Canada Revenue Agency

Work Term 4-5

Position: Agile Project Coordinator

Semester: Winter/Summer 2021

Location: Remote

About Canada Revenue Agency

The Canadian Revenue Agency is the revenue service for the Government of Canada in charge of collecting taxes, administering tax law and policy, and delivering benefits programs and tax credits. Due to the CRA's high number of employees and annual budget, it is the largest Canadian federal public service and is in charge of the economic and social well-being of all Canadians. The organization is broken into 5 program branches and 7 corporate branches to support their core responsibilities as well as internal organizational functions.

To keep up with the increasingly technical and social change, the CRA has 5 main priorities to support its mission. These priorities are service, compliance, integrity and security, innovation and people. As a federal organization, the CRA operates under the Minister of National Revenue and is responsible for providing services for all Canadians.

During my term at the CRA, I worked within the Information Technology Branch (ITB) which is responsible for maintaining and developing new IT solutions. The work that the ITB division is doing has become increasingly important as many Canadians shift to using digital solutions to help with filing their tax information. As seen during the pandemic, the options to file physical copies or access in-person services have become more difficult so digital and remote options enable Canadians to safely perform tax activities.

My Contributions


Overview:

As an Agile Project Coordinator, my role allowed me to work with various teams in the T3 Modernization Project while improving the overall processes within the project. Through my implementation of the business intelligence tool EazyBI, it allowed the project to improve the speed, accuracy and accessibility of reports for various levels of granularity in the project. In partnership with using EazyBI for reporting, I also supported users, team leads and managers to use Jira and CTR to track and organize project progress. In addition, I used my experience in scrum and agile to take on various roles in some developing teams such as scrum master, product owner, and agile coach.

Project Tasks

  • Taught myself how to use the business intelligence tool EazyBI
  • Leveraged real-time data from CTR and Jira to create accurate reports in a timely manner
  • Significantly improved the time and effort required to create reports by automating all reports that are generated regularly
  • Provided insight into project progress by creating easy to understand charts and tables to view project progress at a sprint, package and release level
  • Present and explain reports in various meetings for team members, team leads, managers and the director
  • Acted as scrum master for 2 new teams
  • Developed detailed and prioritized product requirements
  • Explained and clarified product requirements for developers during refinement sessions
  • Provide agile coaching to new development teams to improve their processes, meetings and product delivery
  • Created in-depth training documents and materials to assist with knowledge transfer of EazyBI and CTR activities
  • Worked with new employees to teach them how to use EazyBI and CTR to generate and update reports
  • Mentored a new ITAP member of the Project Office team to get them familiar with the project as well as their new tasks
  • Leveraged the tool Udemy to improve my understanding of project management, scrum and agile
  • Completed strategic training to earn a certificate for The Complete Agile Project Management Curriculum
  • Attended CRA webinars to learn more about minority groups and how to better develop and champion diversity within the workplace
  • Tracked task progress for 50+ core and associated impacted teams for the testing environment releases
  • Maintained communication among impacted teams while progressing through the testing environments
  • Supported other team members in clarifying the tasks and responsibilities of the release coordinator

My Goals

Learning Jira & EazyBI

I chose this goal to expand my knowledge of how to create reports and use this software that little to no one knew how to use or leverage for reporting. EazyBI is a business intelligence tool that I learned to use in combination with data imported from Jira to build reports for the T3 Modernization Project. In addition to learning EazyBI, I chose to improve my skills in Jira by learning how to create more complex queries, understanding how reports are generated and creating dashboards for project insight. To learn more about both tools I read online documentation, watched instructional videos, and examined examples to better understand the components of how everything fit together.

Improve Sprint and Package reporting

I picked this goal because the previous process that was being used to generate sprint and package reports was time-consuming, not very accurate and confusing to read. To complete this goal I leveraged the new tool EazyBI to automate all of the previous sprint and package reports and place them into carefully laid out dashboards which were updated every day with data directly pulled from Jira. These reports were also able to be viewed by many individuals and had selections to dynamically customize the reports to filter for specific teams, sprints or packages. This new way of creating and viewing reports was appreciated by all members of the project and helped generate meaningful insights into the progress of the teams and the project as a whole.

Agile Team Support

This goal was created to take on different leadership roles within the agile teams and practice the scrum and agile methodologies I have learned in a professional environment. I was able to support the new developer training teams by acting as scrum master, product owner and agile coach all in different time periods. I was able to also work alongside an experienced agile coach to learn more about how to monitor and assess a team to provide feedback to help them improve.

Reducing development conflicts and obstacles

I created this goal after observing development conflicts and progress challenges from meetings and reports. To identify challenges with the agile methodologies I supported an effort to have teams submit a report after each sprint to reflect on how they operated and their ability to achieve goals in the sprint. I helped create the report template into which these reports were consolidated and used to identify overall concerns faced by the development teams. To identify problems early on, I helped create and configure reports that provided accurate predictions of the project progress in comparison to the completion. I would then present these reports in weekly meetings for the project releases.

Career Exploration

I created this goal to give myself an opportunity to talk with other employees at CRA and learn from their career experiences as I begin to start my career. I researched and put together insightful and relevant questions to ask each person before meeting with them. During the meetings, I kept the communication in a conversation-style interview to ask questions that I wanted to learn more about while maintaining organic dialogue. I spoke with my team lead as well as an experienced agile coach on the team who provided insight into how they started their careers and what they enjoyed most about the work they are doing now.

Perform Release Coordination

I chose this goal to try a learn in an area I have not previously been exposed to and that needed support on the project. Before starting to help with this role I researched articles on how to best perform release coordination and tools or tips that others have used previously. As part of the release coordination team, I helped to monitor and report on the status of environment sign-on as well as keep in communication with teams directly or indirectly working on the project. Throughout the process, I also helped to narrow down and define some of the repetitive activities we were performing to keep track of what needed to be performed for future releases.

Project management and agile training

As a CRA employee, I gained access to the site Udemy which provides many valuable courses and specifically much content for those in the technical field. To accompany the work I was doing to support agile teams and the project management office I made a goal to learn more about the agile methodologies and project management tasks. I took a variety of courses and eventually found a clear path that offered in-depth insights into how to combine agile methodologies with traditional waterfall methods to manage projects in different environments.

Mentor and Train New Employees

As a leader in my team and one of the most recent employees, I took on the role of mentor and trainer for some of the new employees on the team. I provided in-depth training documents and training sessions on how to use EazyBI and CTR as well as other common tasks that I performed. I worked one-on-one with one of the new employees frequently for 4 weeks to transition my tasks and responsibilities to them. I also provided insights on the release coordination tasks and responsibilities for the new employees coming in to work in these roles.

Conclusion


Throughout my past 8 months at the CRA, I have had opportunities to work in a variety of roles with different teams while improving technical and non-technical skills. The experiences that I had during my term have provided valuable insights into areas I want to explore more as I continue to share my career in the business and technology space. I am grateful for all the support I have received from all the wonderful employees at the CRA and the change in opportunities I was able to experience.