(EW1) Experimentation Works Cohort 1 Wrap-up
Hello to those of you following this space online.
We are at the end of our first Experimentation Works cohort experience (or EW1 as we are endearingly calling it). We thought we’d do one final ‘wrap up’ post.
Like any season finale credits, we don’t want to take too long with goodbyes, thank yous or self-references that show we are into ourselves way too much, but we do want to make sure we are capturing all pieces in true ‘open to a fault’ way.
This, because one of our starting desires for EW was ensuring that good work gets captured properly, based on many past experiences where many of the valuable insights captured throughout a longer-term process get lost for a variety of reasons (retention, our world happening faster and faster, etc.). So here goes our list:
In case you don’t remember where we started and what EW was about, we put together a quick summary of EW. We are also very pleased that a wrap up about participating projects is now available on a dedicated page on Canada.ca, aside from concluding blogs about the projects right here on this Medium blog page.
First, the quick thank yous. Thank you to our management, who were supportive of a project like this from the first moment we pitched it. Thank you to our experts; time and time again we were told that the key to EW working was matching projects with competent, thoughtful experts. Thank you to project owners and supporting teams, who had to navigate many areas of their departments and translate vision into concrete implementation.
Second, some of you may remember us referencing that we had asked our colleagues in the TBS Internal Audit and Evaluation Branch (IAEB) to do an independent review of EW, starting from a genuine desire to know whether EW is a good idea or not. We are grateful to them for dedicating time and resources to independently assessing the various elements of EW: all part of a good experiment! Their full report and our response are both published here as separate posts.
Third, we wanted to do an internal team impact and failure report. Inspired by the (Canadian) Engineers Without Borders failure reports, we wanted to take a good hard look at practices that, from our perspective, did not work and should not be tried again in the same way. Of course, context is everything, so we tried to nuance as much as possible why something did not work, as well as what we learned from it. The impact side of the post is here, while the failure post is here, and contains multiple perspectives, from both EW core project team and some of the executives involved in the project.
Finally, we want to announce here that we’ve been renewed for a second season (to keep the season finale analogy going)! We’ve taken into account insights learned, the Review, and various perspectives and think it was worth the effort. We are also grateful for the international attention on EW as a new way of doing business: OECD and Apolitical. We have fairly significant tweaks for EW2, so watch this space later this summer for posts announcing elements of EW2 design, including the approach we will take (what’s new, what’s not), as well as assessment criteria, selection process, etc.
Thank you again for following us on this journey, and we look forward to continued learning together. If you’d like to get in touch with things you’d like to see here next, let us know (or simply drop us a line if you’ve found this material helpful in your context elsewhere).
Post by TBS EW team: Dan Monafu, Terhas Ghebretecle, Pierre-Olivier Bédard
Article également disponible en français ici: https://medium.com/@exp_oeuvre
