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Framework

Prioritization Criteria

Should we build it?

How do we decide?

The following questions may help Product Owners to guide the effort of their team. These questions are not meant to be a checklist, rather they are tools to help you think critically about your roadmap and backlog and about the individual stories. These question may also help team members to make certain technical decisions and determine how to handle technical debt.

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titleComponent Level Prioritization

  • Will a significant number of people care about this?

  • Is there someone who actually needs this?

  • Does this helps us solve something that is a high BC Government priority? (must know the list)

  • Does this help BC Gov teams other than yours to solve their problems?

  • Will this eliminate a duplication of effort that causing political concern?

  • Does this allow the automating of handoffs between consumers of your service?

  • Does this have tangible financial benefits? (lowers the amount of funding required to deliver,  eliminates a business process, enable repurposing resources to higher value work

  • Is there business agility in the team who will support it? 

  • Will this improve the trust, confidence, reliability, and stability in the support of the service?

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titleFeature Level Prioritization

  • Will the feature make the product more useful to a larger audience of users?

  • Does the feature help to improve how the users trust the product?

  • Will more people choose to use it because of this feature?

  • Is the feature doing something that was previously hard work for someone to do in another way?

  • Is the planned work avoiding opinionated designs and instead allowing for configurable choice?

    • e.g. BCGov Theme can be selected, but if another province was using our product, could they easily select they own style library to use?

  • Does the contributed code increase the reputation of the team? (documentation, coding style, deployment and integration process, testing, accessibility, etc.)

  • Is there measurable value aligned to a user problem?

Context

Do you have an understanding of where your component fits?

Who is it for?

If you are building something with the intention of it being used as a common component then consider the following:

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titleDelivery method(s)

  • Hosted Service,

  • Reusable Component,

  • Shared Code, or

  • Tested Instructions

As you consider how users are wanting to consume your product to gain value from it, selecting the right delivery method will help you to maximize the value while limiting overhead.

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titleUnderstand the capability level

  • Core,

  • Supporting,

  • Service Management, or

  • Service Quality

Core capabilities are the ones that users will ask for. Supporting capabilities are the ones that service providers need to implement for the core ones to work. Service management capabilities are the ones that help you operate the administrative work back stage. Service quality capabilities are the ones that help you have a good reputation because your software is reliable, secure, privacy preserving and high performing. Understanding the capability level will help guide your work to identify user groups and help you determine the scope and boundary of the product you are building.

Capabilities

Enablement Type(s)

Service Delivery Step(s)

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titleForm Design and Submission

Form Builder Tool

Form Versioning

Form Publishing

Form Submission Lists and Details

Form Settings Management

Form Permissions and Security

Submission Status

Data Export and API Access

Event Triggered Service Extensions

Foundational, Enabler

Submission

Payment and Reconciliation

Login, Identity and Digital Trust

Template and File Mgmt

Subscription/Notification

Additive

Discovery

Workflow and Event Streaming

Multiplicative

Processing

API Access Management

Visualization Dashboards

Password Management & Automation

Registry Aggregation (Backstage)

Prototyping Kits

DevOps and Hosting

Page Tree
root@self
startDepth1

On this page:

Table of Contents
Image Added

What makes a good common component?

Introduction

What general characteristics or ingredients does each component need to have for it to be considered “good”?

The big three are to 

  1. reduces costs

  2. accelerates development

  3. promotes consistency and supportability

If you think you have a "good" one and would like it added to the catalogue so that others can find it easier, you can request to add your common component on the common components page of digital.gov.bc.ca/common-components.

Reducing Costs

Cost Avoidance

The following are a few examples of how a components can create cost avoidance savings:

  • Built by one team, but used by more than one team

  • Deployed and hosted by one team

  • Enterprise licenses versus many individuals licences

  • A generic capability built that eliminates the need for reimplementing that function in all applications

  • Adding a self-self onboarding process to a Common Service that didn’t have one previously

Cost Savings

  • An innovation solution that allows for discontinuing an existing common business process or function entirely

  • Providing a free and open-source alternative to switch to from existing more expensive options

  • Openly accept contributions from other digital service teams

Accelerate Development

  • Complete privacy and security compliance documentation that can simplify or eliminate the requirement for each person who uses the component

  • Eliminate approval processes and funding requests by providing the service for free

  • Create quickstart wizards and implementation examples

Promote Consistency and Supportability

  • Use well documented APIs and allow access to them

  • Share data in supported formats that are interoperable with other components

  • Be aggressive in addressing technical debt

  • Monitor the value of everything you’ve built and are paying to maintain

Policy

Core Policy, Chapter [12.1.1] Lists the Digital Principles.

