Job Posting Postscript: Lead, Advisory Services
An open FAQ
📌 UPDATE, December 20, 2024
Notice to candidates external to the public service: given the recent change in hiring policy, this position has been paused, and likely will be reposted for internal to BC Public Service employees only.
I’m grateful to everyone who has expressed interest and I hope you have an opportunity to bring your passion and skill to serve people in BC in the future.
I’m hiring again! We’ve had a busy year and a half since this job was posted, and I’m grateful to the team and our Lead who moved us to grow and mature. He had to move on (across the Atlantic!), and we’re looking to fill this role again.
The description below remains an accurate depiction of the role. A few changes:
- We’ve dropped the term Modernization.
- We’re now a cost recovery service.
- There’s lots more to learn on Digital.gov.bc.ca!
This job posting closes on December 23, 2024.
This is an article written to attract excellent, passionate talent to The Exchange Lab’s mission to deliver inclusive, accessible and connected services that are designed with and for people.
This is an updated version of the original post from 2023.
You can apply to the job here: https://bcpublicservice.hua.hrsmart.com/hr/ats/Posting/view/118107
(Search for posting 118107 if you are logged into the system.)
This is a new kind of role in the BC Public Service, in an organization that grew from very gritty organizing, doing, and learning. We’ve always embraced #OneTeamGov principles and this position, “Lead of Advisory Services” (the Lead), will exemplify these.
As a result of these efforts, and to give solid mandate to our work going forward, our Government Chief Information Officer proudly released a Digital Plan for all of government in 2023. It includes emphasis on service delivery (digital) principles. It signals strongly: come work with us if you want to help government serve people better.
So what about you, dear reader?
Are you are interested in offering and developing your leadership skills in this space? If so, I’m working in the open here with a practical action of blogging to (hopefully) improve your experience applying to this job.
I’m already hearing questions about the work, the organization, and me from some interested folks. The job posting scratches the surface and I’m not sure why I’d want you to read between those lines. I’d rather give you some meaningful lines to read :)
So, this blog will be a somewhat living FAQ where I’ll share some postscript insights into this job I’m posting.
I’ll start with some initial thoughts in the content of this blog. As new questions come in, I’ll make an effort to post my responses in the comments as soon as possible. Included here so far:
- What is a Band 3, Lead, and where does it sit in the organization?
- What will this team actually do?
- Does the team track hours and bill for services? (Updated, November 2024)
- What happens when you improve all of government? Will this role still be needed?
- What are some downsides of this job?
- Can I live anywhere?
- How do I screen in?
- How much effort is required in the assessment process.
- What is the culture like at the lab?
- There are a variety of IM/IT agencies in government. How does the Lab connect to these?
Reading this will not give you an upper hand in the competition. My aim is to attract more of the right talent and to help people get to know me, the organization, and what this job experience might be. Of course, if you join us, we’ll be creating that experience together, with our team of teams.
What is a Band 3, Lead, and where does it sit in the organization?
We currently have around 120 full time people working in the Digital Office where the Exchange Lab resides, with some surge around the edges.
The leadership team in our branch, of which you’ll be part, has an Executive Director (ED), with four Senior Directors, each with a portfolio of teams. There are about 13 teams across the entire office, of different shapes and sizes, each with a Product Owner/Manager (we use those terms interchangeably).
Our ED reports up to the Chief Digital Officer, who reports to the Government Chief Information Officer, who is an Associate Deputy Minister. We also have Deputy Minister in our Ministry of Citizens Services.
You can scope out some of these leaders and what we get up to at the Digital Office in our Livestream playlist. Here’s one example:
Band 3 is the jargon we use as we refer to the pay scales (responsibility levels) in the public service. It is a management classification, which means you are not in the union. This means you do not pay union dues and you are considered the “employer” when it comes to union business. The people on your team will be union members, and they are supported to get “flex days” (earned time off for one day every two weeks).
(Note that this role has temporary exclusion, and is likely to be excluded, but is still going through the union’s process to confirm this. Please email me if you have specific concerns about this.)
At the Exchange Lab, most of the Band 3 leaders are Product Owners/Managers. They have a different job profile than the one I posted because they are managing a backlog for building technology.
I won’t get into the details here, but because this role is building teams instead of tech, I couldn’t use that profile. However, you’ll be working across the organization with peers who are leading teams and setting the vision and scope of work within related value chains that deliver on our mission. You and your team will also be supported by a kick-ass crew of Agilists (Senior Scrum Masters and Agile Coaches) to help optimize your team.
