User-centric advice to Cabinet
Creating policy in government is a complex and rewarding journey, culminating in a process called the Cabinet submission. It’s the big moment policy analysts work towards: after months of hard research and engagement work, your policy proposal is discussed, debated and hopefully approved by the most senior decision-makers in Ontario, including the Premier and her Cabinet.
The system works, and is integral to the way that government operates. But completing a Cabinet submission isn’t the easiest process — it is, after all, rigorous by necessity. There are, however, opportunities to make that journey better for the people who write and manage submissions.
My team, the Strategy and Innovation Branch in the Ontario Cabinet Office, has been testing out different ways to improve the Cabinet submission process and related templates,incorporating the principles from the Digital Service Standard into the project.
About the Cabinet Submission Refresh Project
Our team is looking at the templates ministries use to write a Cabinet submission, as well as the process a submission follows: from an analyst typing out the proposal draft, to the Minister reviewing the final product in a Cabinet meeting.
Our goal is to identify potential improvements we can make to these templates and processes, and ultimately, to enhance the public service’s ability to provide advice to decision-makers..
The CSub Refresh Project, as we call it in our office, has been a combined effort: while our team is spearheading the effort, we’ve had lots of help from partners in Cabinet Office, the Treasury Board Secretariat, other ministries, and of course, the Ontario Digital Service.
What have we done so far?
This handy helix, borrowed from the Ontario Digital Service, is a helpful way to frame our approach to the project.
First, we started with discovery: finding out what works for Cabinet Office users, as well as the problems and pain points that exist. We conducted interviews with people who directly work with Cabinet submissions to understand what works well and what challenges they have. We also looked across the public service to better understand what new or updated requirements were needed in policy analysis.
Kate Kalcevich, user research expert at the Ontario Digital Service, has been instrumental in helping us build a user research practice in our office by teaching us how to conduct user interviews and giving us advice on evaluation methods.
Then, we moved into the alpha stage. With our ideas of what needed to change, and working with our partners, we put together prototypes of new Cabinet submission templates.
One of the other changes to the template we’re testing is introducing a section for ministries to describe user need for service when proposing their policy. Our team has worked closely with the Ontario Digital Service on this component of the template to help ministries think about the “users” of their policies, and what their needs are.
In August 2017, we co-hosted a “User Research 101” session for people from various ministries. We want to encourage policy teams across the organization to start with the end user in mind, understanding their needs — a fundamental principle of the Ontario Digital Service Standard and digital service standards of governments all over the world.
Ontarians aren’t just users of government technology — they’re users of government services, programs, and information.
Now, we’ve moved to the beta stage: testing the prototypes with a small group of ministries currently working on Cabinet submissions.
We’re testing the new templates and changes to the process with three ministries: the Ministry of Indigenous Relations and Reconciliation, the Poverty Reduction Strategy Office, and the Ministry of Government and Consumer Services. As we test the changes, we’re carefully checking our hypotheses about what works by evaluating along the way through interviews, surveys, and observation. With the results of these initial tests, we can adjust course and make changes for the next stage.
That final stage will be evaluating what worked in the beta stage to determine how best to roll-out any changes. We’re expecting to move into this stage in early 2018, so stay tuned.
Applying the Digital Service Standard
The Digital Service Standard is focused on the design and delivery of digital services, but we believe that it’s useful as we look at the processes and policies that sit behind those services, too.
Throughout the CSub Refresh Project, we’re working to use agile and user-centred methods (that’s #8 on the Digital Service Standard) by conducting user research, testing out the changes with a few ministries first, and collecting feedback from users to iterate at the next step. We’re also measuring performance (DSS principle #13!) through our comprehensive evaluations to learn what’s working and what we need to change as the project progresses.
We’re not just following the Standard for this particular project; in the Strategy and Innovation team, we’re trying to model a user-centred approach across all our work. The users of Cabinet Submission documents, all internal to government, each have their own needs: from policy analysts to deputy ministers, Cabinet Office policy advisors to Cabinet and Committee members. We need to keep those users in mind in all the work we do.
As a former co-op student and now a junior analyst with the Strategy and Innovation team in Cabinet Office, I’ve had a fascinating insider’s look at how policy decisions are made at the highest level of government. The ultimate goal of our Cabinet Submission Refresh Project, and the upcoming changes, is to support policy and decision-making that best meets the needs of Ontarians. I’m proud to be a part of that work.
