Adventures in Agile: Procurement Edition
Celebrating Small Wins and Working Towards Cultural Changes
“Innovation” is a word that has launched countless ships. To not get overly philosophical, what does innovation really mean? The Measuring Innovation in the 21st Century Advisory Committee defined innovation as:
The design, invention, development and/or implementation of new or altered products, services, processes, systems, organizational structures, or business models for the purpose of creating new value for customers […]
Here at the Digital Innovation Office (DIO), we constantly ask and challenge ourselves to identify the “right” problems and then how to help make things better. From the process of “start by starting” at the DIO, I have two learnings (so far) that I would like to share.
1) Celebrate little “i” innovation — i.e. little wins!
Our exemplar projects present an opportunity to deliver digital services with partner Ministries using modern approaches and tools, such as Service Design and Agile. But even preparing and launching our requests for proposals (RFPs) for the exemplar projects was innovating in and of itself. The RFPs for these projects are quite different from what you might typically see from the Government of Alberta (GoA), and their development required a lot of collaboration and back and forth with our partners — notably our procurement and legal experts.
It might be easy to overlook things like new RFP templates, but we should appreciate these little wins and the incremental changes and value they bring. Often, they enable us to do things differently — like delivering projects in a new way — and there is great value in applying the lessons learned along the way. For instance, I now appreciate better that there is a fascinating and intricate world of government procurement agreements!
2) Agile is cultural.
During our Agile Product Ownership course, what really resonated with me were the Scrum values as a foundation for teams. It can be challenging to introduce new ways of doing things and there are associated risks that can be scary. Your work environment and team culture are critical enabling factors to success. Here at the DIO, we work really hard to create a safe space where we celebrate wins and failures. That takes openness and courage, but also a healthy dose of trust and humour.
