Digital Drone Collective

For our project panel meeting, I (Jen) ran a few activities from Jake Knapp’s book “Sprint”.

One lesson I learned: if you leave pens on the table, people will write in pen. From afar, it is hard to read pen-writing on post-it notes. Sharpies encourage short (& legible) notes. For next time, note to self: leave out Sharpies and remove pens after pen activities. Concise, readable post-its will ensue-- no instructions needed!

Looking back through my notebook from onboarding, and stumbled across these points to remember, from Luke’s* session on storytelling.

In early November, Jen and Jeannie attended Unmanned 2018, a national conference on drones. If you’re wondering where the term “unmanned” comes from, it’s “unmanned aerial vehicles*”–another word for drones, or “remotely-piloted aircraft systems”.

I (Jen) met lots of interesting folks and learned what many acronyms stood for! Here are a few:

UAV: unmanned aerial vehicle

BVLOS: beyond visual line of sight

VLOS: visual line of sight

NOTAM: Notice to Airmen**, a notice about potential (generally temporary) flight hazards

* There was some discussion on the appropriateness of this nomenclature. Using the phrase ‘remotely piloted’ instead of 'unmanned’ is preferable because i) it’s gender neutral, and ii) it’s more appropriate considering– at this point– most drone flights in Canada still involve a person as the pilot. ** Speaking of language that’s not gender-neutral…

We’re going to get a table on Dec.11th at lunch to talk about what we’re up to. We want to create HYPE for our team’s work. Brownies may help facilitate! 

Here’s the unofficial ad for our event, to be approved soon (hopefully!)

Collective Visioning with the panel

During our Project Panel kick-off (Transport Canada stakeholders), we wanted to get everyone on the panel to inform our work. We employed Appreciative Inquiry, a design-thinking process that centres around positivity and opportunity, versus centering on problems. We used an activity that would bring out the shared interests of project outcomes of the panel, and visualize them for the DDC team. We started off by clarifying our mission, then asked the panel to get into groups of 4.

Our Mission

"...to support recreational drone users in flying more safely and in accordance with regulations."

Collective Visioning Activity

We started the activity by asking, "What already works well?" Individuals would brainstorm for 2 mins, then groups would decide their top 3-5 things that already work well to achieve our mission.

Then we asked them, "What do you dream?" Again, there was individual brainstorming and sharing of ideas. Then the teams were asked to fast forward to the launch of the solution. They were to imagine the team made the front page of the Globe and Mail, and draw the front cover on paper. It was to include a headline, an image, and 3-5 points of why the soution was so incredible.

The results are pictured above, and currently hanging on our wall. They visualize the desires that the panel have for us, and I think it will be incredible to show them that we can achieve this together.

Our Project Kick Off was a success! 

Planning activities for the Kick-Off Meeting

Since the Kick-Off meeting was the first time we would be introduced to our key stakeholders - and it was three hours long - we planned some activities to get them familiar with the way we work. These activities included some cool things like designing newspaper headlines and exploring user journeys together.  It would be a chance to introduce Code for Canada, ourselves, create a shared vision for the project, and give everyone a sense of how we work going to achieve that vision and work together (sprints, agile, project panel meetings).  More about the Kick-Off meeting soon!

Andee’s Post-It Kanban board during Sprint 0

Sprint 0 in Ottawa

When we first got here, things were slow to get started. Everyone was welcoming and exciting to meet us. There was a lot of going around in tours, meeting people at their desks, and tons of introductions! 

In the meantime, we were planning what we now call “Sprint Zero” - basically all the things we needed to do before our project kick-off meeting - aka the launch of our project with all our key stakeholders. 

Day 1 in Ottawa at Transport Canada

We received a warm welcome on our first day at Transport Canada, got our badges and were given a tour of the place. We also got to meet a lot of the key stakeholders in our project and everyone was so excited to see us. 

Pictured from left to right: Nicolas Horne - Director, Solution Centre, Andee, Fatima, Jen, and Wei Guang.  In this picture, we popped into a management meeting and even got to meet our CIO, Julie Leese and many people on her team. 

Onboarding week ended with a night at SPin Toronto where we all laughed and played ping pong together. Pictured all the fellows and their government partners (the phone Fatima is holding is a picture of Jen who had left before we took a group photo). 

An activity where we all (fellows + government partners) shared why we want to work in government. 

The Digital Drone Collective!

That’s what we’re calling ourselves now - since we are a collective of individuals from Code For Canada Fellows, Transport Canada Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS) task force and Transport Canda Digital Services.  Pictured from left to right: Jenn, Jeannie (RPAS), Andee, Fatima, Olivier (RPAS), and Wei Guang (Digital Services).  This was our first team photo to mark the end of an awesome week of onboarding in Toronto together. That past week was full of thoughtful speakers giving presentations, team activities, understanding our problem space and government partners better, and learning how to work well as a team. 

Demo Day !

We gave a presentation and showcased our prototype on demo day to an audience of our fellow cohorts, Code for Canada staff, and our government partners! 

It was super successful and really set the stage for lots of conversations and engaged learning with our government partners - who were super impressed with our work and couldn’t wait to start working with us. 

Fatima, coding our sprint prototype.  

In one of those super cool monitor + table + chair mini rooms at the Ontario Digital Service office. 

After Andee designed the first iteration of our prototype, I (Fatima) started to work on building some of the features we’d identified. As I worked, I placed all the features in triage on the window in the main room. I did this because I wanted my team to know the status of certain features - in both priority and completion or non-completion - kind of like a live JIRA board :) This also helped me recognize certain features that were taking too long to implement or that were too tricky so I could flag them early. Since our sprint was only a week long, prioritization was key.  After the first prototype went live and into user testing, Andee updated the design. In turn, we updated the feature-set together and re-prioritized the triage board. It was super useful to walk through the features with my team for each iteration of the prototype so that we were on the same page in terms of what was most important - and so that they were aware if something was trickier to implement.