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Resource a Team

Source a Team

Organizations have a few options for building a team. Once a team is brought together, we help facilitate their journey.

Source the talent internally. This is challenging in the BC Public Service currently, as we have a shortage of technical talent. However, you are very encouraged to support your staff to learn new skills, such as human centered design, code development, and data science. There are courses offered inside government, however, certificates from external programs are encouraged (and the Pacific Leaders Program is an option for funding).

Hire team members. With approval of the Exchange Lab, you can use these job profiles to build an Agile team, including:

Procure a Team. Most of our teams start by hiring vendor partners for a year to build the product and then mentor team members that are hired to continue improving and maintaining the product continuously.

We encourage hiring agile teams using Sprint with Us in the Digital Marketplace. This method of procurement sources a team of experienced Agile talent. It includes an unbiased process of evaluation (you can’t see the vendor’s names) until scoring of applicant questions and a coding challenge is complete. We hire teams in less than 30 days.

You can find other ways to procure talent at BC Bid Resources.

Evaluate the Total Cost of Ownership

The total cost of ownership is the cost to buy something plus the cost to operate it over its useful life. The idea is to take into consideration the total cost to operate an asset or program, not just the upfront acquisition cost.

For Agile product teams, we estimate that running a team for a year costs between $1-1.5 million in the first year, and about $700k after that. The product may go live within that time, but there is a need to understand costs that will sustain and continuously improve the product.

A traditional approach to tech allows products age, and requires new capital investments every so many years. This new funding is usually difficult to come by, risking a program becoming inefficient due to technical debt or worse, failing to meet people’s needs.

We argue products that are essential to service delivery should be maintained by a team and be mostly funded through operational dollars. This reduces amortization costs to a business area, particularly if that team is operationally improving a program by building other new products.

You might think of technology today like policy has been for ages: you can’t run a program without it. It is not a one time investment. It is an operational need.

#### Investment will look different for every program area and product.

Some are more demanding, or need to respond to change more frequently. Your program may also have a variety of systems and service delivery products to build. In these cases, we recommend investing in a full time and complete product team.

Other programs or products require less attention, and may only require a Product Owner and Site Reliability Engineer. They may procure talent when feedback from people indicates more demand for new or improved features. This might also be where a CIO builds capacity to service business programs that have minimal, or less complex tech needs.

Across an organization, teams may develop specialties for addressing particular business capabilities (e.g. notification or digital identity). Or, they may specialize in unique program content and user needs (e.g. industrial emitters, or health sector clients and systems).

There is no one way to slice it that will make sense for everyone.

As teams have exited the Lab and discovered their pathway to continuous improvement, there are a variety of organization design models emerging. In 2021, we are working to research and understand what is going on to share more broadly. Stay tuned!

Engage Your CFO

In Ministry Operations, the Chief Financial Officer supports programs to make sound financial decisions. They can facilitate re-allocation of resources and sourcing new funds.

Agile delivery is challenging our traditional perspectives on the allocation of capital vs. operational funding for “technology” (which is really just embedded with operational services). This means your CFO might benefit from extra support understanding your new circumstances.

The Lab team can work with you and your CFO to connect to others in the public service who have navigated managing these new investment considerations, including risks, associated with Agile product development.

Policy and guidance for this is not yet formally established… but there are plenty of organizations forging a path to this next level of investing in good digital services.

LabOps Resources

We’re currently evaluating what resources would be helpful to place here… share your thoughts with us at exchangelab@gov.bc.ca.


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