Self Service Tool

What were we building?

There was a large number of employees in Ontario who were not being paid what they're entitled to or employer's who just aren't educated in the Employment Standards Act.

Our goal was to create a tool that can fill that gap to help Ontario citizens understand what they're entitled to.

Through building the Self-Audit Application we identified from user interviews with employers on how difficult it is to understand the complexity of employment standards like Public Holiday. If most employers are having issues, then employees must be having them as well. This gave us the idea to leverage our Self-Audit application and introduce a hybrid to the public.

We were setting out to create an advanced employment standards digital tool. The tool:

Allow anyone to check what they should be entitled to for Public Holiday Pay, Overtime and Minimum Wage
Allow anyone to check for non-monetary standards such as Vacation Pay, Hours of Work, Poster etc.
Automatically work out whether the employer is abiding to standards.
Provide education on the ESA and provide informative links to across the website
Completely anonymous data entry

Our Process

When a new project starts with SDC we go into a phase called "Discovery and Framing". The phase is an intensive few weeks where the team sits in a "war room" together full-time to really understand the ins and outs of the software we're about to build. Coding is expensive and hard to change, so our goal is to decrease the risk of what will be coded.

Discovery & Framing

For the first exercise, I walked everyone through the "double diamond" Discovery and Framing approach.

A Discovery and Framing phase happens at the beginning of all projects. It's a series of intensive exercises and user interviews which help the team understand:

who their target users will be
what their target users need
and it allows the team to find a starting point with the lowest risk

Depending on the work already completed, D+Fs range from two weeks to eight weeks.

Stakeholder Mapping

Exercise Goal:

Create a shared understanding of the stakeholders involved so that teams can establish relationships and dive deeper where necessary. Also, this helps the team visuals where to go for help if blocks are encountered.

Steps we took:

Everyone wrote their name, title, and key quote to describe what they cared about (in regards to this project) on a large post-it
I then placed the post-its on the wall, grouping teams together (he started with the Team).
Then I drew connecting arrows between people with relationships
We added stakeholders that weren't in the room
We finally added key stakeholders: funders $$, people with eyes on the project

Risks

To gain a shared understanding of potential risks that will block us from achieving our goals.

We did this exercise to create a forum where people feel comfortable sharing fears and concerns, and in order to proactively mitigate issues, we thought may arise. This session results in a list of prioritized action items that the team could use to get ahead of any risks.

Top Risks

1-Deadline/Funding

A deadline and funding was still unknown to us, especially with new government forming.

2-Human Resources

Some resources were still unknown to who was formally on the project. There was also remote balance team members which was new to the team.

3-User Testing

There is no funding for gift cards which were formally used as an incentive to recruit employer's for user testing.

4-Move to St. Catherine's Office

The entire team has been settled in at the Pivotal office in Toronto. There will be potential technical and physical roadblocks when migrating the team over to our head office.

5-Multiple Stakeholders Involved

Stakeholders such as LSB, CMB, EOP need to be involved which generally creates red tape to ship software.

Personas

The software for the Ministry of Labour will have two users:

An Ontario Employee
An Ontario Employer

Exercise Goal:

As a team, we did this exercise to create a real person the team can relate to. We wanted everyone on the team to have a clear vision of the person who will use our software, and thus gain empathy for them.