The Development of XFN — Part 5: Talk to me…

No matter what line of work you are in, your stakeholders/customers are who you are working for. They are the reason you try so hard and motivate you to work towards improving their conditions, whatever they are.

For me, my stakeholders are internal to the Government of Canada, but that doesn’t mean the actions I have taken differ from what I have done/would do when working with external stakeholders.

Testing the Waters

My first opportunity to test out the initial design of the program was with the National Managers Community on March 7, the National Capital Region (NCR) Young Professionals Network on March 21, and at the 2018 Policy Community Conference on March 28.

These discussions shed light on a number of things. To name a few:

• Deploying out at the end of the Program could be a challenge for participants.
• Less opportunities and policy positions available in the regions across Canada (creates an opportunity to improve communication between the NCR and the regions).
• Program participants need to be able to hit the ground running.
• Managers need a concrete understanding of how program participants were assessed to trust in the program and use it.
• For employees, going through a development program with no promotional opportunity is demotivating for when people graduate.
• Promotion should be a by-product of participating in the program, but grounded in skills assessment.
• Corporate knowledge should not be required for assignments.
• High value in staying with a file throughout the entire development process (from consultation to legislation and implementation).
• There should be an orientation at host departments, as well as onboarding for the program.
• Program should be interchange friendly and allow/encourage participants to work for other levels of government.

Engagement Strategy

While I worked to address the comments mentioned above and many others received during my engagement on the first design for the program, I built the engagement strategy you see pictured below (well, this is the final version, it went through a few iterations).

This strategy took me right through to implementation. It covered receiving feedback on various elements of the program, as well as looping back with stakeholders to provide updates/garner support for implementation.

I cannot stress how important and valuable engagement and consultation is when developing programs or policies. Reflecting back on it, I don’t think XFN could have had success in the prototype stage without all of the engagement/consultation sessions and one-on-one meetings with stakeholders.

Detour

Now before I tell you more about how these engagement sessions went (because we did some pretty cool stuff to gather feedback), there are two things we need to talk about first:

1. An unexpected curve ball.
2. Experimentation.

Stay tuned for the deets on what happened next in my next post!