Code for Canada fellowship teams spent a month in Toronto doing onboarding sessions. As experienced industry folks, these sessions were useful to give us the context and tools necessary to be successful in the Government of Canada.

Below are the details of what this time looked like with some of our favourite quotes.

Week 1 - introductions to Code for Canada, each other, and our government partners

Monday

• Intros to Code for Canada and each other.
• “We will be ambassadors and doers of digital government.”

Tuesday

• Project charters.
• Jurisdictional realities panel.
• “Fall in love with the problem.”

Wednesday Comms and storytelling.

• Meeting the partners.
• Open House.
• “We tell stories to amplify impact.”

Thursday

• Negotiation with David Eaves.
• Team dynamics.
• “Figure out what your powers are and use those in the right way to make wins for other people.”

Friday

• Project planning with Marc De Pape.
• Lunch with previous PM Fellow.
• Retro: “If your week was a movie what movie would it be?”
• Team manuals review.
• “The risk of building the wrong thing is very expensive.”

Week 2 - tactics for working in government

Tuesday

• Tech and Gov with Dan Hon.
• “If you wait till you have the entire thing figured out, you’ll never get anywhere.”
• “Technology is the excuse to try something different. The reason to do something different is because we deserve better.”

Wednesday

• Design with Meghan Hellstern.
• Fellows cohort 1 chat.
• “If a picture is worth a thousand words… a prototype is worth a thousand meetings.”
• “The problem is the gateway in which you were brought in.”

Thursday

• Data in government with Asher Zafar.
• PSC Team Pizza Lunch.
• Knowledge transfer - Joey
• “Government is a symptom not a cause of society.”

Friday

• Client Management with Ryan Androsoff and Ande Cote
• Retro - “If your week was a fruit what fruit would it be?”
• Knowledge transfer, Siobhan and Caley
• “Empathy is the most important digital skill and I also think it’s the most important client management skill as well.”

Week 3 - executing a “micro-sprint” for a problem the PSC gave us

Monday - Sprint day 1.

• Call with stakeholders.
• Collect problem notes, user data, and tech research.
• Map out current activity flows.
• User interview call at night.
• “What can we do in a week?”

Tuesday - Sprint day 2.

• Activity mapping.
• Concept generation.
• Sketching.
• More interviews.
• Digital Security session.
• “Privacy is an unspoken user need.”

Wednesday - Sprint day 3.

• Map our required screens / problem we’re solving.
• Create a backlog.
• Create screens, content, webpages.
• Selection panel lunch.
• ODS Happy Hour.
• “We’re team lunch.”

Thursday - Sprint day 4.

• Lean Analytics with Alistair Croll.
• Create spreadsheet, personas, QA.
• Create and practice presentation.
• “The goal of your product is to figure out what product you should’ve built in the first place.”

Friday - Sprint day 5.

• Present sprint output.
• Iterate on presentation.
• Retro - charting our comfort.
• “Don’t apologize for doing a sprint.”

Week 4 - alignment with our government partners

Monday

• Met Lou Downe from GDS and Hillary Hartley from ODS.
• Agile workshop.
• “We can only fix the big problems if we work together.”

Tuesday

• Sprint Demo!
• Partner time.
• “Great job!”

Wednesday

• Communicating in the open.
• Ethics and Equality in digital.
• “Be bold and don’t hold back.”

Thursday

• Defining success workshop.
• Ping pong night.
• “What does success mean to you?”

Friday

• Role definition.
• Team retrospective.
• “The product manager answers what, the designer answers why and the developer answers how.”