The team itself is made up of Senior Advisors and other talent with specialties such as Human Centered Design and Agile Coaching.
We do have fantastic people in the team now, who have been shaping the digital government ecosystem for a few years. They’ve also been learning a tonne about how to drive more success for our specific program into the future.
What will this team actually do?
We help program areas orient around a complex problem to solve for people in BC that need services from government. Typically these are priorities for government, like housing or health.
We design and run activities that sense what the organization might need to adopt the digital principles. We have several workshops and advisory practices we use and are always refining these and trying more.
If a program meets a set of readiness criteria, is determined to be a priority, and is within our capacity, then we advance towards Residency Partnership.
Related, the job profile references giving preference to candidates who have:
- Experience designing and delivering a program for a diverse scope of clients in a high change environment.
- Experience facilitating and coaching people for change adoption, including group process.
We don’t just write reports. We actively immerse ourselves in the experience of the program that is struggling to deliver. We spend time getting to know them, their problem, and we pitch in to help them extract the insights we and they need to modernize. We have some of the most experienced talent in government at this (and a broader community beyond our doors that love to pitch in). It is not uncommon to draw the network together to help design a service blueprint or to facilitate an alignment workshop.
Given this context, the Lead will manage the team’s backlog so that they can deliver at their capacity. And, the Lead will be creative in finding ways to amplify that capacity.
Resident partners get priority access to our Modernization Advisory Services, and the rest of the services at the Lab. This includes talent hiring and procurement, training, and support with developing common components, among others. These supports improve the pace of getting a delivery team in place that can get working services and products to people within 6–12 months. We see teams deliver working software much faster than that, mind you (not that it is a race.)
The Lead role will work in a scaled, meta-scrum fashion with other product service Managers at the lab to align our services and shared backlog. We’re in progress setting up these collaborative structures now, so you’ll probably get to help shape them.
When it comes to “experience delivering digital products or services,” this is ideal because someone with this experience will understand the unique trials of digital delivery. They don’t need to have a deep technical background though.
Once an organization is delivering and continously improving services, and has a sustainable organization model to continue feeding a backlog to the team (or to scale to more teams), we exit (saying: “see you around”, not “good bye”).
Does the team track hours and bill for services?
Yes, as a part of the Ministry of Citizen’s Services, our budget needs to be flexible to meet the changing needs of Ministry Partners. We charge for our team’s effort, which has very little other overhead than salary.
The funding to deliver services is driven by Ministry mandate, not ours. So it makes sense that a program would account for the full scale of resourcing to achieve an outcome, including help with innovation.
We used to be a free service when we were discovering what service was most needed. Kind of like a software start-up, we were proving ourselves.
The value we deliver as we work with Ministry partners and vendors is now clear: we amplify your chance of success through faster adoption of Agile mindset, context appropriate methods, and emerging technology.
For example, partners often deliver working software in less than 22 weeks.
What happens when you improve all of government? Will this role still be needed?
Our job is to work ourselves out of a job. But while you have one doing this kind of work (which won’t be done for many years yet), you’ll be exposed to many exciting opportunities to plot your future career path.
I’m not interested in keeping people in one place. I’m interested in serving the mission. So, as we make progress helping to shape organizations capable of solving complex, connected service and system challenges, I believe we’re essentially creating organizations most of us would want to work for. They’ll also need our talent and experience when we’re ready to move on.
I’ll take a moment here to express my BC Public Service pride: it is an excellent place to work, with a great diversity of pathways and career experiences to grow into.
What are some downsides of this job?
While some people will be drawn to this kind of work, it is common to lament being distant from the direct impact of improving services for people. We’re a step or two removed as a corporate service.
Some people will be frustrated with this kind of work because it is unpredictable and not as controlled or easily shaped as a digital product backlog allows. Our work is organization change for people, within organizations that have often experienced some kind of failure-to-deliver trauma.
Under the mission of “connected services,” we bring people with different perspectives together and to enable them to collaborate across a system that is used to being delineated and stunted in a variety of ways. This is exciting, yet murky, and at times, frustrating. We build trust however we can to unblock people. Sometimes this means letting go of our attachment to ideal digital practices.
If you’ve read this and these sound more like fun challenges, you might just find job satisfaction and personal growth here.
Can I live anywhere?
