#code4canada

[maddy-c4c]

Week 22: We’re talking with users again!

Week 22 | Monday November 18 – Friday November 22

It’s pretty surreal to think that we’re rounding out week 22 of 40 embedded with our partners. That’s 55%, whew!

We made serious headway this week:

Talked with 6 travellers and travel arrangers. Mostly focused in the NCR, but some in other provinces as well.

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Made significant headway on organizing an upcoming pilot with a small test group, where we will be prototyping tools to test whether we can improve their travel experience if they had flexibility in where they booked their travel.

Opened the conversation with our comms team about how we can share our prototypes more widely.

Wrapped up the first version of a fully interactive, functional prototype that helps you put together a travel estimate.

Started getting feedback on the prototype to learn whether it satisfies user needs. (Does it help reduce the time to build an estimate? Does it reduce errors in the estimate?)

Got a local Postgres database set up to consolidate some large Excel files, and allow me to run SQL queries (my data bread and butter) on the historic travel data we have.

Developed a first draft of a current-state service blueprint.

Caption: Mike and Andrea discussing the travel estimate prototype.

Alternative caption: A woman with blonde hair and blue jacket stands holding coffee beside man with red jacket sitting in a chair. They are looking at a laptop computer hooked up to a monitor. They are in an office cubicle.

This week was heavily focused on the building and testing portions of our newly minted team slogan:

Learn & Build & Test & Repeat.

As a product manager, I’m stoked that we’re prototyping, seeking data to define success/failure of the prototypes, and getting feedback from real end users which is leading to… what is shaping up as a product backlog!

Another big turning point this week was changing our working style slightly. We’re shifting back to sprints -- but one week sprints! This will allow us to have really short, tight feedback loops from prototyping to getting feedback on it, and shifting direction based on the feedback very quickly before we invest any more time in a bad idea.

–Maddy, Product Manager

[c4c-phac]

Celebrating wins: reflecting on the weeks of November 18-22

This week, our team is celebrating a few huge wins!

We finally presented a (beta version) of our insights report to our core team this week. 

It’s currently a monster 155 page document since we had so much rich data from our deep discovery phase! Now that our analysis is complete and fully documented, we can draw from it to present to various audiences and - most importantly - use it as the basis for building out prototypes of our product!

Here’s a sneak peek at some slides, demonstrating the breadth of what’s covered in this report: a journey map that more accurately demonstrates the ways that applicants to MSP engage in the various touchpoints throughout the process; exploring the purpose behind certain steps and demonstrating where understandings are shared or divergent; and explaining how code can be used to streamline the process to be more opinionated in the way we collect data. 

We’ll do a deeper dive into our research in another blog post soon, but for now, just know we’re pretty amped about it!

Another long-time-in-the-making milestone this week was finally getting set up for a trial instance with Apply by SurveyMonkey. 

This is the Software as a Service (SaaS) solution that we’ve been leaning towards, and now we finally have an opportunity to play around with it - ie. the design, build, test part of our fellowship! We are so excited to be able to show staff more tangibly how digitization of the MSP program can improve the applicant experience, while making their own lives easier, too.

So far, Adam’s been exploring how to create different projects within it...with some existential dummy data (very On Brand for him). 

The final big milestone we hit this week was the official receipt of the Options and Analysis that had been initiated some months back by Health Canada Corporate Services in order to determine which back-end system we’d be integrating with. As you’ll know if you’ve been following our project, we are now pushing for an end-to-end solution - Apply - but it took us some time to convince Corporate Services that this was the right direction. The Options and Analysis documentation is the first step in having them support us to go in this direction and perhaps socialize SaaS solutions more broadly throughout Health Canada, when appropriate. Fingers crossed!

And, on that note, we are going to finish our big week off right by heading out for a drink together. Team building and celebrating successes are important, ya know?!

Glennys, Product Manager

[c4c-phac]

Adam, Glennys and Erin joined Mark and Don at the Health Canada Data and Digital Day earlier this week! 

[c4c-phac]

Drowning in Data (but in a good way!)

Hello! You haven’t heard from us in a while because we’ve been focused on publishing our first official Code for Canada blog, were at our first Code for Canada Fellow retreat, and have been absolutely drowning in data. But these are all good things!

Code for Canada Fellows goofing around at our first retreat. 

We wanted to give a quick check-in on where we are with our discovery research and data analysis, so you know why we’ve been quiet.

During the UX research phase, we completed:

More than 30 hours of interviews, including with past, current and potential applicants, staff, and stakeholders

Two design probes breaking down the Letter of Intent template

Analysis of the contents of the PSD inbox, which is often the first point of contact for applicants interested in the program

Observational studies of PHAC processes and ways of interacting with applicants

Slide from our most recent Project Panel presentation, where we gave an update about our work, including our UX research process.

As you can see from the walls in our office (and even the filing cabinet), where more than 500 are posted, this has given us at least a thousand data points! We’ve been working hard on collating, synthesizing, and analyzing that data. My dog, Boris, helped.

My sweet dorkie (no, actually, that’s his breed) dog dorking out with us during data synthesis.

Rose working on analyzing our data points, which have spilled over from the walls to the tables and filing cabinets. Oof.

In the next week or two, we’ll be delivering an insights report that identifies key areas of opportunity to streamline the MSP program’s application process for users, as well as make it more accessible to the types of innovative organizations across the country that it intends to serve.

- Glennys, Product Manager