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BC Common Components (CoCo) Weeknote 14

2020-04-19

This is a weekly post recapping what the BC Common Components “CoCo” team has done this week and what we plan to accomplish next week. The CoCo mission control dashboard is here.

This week’s note is another special COVID-19 edition of our weeknotes. We’ve been iteratively improving the new service we launched last week to support British Columbians returning from abroad with their self-isolation, and have also taken on a new priority (more below).

Done

  • Continued iteratively improving the enhanced travel screening service in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Service B.C., which supports British Columbians returning from out-of-country to self isolate. Highlights were a major database migration, integrating with ServiceBC’s workflow management system and implementing real-time analytics with the help of GDX. All of these enhancements will support the Province’s data-driven decision-making and service delivery.
  • Took on a new COVID-19 priority - building a new farm operating screening service to ensure the safety of hundreds of temporary farm workers coming to the Province this week. We began work on this initiative on Friday and completed the first module this afternoon. We’re now awaiting a go/no-go decision from the Ministry of Health this evening. This pace of development was made possible by reusing code from the enhanced travel screening service and by working on cloud infrastructure.

Doing Next

  • Continuously improve the enhanced travel screening service in response to user feedback.
  • Build and launch a new module of the farm operator screening service to support 70 farm inspections by the Ministry of Agriculture.
  • Continuously improve the farm operator screening service in response to user feedback.
  • We also plan to make time to regroup as a team to reflect on the past three weeks of fast-paced delivery and plan how we can shift into a more sustainable delivery cadence starting this week.

Measuring Our Impact

For many of us, having the privilege to support B.C.’s COVID-19 response has been the most impactful work of our careers. Now that we have instrumented all of our services to capture analytics, we wanted to reflect on some of our team’s measurable results from the past three weeks:

  • BC 211 (designed and built a solution in two days):
    • To date, the landing page we built has fielded 35,000 visits from British Columbians, shielding the fragile main webpage from over 70% of incoming web traffic and preventing another site crash.
    • We’ve facilitated 11,300 visits to the Safe Senior’s Program registration page - a link that was buried on the old BC 211 website’s user interface.
    • The Safe Seniors Program has to date helped connect 2,800 registered seniors in need of help with 4,950 registered volunteers to provide services like grocery and prescription pick ups.
  • Travel Screening (designed and built in five days):
    • In the past week, the service has seen 8,600 web visits from British Columbians returning home from every continent except Antarctica.
    • In the eight days since the service went live, the service helped 2,050 travellers and families complete self-isolation plans for their arrival in Canada.
    • The service’s integration with Service BC means that each of these travellers and families receive a support call a few days after their arrival from ServiceBC.