Important: The GCConnex decommission will not affect GCCollab or GCWiki. Thank you and happy collaborating!

CSPS Digital Academy/CSPS Digital Accelerator

From wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search


Overview Build your team Choose your problem Intake History of the Digital Accelerator Partners Meet our team


CSPS Digital Accelerator

Welcome

The CSPS Digital Accelerator Program is a transformative learning experience that helps established teams transition to new digital ways of working together. The program consists of a series of facilitated workshops, meet-ups, and events designed to prototype a human-centred solution to a current business problem. Through a combination of practical interventions, peer learning, coaching and mentoring, participants will develop and apply design, product management, and Agile methods to address and advance a business problem faced by their organization.

Overview of the program

The program consists of a series of facilitated workshops, meet-ups, and events. The program ends with teams presenting at "Demo Day," an opportunity to share their learning journey with other public servants across the Government of Canada. Registration for the CSPS Digital Accelerator Program is currently closed. For more information or to be added to a waiting list for the next cycle, contact the CSPS Digital Accelerator team at accelerator-accelerateur@csps-efpc.gc.ca.


Goals

Decorative image - hand using a pencil to write
Learning by doing

Teams get hands-on opportunities to apply new skills by designing, prototyping, and testing solutions to a real business problem relevant to their department.

Decorative image - a lock unlocked
Breaking boundaries
We aim to break down boundaries - in the way we work, collaborate, learn, and innovate. The Digital Accelerator team is constantly exploring, producing, and trying out different tools, resources, workshops, and activities in order to help create more digitally capable teams in the public service.


Decorative image - muscle
Changing with confidence
Modernizing requires change, and we recognize the importance of changing with confidence. If folks are first instilled with confidence, they may be more willing to embrace change and be more actively a part of creating change.


Decorative image - four hands connected
Collaborating to succeed
Collaboration is key to successfully finding and prototyping solutions during the Digital Accelerator. We are always exploring and testing different tools, activities, and workshops that to help facilitate collaboration.

Decorative image - three people with a lightbulb on top of their heads
Designing an empowering experience

Great products and services are human-centred and designed for and with users. This applies to the Digital Accelerator too. We design experiences with our participants in mind and support them every step of the way with coaching and mentoring, so they can have an enriching, empowering experience. We give teams the skills and tools they need to help them shift in the way they work, create, and share.




How to build your Accelerator team

Decorative image - lego blocks

Product Team

  • Diverse & multidisciplinary
  • Product teams work on their problems during the Accelerator and ideally stay together once it is over
Decorative image - steering wheel

Steering Team

  • Executive champion who fully supports the work of the product team
  • Other executive supporters who form a governance body and help support the work of the team through: approvals, guidance, unblocking, feedback, upward briefing, and funding.
Decorative image - shaking hands

Corporate Partners

  • Enablers and partners who can support the product team in delivering their solution
  • Could include: corporate services, security, legal, policy, communications or other forms of expertise

The right problems for the Digital Accelerator

checkmark
An actual problem – process, service, issue, or challenge – to be improved
checkmark
Doesn’t have an obvious, simple solution
checkmark
Has room for exploration, space to pivot, and flexible timelines
checkmark
Has a team that will continue to work on a solution once the program ends
checkmark
Be related to the core work of your organization – internal or external
checkmark
Has a business owner open to solution ideas that go beyond the usual
checkmark
Has usable (and accessible) data to inform exploration and solutions
checkmark
Has the potential to change how people think about and do work
checkmark
Has organizational support and buy-in
checkmark
Has access to users to co-design, explore, and gather insights from
checkmark
Can be explored and shared publicly, with a team who can work in the open
checkmark
Has a manageable scope


What's not the right problem?

x
A pre-determined solution
x
A large-scale complex problem with many dependent pieces
x
A pre-existing project with fixed timelines and requirements
x
A team that will not continue working on their solution post-Accelerator
x
No access to users to collaborate with or be informed by
x
Is classified and/or cannot be shared openly with other teams or the broader public service

Intake Process

Contact us to arrange an information session about the Digital Accelerator for your team

CSPS Digital Accelerator Information Deck (Bilingual)

CSPS Digital Accelerator Team Cohort Experience Intake Form (English)

CSPS Digital Accelerator Cohort Experience Overview and Commitment Agreement (English)

Info session deck (English)

Info session deck (French)

Registration for the CSPS Digital Accelerator Program is currently closed. For more information or to be added to a waiting list for the next cycle, contact the CSPS Digital Accelerator team at accelerator-accelerateur@csps-efpc.gc.ca.

History of the Digital Accelerator


In Spring 2021, CSPS welcomed its first cohort of Digital Accelerator teams for a 13-week, completely virtual hands-on learning experience. Five teams participated, from four departments:  

  • Canada Revenue Agency
  • Department of Fisheries and Oceans
  • Department of National Defence
  • Canada School of Public Service


In this cohort, teams focused on internal-facing challenges and solutions, including new employee onboarding, simplifying procurement processes, improving internal access to data, supporting employee training and learning, and making operational decisions using data and insights.


As a team, they worked together to pinpoint their users’ needs, improve their digital skills, explore their problems from multiple angles, identify different solution options, develop prototypes and test with users. At the end of the program, the teams pitched their solutions to more than 400 public servants from across the country who participated in Demo Day.  


Interested in learning more about the teams’ solutions and experiences? Click on the links below.  


Team DND-Army – Canadian Army Digital Transformation

Team CRA – CRA Learning Zone

Team CSPS – Procurement Portal

Team DFO – Improving the Onboarding Experience  


Testimonial video from our first cohort. Watch it here!

In Winter 2022, CSPS had a second cohort of Digital Accelerator teams for an 11-week, completely virtual hands-on learning experience.  

Eight teams participated, from seven different departments:  

  • Canada Revenue Agency
  • Department of Fisheries and Oceans
  • Indigenous Services Canada
  • Canada School of Public Service
  • Transport Canada
  • Employment and Social Development Canada
  • Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada


In this cohort, teams focused on improving a self-service portal, collecting clean and consistent data to report on engagement, adapting data science work to attract new talent, creating safer devices for employees purposes, redesigning a Web interface, improving data management process, centralizing a reporting product for Business Analysts to make data and insights accessible and reportable and the referral process for field auditors and technical advisors.  


At the end of the program, teams were able to work with digital tools and new approaches, be more fluent public servants in the digital sphere and each teams presented demos of their proposed solutions to more than 600 public servants from across the country who participated in the CSPS Digital Accelerator’s Demo Day.  


Watch the 2022 Demo Day video Here! *It is important to note that the recording of this session is only available in the language that was used during the event.


Meet the CSPS Digital Accelerator Team















For inquires about the Digital Accelerator contact us at CSPS Digital Accelerator mailbox.




Canada logo.png