From zero to legislation in 70 days
Editor’s Note: Rachel Barton is a Team Lead at the Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services, but she spent most of 2019 at the Ontario Digital Service working on the Digital First Strategy. She likes to think about teamwork, digital, data, open, archives, and hope in the face of the coming tech dystopia.
In addition, please note, the list of people mentioned in this post is not exhaustive. There were many other helping hands on this project from our Ontario Digital Service community and beyond and the journey continues towards simpler, faster, better services for all!
We were doing it again.
It was 3:30 PM on a Friday, and an urgent, last-minute request had come in for an update on the Digital First Strategy. Our team was distributed across the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) gearing up for the weekend, but when the call went out, the team leaned in. And in 45 minutes, what was a blank page was a polished document that would often take days or weeks to write.
The Digital First Strategy is the province’s plan to make government work better for people, businesses and communities.
A key outcome of the Digital First Strategy was the Simpler, Faster Better Services Act which you can read more about how this came to be in Honey Dacanay’s blog post.
My focus, however, is to shed light on the team because, holy moly, this team.
The humans I was on a team with blow me out of the water with their skills, ways of working and expertise. Besides getting a chance to brag about how great they are as individuals, I think this model can offer insight to anyone else looking to go from zero to legislation in 70 days.
People working inside government will recognize this delivery timeline as exceptional — it was a huge achievement, for everyone who touched the result, from the core team, to our partner ministries and supportive political decision-makers. Will and drive — across levels — came together to make magic happen.
If you work outside government, 70 days to do something might still feel long to some. But creating or amending legislation is among the most important work of government teams. It is intentional, thoughtful and immersive — by design. As public servants, we want our laws to serve the public interest, be reasonable and well-informed. This responsibility is important to us and guided our delivery ethos — as we simultaneously worked to accelerate the path towards better government services in a digital age.
How to replicate this magic:
Establish the Right Team
The Digital Service Standard isn’t kidding with this one. The diversity of people and skill sets on this team are why we were successful. From data analysts to policy researchers, content designers and communicators, we had the essential basics covered.
Together, we challenged the traditional policy and delivery roadmap. We hit all the crucial parts of policy design, but delivered them in a new way.
Team roles
Now everyone’s going to have to tackle specific challenges on their digital transformation initiative in their own way, but this model served us pretty well:
Strategy Lead / Machinery of Government
We had a fearless leader coordinating, setting overall vision and direction, assigning work and making sure things went smoothly as we navigated bureaucracy.
We were fortunate to have a leader with deep and broad experience. If you can get a Honey Dacanay to lead your work, get a Honey Dacanay to lead your work. Honey brought 12 years of OPS experience in how government works and deep expertise on how digital government could work, on top of being a next-level leader and bureaucracy-whisperer.
Digital and Data Leads
We had a couple of people bringing expertise in digital practices, technology and data management into the process. We tended to divide the work into “digital” and “data,” but the takeaway here is that you’ll want people with deep expertise in the thing you’re doing and the context you’re doing it in.
We had the good fortunate of having the person wrote the OPS’ guide to agile, Darren Chartier. Darren led policy development on all things relating to digital practices and technology. He’s the reason “scalable and interoperable” show up in our legislation, and brought an incredible depth of expertise in I&IT to the game. He and I got to tag team a lot of the policy work, and it was so much fun. I got to roll up my sleeves on the data part of the picture, and brought expertise in recordkeeping, privacy, data sharing and open government to the mix.
If you’re wondering about the open data principles and requirements though, you’re gonna want to talk to Amy Bihari, Dawn Edmonds, Christine Hagyard, Dalia Hashim and Paul Vet. These data-obsessed geniuses ran a team-within-a-team, making sure we were aligning with international best practices for an open, transparent and accountable government.
Omnibus Coordination Lead
It shouldn’t surprise you to hear that getting a multi-ministry submission to Cabinet — core work across most Westminster governments — approved takes coordination. Someone needed to guide various ministry submissions, keep our partners engaged and updated, and make sure we all hit all our deadlines.
Laura Nelson-Hamilton, fresh from work with the Ministry of Community, Children and Social Services and bringing collaboration skills like you’ve never seen, led us on this front. Her attention to detail, care for building and sustaining good relationships with partners, and dedication to delivery made it possible for us to help five ministries change 15 pieces of legislation on top of the work needed to write the Simpler, Faster, Better Services Act.
Narrative and Engagement Lead
Policy people write like policy people [hello, hi!]. This is why we needed a communications strategist. Our lead made sure that we were always thinking about how everything we did would impact the people of Ontario. She pushed us to answer the “so what?” to all our changes and made sure our work made sense to the world.
We were lucky to have an Allyna Sagun, which was a total gift. Allyna helped lead the ODS’ alpha Digital Action Plan, and understands both government and communications, so she can be a bridge between us and people outside of government. She’s also a total delight of a human being who chooses to deliver excellence with grace, no matter the pressure.
Finally, you’re gonna need a “Delivery Dynamo”
Someone who can bust blockers and get stuff done, quickly. In our world, that was Dalia Hashim. Everywhere there was a need, this woman was ready to go. Communications support? On it. Deck revisions? Here you go. Ministry submissions need to be collated and delivered in paper and electronically in the middle of a snow storm? Done.
The Strategy *is* Delivery
Now, I’ve only been talking about the core policy team — the minimum viable skill sets you need at the table to do this kind of work, at this kind of pace. This doesn’t cover the work our executives did to clear the path (thanks Michael Maddock and Hillary Hartley!), the work of our incredibly talented and supportive legal team (Don! Julie! Sally! Ashley! ) or the follow-on work and the iterations that have happened since then (the law gave us permission to do the work, and we dove right in).
Some of the highlights of what was made possible because of this game-changing legislation (thank you to Cabinet for the green light!):
● consultations on the Open Data Directive led by Dawn Edmonds
● API standards thanks to Jenny Zhang and Paul Vet
● ongoing work on data standards from Cody Schacter
● creating a new process to assess digital projects thanks to the team on digital first assessments
● coordinating the next round of proposed changes to enable digital and data-driven government
● the steady work that many ministries are doing to make the legislative rules real in practice
Magic is possible inside government
As a team, we made an important impact, together, in record time. And I just wanted to brag about the people that made that possible. As the first point in our Digital Service Standard says, “establish the right team”. The rest, as they say, is history.
