The Development of XFN — Part 7: Consult, test, repeat

It is said that you can never consult/test too much when developing programs/policies. We took this to heart when it came to XFN.

With the help, guidance and leadership from my amazing colleague, Amy Taylor, we were able to build engagement sessions that allowed us to test the assumptions we had about the problem XFN was trying to solve/design of the program; the self-assessment questionnaire; participants experience with the host manager/team; host managers experience; and, the program assessment tools.

Group Consultations: In-person and Virtual

From May 22 — September 26, 2018 we ran 21 engagement sessions. Of those 21, 9 were virtual. Our activities were strategically designed by Amy to ensure that we:

1. Created a safe space for honest sharing.
2. Provided a meaningful experience to participants.
3. Gave participants the opportunity to learn.
4. Made participants curious.
5. Gathered data to use for development.
6. Tested our assumptions.

We ran our in-person sessions in the downtown core of Ottawa and leveraged WebEx and a tool discovered by Amy called BoardThing for our virtual sessions. BoardThing was amazing and allowed us to capture the same data that we were gathering from our in-person sessions.

Here are a few pics of the tool in action:

One-on-one Consultations

While running our group engagement sessions I continued to meet one-on-one with various stakeholders as per the strategy shared in Part 5 of the series.

I had ongoing discussions with the Office of the Chief Human Resources Officer, as well as the Public Service Commission and corporate enablers at the Canada School of Public Service to ensure XFN could enable employees at all levels and classifications to accomplish their career development goals.

In addition, my ongoing relationship with existing programs in the Government of Canada and internationally allowed me to learn from others and share openly about the design for the prototype of XFN and receive feedback from experts.

When I sit back and think about all the relationships I built to get to the point of launching XFN I would say it was completely worth it and that I am glad these folks continue to help us learn and grow in our current live prototype mode.

The End is Near

In the end 58 organizations were consulted in the making of XFN. If you are curious who we talked to, the full list is pictured below.

Well friends, I have good news, we are getting to the end of the development phase 1. But, when the end is in sight there is always one final hurdle to cross. Find out what mine was and how we went live with recruiting the first cohort of XFN in my next post!