses across British Columbia.
- Service & Content Design – improving how citizens find, access and use government services by performing human-centred design research with citizens and stakeholders in B.C.
- Analytics - using digital tooling and business process to enable assessment of the success people have using services from end-to-end.
Want to connect with these partners “in person”?
Delivery Community Channels
Guides and the Service Design & Delivery Playbook can aid some of the work we do. However, conditions change so rapidly and delivery contexts are too diverse for any ordered list to remain relevant. The evolving knowledge shared by the community is how we keep pace. Get connected:
- MS Teams: search for the “Digital Delivery Network”
- Rocket.Chat: available to external partners who are authenticated as part of a team in our BCGov Github organization.
About Us
Formally, the Exchange is less than 20 people who organize around the following functions:
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Exchange Lab Operations: Leads organizational development for program areas seeking to apply emerging digital service delivery standards in line with the BC Government Digital Principles. Facilitates early design and delivery readiness and community support for delivery teams throughout their development.
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Strategic Policy: Builds enabling functions or removes frictions and blockers in the system that slow down or impede the results of delivery teams. Work includes enhancing institutional policies and processes and creating or enabling platform functions that are broadly valuable (e.g. common components).
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Digital Marketplace: Builds products and programs that help bridge relationships with the internal and external ecosystem of service delivery talent, including through innovative procurement methods (E.g. Sprint with Us).
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Digital Academy: Builds, coordinates, and delivers training and learning resources with a community of experts.
Other corporate service and Delivery Network partners support these functions with specific services, products and mentorship. The Exchange Lab would not be successful without broad collaboration, including with our external partners.
The organizational structure the Exchange Lab Team is part of in the Province of B.C. is
- The Design and Delivery Branch, in
- The Digital Platforms and Data Division, in
- The Office of the Chief Information Officer, in
- the Ministry of Citizens’ Services.
Our Stories
There is lots to tell… and we’ve been trying to do so over time through a variety of channels. Check out some of our multimedia to get a sense of our program, results, and the community that makes it work.
- The Exchange Medium Blog
- The Exchange Youtube channel
- The Exchange on Twitter
- The Exchange on LinkedIn
We also cross post and share content relevant only to the BC Public Service on our @Work Group
Results
How do we know if we are successful? This is one of the first questions all teams ask when they set out to solve a problem. Our team works from a service blueprint and we engage in impact mapping (what is impact mapping?.) to improve the experience for our partners and our operations.
- Current service blueprint (coming soon)
- Exchange Lab Impact map (coming soon)
Here are some of the results of our work as of December 2019.
Impact: Digital Product Delivery
We aim to deliver digital products that meet people’s needs.
The Exchange Lab has hosted more than a dozen teams since 2015. See the list of resident and graduated teams for the products that have come from the Lab.
Note: We are working on ways to illustrate the return on investment for Agile product teams.
Impact: Learning and Community Building
We aim to increase the digital delivery capacity of government employees and our delivery partners through training, learning by doing, and community building.
| Learning Program | Result |
|---|---|
| Agile Fundamentals: A one-day BCDevExchange course on what being Agile is all about from a mindset, cultural and practical perspective, with the practical methodology worked through as Scrum. | 950 trainees. 86% either agree or strongly agree that this course is effective. |
| Digital Leadership sessions: Course content unpacks new leadership competencies, the new OCIO Digital Framework and focuses on Agile Governance, Lean IT and Servant Leadership. | 125 trainees. Future courses are waitlisted. |
| Open Shift 101 - covers DevOps platform training (application operational tasks) | 168 trainees |
| Open Shift 201 - covers DevOps platform training for advanced topics | 25 trainees |
| Discover DevOps - an introduction to DevOps for Product Owners. | 30 trainees |
| Certified Scrum Product Owner | 102 trainees |
| Certified Scrum Master | 55 trainees |
| Visual Facilitation Practices | 48 trainees |
| Lab and Learns - delivered by BCPS employees, vendors, or guest speakers. | 35 sessions to date with over 1,000 attendees |
| Webinars - delivered by BCPS employees, vendors, or guest speakers. | 7 Sessions to date with 330 attendees 330 |
| Tours of the Lab – Bi-weekly open door tours are a first stop for anyone interested in accessing Lab programming. Attendees engage with teams active in the Lab to learn about their experience. | 50 tours with on average 9 attendees per tour. Special tours have been arranged for Deputy Ministers and the Premier’s Office staff. |
| Partnership with Ontario Digital Services, Government of Canada and Apolitical on How to be digital in the Canadian public service: a 10-week online boot camp.. | Two cohorts delivered as of February 2021 (stats to come) |