Week 47: 13 weeks that felt like 13 months
This week marks 13 weeks of working with GovTech Barbados, so I’m going to reflect on what we’ve done in that time, which TBH has felt like 13 months.
- Held a week of workshops with stakeholders from five different ministries and identified 99 digital services.
- Launched alpha.gov.bb in the second week, including designing a new brand for the Government of Barbados. Amazing work from our designer, Jack!
- Launched 17 entry points, which took a feat of stakeholder wrangling by Amy and quite a few late nights.
- Redesigned the process of registering a birth, led by a Public Digital colleague. This turned out to be more complicated than we first thought, but it has given us the opportunity to introduce OpenCRVS to the registration department. Fingers crossed, we’ll be running a six-week pilot in early December.
- Interviewed and started onboarding our first cohort of user-centred design associates, the first of whom started this week.
- Started our second round of recruitment for developers.
- As a team, we’ve been to Barbados twice and built strong relationships with the team and stakeholders across government.
- This week, we started early conversations about onboarding the Barbados Licensing Authority and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital.
- Also this week, we started exploring how we can integrate EZpay, the government payment platform.
- And finally this week, Mark, the CEO of GovTech, was on national TV talking about the work we’re doing, which the presenter described like this:
I went on to alpha.gov.bb this morning for myself, just to test what it’s all about, and it really has simplified and answered a lot of simple questions that all of us simply have. And so there must have been a lot of thought to go into designing and understanding its infrastructure, so you’re able to respond to what people’s lived experience is.
You can watch the interview on YouTube.
Everyone on the team has done exceptional work, especially navigating chaos and complexity, and TBH a fair bit of reacting to the situation as it unfolded. But what I’m most proud of is Mark going on TV to speak about GovTech’s approach. Every conversation we’ve had with him has paid off. We’re starting to build an organisation that can stand on its own feet. It’s work that matters!