We are hiring someone who is resident to British Columbia (a big, beautiful place). We’ve had challenges hiring people who were going to move… and terrible disappointment (for both parties) when it didn’t happen. Please have a solid plan for living somewhere in BC (with internet connection) if you intend to apply.
How can I screen in?
We will be screening candidates based on the answers to the questionnaire. We really mean it when we ask for you to tell us “WHEN (how many years), WHERE (what job) you obtained the experience we’re asking about. If you’ve met the requirements set out in the posting, we’ll look at your application in more detail.
The next phase will include an assignment for a subset of candidates, and a subset of candidates from that will move on to an interview. We only do one panel interview so our process is not overly cumbersome.
In that interview, a panel will create an experience where you can demonstrate that you have the behavioural competencies we are looking for (which are listed in the profile, linked at the bottom of this posting).
👉🏻 Here is some more information about competencies and the hiring process.
We’ll communicate as quickly as possible with candidates about their status in the process.
What is the effort required in the assessment process?
I plan to design the assessment process once I see the applications that come in. Depending on demand and screening, the first assessment may be a short suitability interview.
For any written assessment, I intend to limit the effort to take not more than 2 hours for a qualified candidate to prepare.
My approach last time was to ask candidates to prepare something in prototype format, to maximize work not done. Interestingly, despite being really direct about a timebox and low-fidelity expectations… I had a lot of brilliant people send high-fidelity work.
Some admitted to spending as much as 20 hours!
I mean, I’m flattered that folks felt very drawn to doing everything they could to try and win a role with my team. And, this is the test: I need someone who can confidently draft an artifact that illustrates the approach, tone, and knowledge to suit the challenges they’ll be hired to engage with.
This will help us screen for the interviews, which I am planning to run mid-January, assuming the screening process goes well.
Interviews with my team include a role play within a realistic scenario to help us sense your leadership skills.
What is the culture like at the Lab?
Generally, we embrace the digital principles (https://digital.gov.bc.ca/policies-standards/digital-principles/), which can tell you a lot.
We’ve also undergone a lot of change and growth in the last few years: from a grass-roots start up in gov, to a collection of corporate services with problem solving at their core.
We’re still learning how to collectively meet the increasingly diverse needs of our hybrid work mates, which is a fantastic challenge to have. We want to be an accessible, inclusive, and nimble organization and there’s an ongoing commitment to learn how to better measure how we are achieving this, and our service delivery outcomes.
Some of the practices that might tell you something about our culture include:
- we collaborate across teams regularly;
- we host in-person team collaboration weeks twice a year for the whole org (this requires travel for some);
- we actively support learning opportunities — both formal and on the job;
- we take a pulse check of engagement quarterly and the Leadership team have a backlog of improvements we regularly test with the org; and
- people love to come on tour to the physical. because of the passion they sense we have for the work (as well as the modern tools and ways of working we embrace).
Of course, each team in the broader org has unique practices that shape it’s culture too. With a healthy practice of retrospectives, you can expect to be part of weaving the tapestry of our team’s culture.
There are a variety of IM/IT agencies in government. How does the Lab connect to these?
Government organizations consist of Ministries with program areas that deliver public services and corporate services that support these programs with tools like finance and project management. About 20 years ago (when I started in gov — yikes!), technology support for these programs centralized, and is now managed by Chief Information Officers (CIOs).
These organizations largely outsourced technology, with a focus on procurement and waterfall project management and ITIL methods.
In 2016, a new team in the BCDevExchange sought new ways of addressing complex service delivery challenges. They introduced Agile product delivery and human centered design methods, leading to a policy change in 2021 that allowed hiring developers and adapting to new ways of working.
While some IM/IT agencies have adapted well to these changes, others struggle. The focus now is on helping program staff deliver services more effectively, with technology, and in collaboration with users to ensure their needs are met.
We partner with IM/IT shops to optimize resourcing and supports for continuous improvement, including technical excellence and resilience.
You can find more policy details here: https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/governments/policies-for-government/core-policy/policies/im-it-management#12.3.7
Send me your questions
As I receive more questions about this position, if I have not yet answered them in this article, I’ll be adding them to the comments section.
For further details about this opportunity, including accountabilities, please refer to the attached job profile or contact me at Heather.Remacle@gov.bc.ca
DO NOT SEND YOUR APPLICATION TO THIS EMAIL ADDRESS.
Big gratitude for your interest in this. Even if you’re not planning to apply, you’ve made it this far which indicates you care about this work.
If you have already applied, thank you!
H
