Program Operations

Owned by Matthew Hall
Last updated: Oct 09, 2024
3 min read

Financial

  • Budget

    • forecast updates

      • Procurements

      • Capital funding allocation

  • Tracking

  • Ensuring invoices are processed

  • Justification of existing - cost avoidance, value generated, return on investment, break-even

  • New business cases

HR

  • Support for Product Owners

    • Confirming alignment and strategic vision

    • Coordinating with executives to gain support for new work on existing products

    • Review and sign off on procurement and contract details

    • Participation in procurement evaluations

    • Time and Leave requests

      • entering bi-weekly stand-by time for direct reports who do 24/7 support of a product

    • Performance Development Conversations

      • create goals at the portfolio level to share

      • meet quarterly with direct reports to discuss

Product Management

  • Seeking Senior Mgmt Team prioritization and support for relavent projects

    • Do.Better Jira

      • in each columns answer the gate questions

    • Decoder Ring

    • A3

    • Objectives and Key Results

    • Present and discuss at SMT monday meetings (invited and called in for just your bit)

    • Team Support (OCIO Common Components Program)

      • Forminators

        • Product: CHEFS

      • Pathfinder SSO

        • Products:

          • Keycloak (Red Hat Version)

          • Common Single Signon Requests (for self service onboarding to the shared common realm in Gold)

      • NEW

        • Product: (possibly coming soon) Proof of Concept for managing staff secondments which requires: volunteering applications, applicant review, posting opportunity, invitation to be volunteer, applicant profile and status, program administration and event management

      • Payment team

        • Products:

          • Disrepancy Reporting On Payments (DROP)

          • GC Notify Triage -

            • 14 Clients onboarded

            • CHEFS form for intake and review (Director forward recommendation to accept to CDS)

            • biweekly Checkin with Canadian Digital Service

      • Attend product team meeting where there are items that would benefit from strategic visioning perspective or where the PO support

Communication and Outreach

  • provided position welcome one on one service for new comers where you have time

    • contributing to the development of content for

      • digital.gov.bc.ca

      • developer.gov.bc.ca

      • respond to digital investment office and enterprise architecture requests

        • governance frameworks

        • code of practice

        • digital principles

        • business cases

      • developing and continuously improving a body of knowledge on what a good common component look like

    • sharing the Common Component Program phylosophy

    • advocating for product owner autonomy and empowerment in all aspects of product management including financial. Product Owner includes chief product owners and higher who are actively involved in the continuous improvement of the product

    • advocate for the need to understand the journey of product (idea/A3, Proof of Concept, Pilots, Production for low risk clients, Enterprise for high risk clients)

    • Advocate for the need to understand the componentization of capabilities and how they can be assembled and bundled to form more complex services

      • example: a simple component can send emails, a complex component could enable the management of online form submissions, and bundled one more level, a component could enable the application, evaluation and processing of any grant program

Monitoring Uptime

For a Digital Portfolio it is important to have an understanding of realistic uptime targets. These are often misunderstood by users who hear the phrase “five nines” and then list that as one of their requirements when building a digital service. Here is a breakdown of the various levels of “nines” Numbers are monthly outage allowances:

  • 99% availability: less than 7 hours 18 minutes per month downtime

    • 99.5% availability: less than 3 hours 39 minutes per month downtime

    • 99.9% availability: less than 44 minutes per month downtime

    • 99.95% availability: less than 22 minutes per month downtime

    • 99.99% availability: less than 4 minutes 22 seconds per month downtime

    • 99.995% availability: less than 2 minutes 11 seconds per month downtime

    • 99.999% availability: less than 26 seconds per month downtime

  • For a system to have five nines the following things have to be in place:

    • Completely decoupled from all outside dependencies. This does not mean you don’t use external APIs, this mean you have to assume they are down, and have a way to try again, in a way that to the user doesn’t appear like the app is frozen or waiting.

    • DevOps practices will need to implement zero downtime deployments and highly available databases. The ability to make small changes to your app quickly is a foundational principle that agile teams strive to achieve. The DevOps processes, code versioning processes, and testing automations ensure only quality code get released, and the stateless architectures of your components allow you to make changes to the system while people are using it.

    • You will need to run the service on a container platform that has disaster recover capabilities (failover to a different datacenter). Remembering that 99.999 is an annual number. In the scale of years data center outages are not uncommon. Without disaster recovery you might still get 99.95% uptime, which is less than 4.38 minutes a year.

    • The disaster recovery implementation will need to hold all the data of the users currently in the middle of a transaction and preserve their data during a failover procedure

    • There are moderate levels of disaster recovery as well that conducts a failover without the preservation of transactions that were currently in progress.