Mapping the future: What we learned, confirmed and never expected in our service design project

Development and Digital Services (DDS) is a work unit within the Ministry of Water, Land and Resource Stewardship (WLRS) that provides Agile software development services to the natural resource ministries (NRM). As a part of the Natural Resource Information and Digital Services Division (NRIDS), we encourage inspecting and adapting digital products to meet client needs and organizational goals.

Walking the Agile walk

Creating an Agile team is both an accomplishment and a first step. Once the team’s up and running, how do you help it grow into something that improves the lives of people in British Columbia? How do you connect your Agile approach to the real-world needs of product owners working with your staff? And how do you know what you don’t know about their needs, and what you can do to improve your own business practices?

Applying Agile principles to our own work, we modeled the practices we champion for our teams to show that not having all the answers is not just okay — it’s the starting point for real discovery. In a time when taxpayers demand more from government with fewer resources, we saw an opportunity to lead by example. By embracing service design principles, we explored how incremental improvements and actively seeking feedback from our business partners could create more efficient and effective services. Our goal was to demonstrate that continuous iteration is possible in leadership and a powerful way to deliver better services.

Transforming our work through service design

Our leadership team embraces an Agile mindset, and we aim to follow the principle of continuous learning and improvement. That approach extends to our own processes and materials. For example, in 2022 we improved our employee onboarding experience by creating a checklist and virtual whiteboards for supervisors to aid them in having better conversations with new team members. These tools have led to a better hiring experience and happier team members who are more likely to stay.

For our latest improvement project, we took a page out of our own book and applied service design to guide enhancements to services we provide for our partners. In the fall of 2023, we began work with a service designer. We initially thought this project might help us organize our team better, but their guidance and the path of the process pointed us in new directions – as often happens in service design. Through collaboration and discovery, we created a list of challenges, opportunities and goals to guide our work for the next few quarters.

Mapping out our services

Within the DDS leadership team, there are ongoing conversations about our services and who is responsible for them. To help clarify this, our service designer interviewed product owners, team leads and colleagues who work with our Agile teams to build an initial wireframe of our service journey blueprint.

A service journey blueprint is a visual map that shows the steps users take when interacting with a service, pointing out key touchpoints, processes and problem areas. It helps us compare our users’ experience against the work behind the scenes, so we can find opportunities to improve and make things run more smoothly.

Co-design involves collaborating with our audience, designing for the user by working alongside them. In our co-design sessions we refined the wireframe, filled in gaps of understanding and answered questions that emerged during interviews.

The resulting service journey blueprint gave us a clear picture of who’s involved at each stage and what happens, from surface-level interactions to the deeper core of each service. Seeing the map laid out this way showed us:

• How much work we’re doing
• What’s working well
• Where decisions are made
• Hand-off points
• Pain points
• Gaps
• Opportunities
• Areas that need more investigation

Key insights

Through this work, we learned a few important things:

• We need to get better at identifying all DDS does for our product owners, Agile teams and partner ministries to help provide a more consistent level of service
• We need to help product owners better understand the roles and responsibilities of each work unit in NRIDS that support our teams
• There are too many communication channels, documents and meetings, which can be overwhelming for staff
• Product owners and staff need more comprehensive guidance navigating financial processes.  Access to accurate and consistent information is needed to improve forecasting and manage other financial tasks.
• We need a clear process for moving products from active development to sustainment as their funding model and resource needs change over time
• There are gaps in the information we provide to product owners during onboarding
• We need ongoing Agile education for our teams and partners
• The DDS leadership team is focused on aligning with the B.C. government’s Digital Code of Practice and Agile values and principles

Changes on the horizon

After listening to our partners and team members and building out our service blueprint, we started brainstorming ways to improve our services over the coming months.

Improving financial processes

To help everyone on the team better understand our financial processes, we began by mapping out how each of our funding sources works. This visualization has made it easier to:

• Explain how the financial processes work
• Identify areas we can improve in services we control

We’re also working with colleagues in NRIDS on financial and reporting processes to better meet the needs of our projects.

Creating a product owner onboarding guide

During our discussions, we noticed the need for an onboarding guide for product owners similar to the materials we created for new employees. We’ve started holding discovery sessions with product owners and others involved in onboarding to co-create a new tool and reference guide for future new product owners.

Managing our backlog

We’ve also gathered the rest of our ideas and focus areas into a shared backlog. This helps us work in the open transparently and encourages collaboration with product owners. As we work through the backlog we’ll continue refining our goals, using an Agile approach to break them down into smaller steps so we can deliver value more quickly to our partners.

Reflecting on the project

Running a service design project requires openness and a willingness to find new ways to improve our partners’ experience. Throughout the process, we’ve learned what matters most to our partners, where we can improve and how to work better as a team. As we work to deliver better experiences for NRIDS and the NRM, the knowledge we’ve acquired through service design will continue to shape our goals.