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BC Common Components (CoCo) Weeknote 1

2020-01-19

This is the first of a series of weeknotes recapping what the BC Common Components (we’ve taken to calling it “CoCo”) team has done this week and what we plan to accomplish next week. I’ll save all of the weeknotes here.

On Friday, I overhead one of our designers summarize the week best: “It feels like we need to design an ecosystem. It’s an incredible design challenge, but it’s not easy to figure out where to start.” This week - the start of “Sprint 0”- was all about figuring out where to start. We onboarded to the lab, began forming as a team, and began initial discovery work. We learned a lot and started shaping a few ideas about how we might rapidly add value to other tech teams in BC. We’ll further shape these ideas this coming week with the broader team (CGI and Exchange Lab), with the aim to get to a decision about the first components we take on in the next few days.

Done

  • Held a kickoff strategic alignment workshop, created a team agreement and Introduced ourselves to other teams in the lab.
  • Drafted an initial Product Vision Statement and Opportunity Canvas.
  • Interviewed our first team, the Citizens’ Services Real Property PIMS team.
  • Drafted a matrix to help us evaluate other jurisdictions’ common components.
  • Started analyzing research done by GDX on service patterns in government to explore initial opportunities for common components.
  • Met with the NR Sector’s Common Services showcase team to learn about their products and approach to developing easy-to-use common services.
  • Finished initial R&D on the Gov.UK Notify Platform. We’ll need direction on how to proceed; it’s deeply tied into AWS and will take extensive effort to deploy to OpenShift.
  • Uncovered a potential good first common component that could help us add value fast: building a set of simple template applications (frontend, API and database of choice) to help new teams quickly get set up fast with working applications. This is a good example.

Doing Next

  • Launch a public team site like this one to document our work in the open.
  • Develop a user research plan.
  • Create a repository of common services/platforms around the world.
  • Meet with the incoming Wildfire Predictive Services team to discuss their needs.
  • Shape common component ideas, including Notify and Application templates/boilerplates. For anyone interested, we’ll be doing initial shaping of these ideas Monday morning at 10:00am in our team room in the Lab.
  • Meet as a Program/Strategy team to discuss and recommend to Rumon what we should build first while we’re conducting broader user research and discovery.