A new registry, and a new approach
Editor’s Note: The Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change is working to revamp the Ontario Environmental Registry. We at the Ontario Digital Service have been excited to work with them on this project, and we’ll be sharing more about the process over the next few weeks. Here, David Cook, the manager of strategic projects at the Ministry, shares the genesis of the project and its novel approach.
The Ontario Environmental Registry contains “public notices” about environmental matters being proposed by all government ministries covered by the Environmental Bill of Rights. It’s an important way to allow Ontarians to participate in decisions that affect the environment.
The Registry began its life as a bulletin board system, commonly known as a BBS, in the 1990s. A BBS allowed users to upload, download, read, and contribute to a public message board: all functions that aligned with the function of the Registry at that time.
Like other systems that have been around for more than 20 years, the story of the Environmental Registry is one of change. In government, and in many large organizations, we change piece by piece: we update, modify, and modernize existing systems until one day we can tweak no more — and then we realize it is time to start over. With the Registry, we had hit that point; we knew it, and our clients were telling us that, too.
And so, staff at our Ministry (Environment and Climate Change) found themselves in a place that is familiar to many, working our way through the RFB (Request for Business) process as we moved towards a traditional IT project solution. That’s where the Ontario Digital Service came in the picture!
When the ODS first reached out to me, I’ll admit, I was skeptical: we had already completed the RFB draft, and this group didn’t even have a formal name at the time we first chatted. (The ODS moniker is a relatively recent one.) Luckily, the initial direction I received from the group was clear and good, so we decided to work with the ODS on our project before issuing the RFB.
Since then, the Ministry and the ODS have gone through a journey together, a journey that includes discovery and user interviews that resulted in more than 50 hours of facilitated and guided conversations with Ministry senior leadership, the Environmental Commissioner of Ontario, environmental law firms, advocacy groups, municipalities, business owners, and concerned citizens.
From all those interviews and research, we’ve developed user personas — and looking back at them, these personas bear a great resemblance to many of our clients. (At the Ministry, we’re still learning about personas and how they can guide our work, but I know they were very useful to the ODS team: unlike some people we’ve worked with for months who thought the project was a financial system, the ODS team has done the background work to know exactly who and what purpose the Registry serves.)
Now that the initial user interviews are complete, and the personas have been developed, the Ministry and the ODS are going through sprints together. Each week, we bring together a team of highly skilled staff with diverse talents to determine the minimum viable product (MVP) that can be built, launched, and tested during that sprint. The sprints follow a schedule:
- Mondays = brainstorming
- Tuesdays = refining the scope of work
- Wednesdays = creation of high fidelity prototypes
- Thursdays = user testing
- Fridays = the highlight of the week: show and tell, where we get to see what has been created and tested over the past five days
The sprints have been successful so far. The biggest concern we’ve had to date has been the quality of the prototypes: testers sometimes perceive them to be final products! (When your preliminary work is so good that it is confused with a finished product, that’s a good problem to have.)
What lies ahead of us are more sprints, some critical business decisions, and then the move to the beta stage — where I’m told we’ll be doing double sprints! I’ll be sure to share more about the process once we move to beta.
In the meantime, this project and our new approach to it has caught the eye of senior leaders across the Ministry, and requests for updates and presentations about the process are becoming the norm. This has the potential to change how we do a lot of work across the Ministry.
In 1993, the Environmental Bill of Rights Act was passed, giving Ontarians the right to participate in environmental decision-making. Today, the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change is working with the ODS to redesign the Registry, making that participation easier and better for everyone in the province. We’re excited to be working on this, together.
You can’t have a successful, collaborative project without great people working together. While many have had a hand in the work to date, I would like to acknowledge the following: Spencer Daniels, Dana Patton, Jacqui Klugman, Kyle Binger, Nick Gajewski, David De Medicis (all of Cabinet Office); Scott Shaw (IMAB); Bunny Santos (TBS); Roland Hsu and Colin Barclay (MOECC Communications); and Rebekah Church (Environmental Commissioner’s Office).