Principles 5 and 6 (Work in the open, Take and ecosystem approach) specifically relate to Common Components, but they are all useful for any software teams to be very familiar with.

Definition

In a software context, common components are among the list of building blocks used to create digital services. Components specifically enable core capabilities within services.

  • A core capability or service that can be utilized by public and private service delivery teams

  • A common component should be the following

    • technology agnostic for the user

    • well documented

    • regularly updated by a dedicated team

    • quick to onboard to in a self-serve manner

  • Self service is achieved when components are cataloged in a central repository, where a service delivery team can easily see which components are best suited to solve their use case. This can be aided by sharing information on success stories, metrics, and data that can be used to evaluate product health.

  • Common components are built with the goal of providing one more tool that can be used in combination with other tools to solve any problem that may arise.

  • The objective of a common component team should be to solve a significantly complex and frequently occurring problem faced by multiple teams for once and for all.

  • A component requires reliable data sources and must strive to provide consistent outputs

Ecosystems and Value Streams

Identifying Commonality

What are the other products or services that may be doing what I’m doing? Who can I collaborate with?

Your product or service may operate within many categories of software capabilities. Start with looking at just one of those categories that you think might benefit most from using common components.

When thinking about what the list of all common components are, it might be helpful to consider that there are multiple ways to group things to create this list.

Capability Categorization Models

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title1. Service Delivery Cycle

This model looks at the journey of a user:

A. discovering a service is available,
B. requesting or activating the service
C. the service being performed or the transaction being processed

Note that in the model one service may initiate the

  • Discovery of

    • Products

    • Services

    • Careers

    • Procurements

    • Data

    • Subscriptions

  • Submission of

    • Enquiries for information: Asking for guidance

    • Requests to create, update or delete something: Asking for coordination

    • Applications for a decision to be made: Asking for support

    • Messaging to provide comments: Feedback elicited and voluntary

  • Processing (Operation)

    • Status: recording, tracking and displaying the state of a users submission

    • Comments

    • History

    • Assignment

    • Notification

    • Automation

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title2. Capability Enablement Level

FOUNDATIONAL:

Starting with Foundational capabilities ensures there is demand and that you are solving problems for users.

  • collect/submit information

ENABLERS:

Factor out the enabler capabilities as new common components.

  • design forms

  • store information

ADDITIVE:

Looking at the user journey where there are system handoffs work to add connections to solutions for the next chunk of work in the user journey.

  • evaluate applicant’s submissions

  • send notifications

MULTIPLICATIVE:

As it will not be possible to scale with just additive approaches, we will need to implement event triggered messaging and subscription services that can enable many systems to connect with each other without those services being tightly coupled.

  • system A is subscribed to certain events that get posted by system B

  • a process for the evaluation of grant applications may start when a new grant application is received

  • example component: event streaming, or message queues

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title3. Product Model

This model looks at the logical breakdown of the capabilities of a software product. Each of these capability areas may contain many functions:

Find out what ecosystems you may be contributing to or consuming from.

When you think about the service that your product delivers also consider what the larger value stream your service is a part of. Once you identify your value stream, take steps to connect with others who are there as well, and start examining the various points along the way where there are hand offs, and make plans to address them.

Agile Approaches

Where does the need for

common Services

your Digital Service exist?

Understanding who the user is can be hard to understood. Let’s look at two distinct groups that occur commonly with Common Components. These two groups are not easy to focus on at the same time.

The Have’s and the Have Not’s:

  1. Staff who are non-technical and have no funding to acquire technical people to help them

  2. Product/Project Teams with technical resources who need to integrate their system with common components

How do we build Solutions to help both groups?

  • Start with the simplest user journey

  • Add new capabilities that have only a minimal increase in complexity

    • Hide

  • internal adjustment based on user centric feedback

    • external adjustment based on industry factors

    • and protect it as the product matures

    • When adding new capabilities, hide the complexity from those who don’t need it or want to see it

    Market Awareness

    Analytical Iterative Feedback, measuring the pulse on the three pillars and adjusting as necessary

    Are customers satisfied that their problems are solved by the product you offer?

    Regular evaluation and monitor of the problem you are solving for will give you the information necessary for doing internal adjustments based on user centric feedback

    What threats and opportunities are presenting themselves from the industry?

    Analytical Iterative Feedback, measuring the pulse on the three pillars and adjusting as necessary

    Trends and new technologies may arise that introduce new ways to solve the problem you are solving. Conducting analysis of these external factors and making adjustments is just as important as listening to users.