By Sarah Adams
In a centralized service model for seven BC government ministries, Natural Resource Sector Digital Services helps deliver technology services more effectively. Their vision is clear: bring together infrastructure, common components, and shared expertise to gain the benefits of operating at scale.
NRS Digital Services plays a central role to enable technology delivery by forming a triad with ministry clients and development vendors. Staff maintain the infrastructure, procure vendors, oversee technical change processes, and execute deployments—particularly in the government’s secure on-premise environments where many applications are 15 to 25 years old. They also support applications hosted in the cloud.
Applications hosted on-premise have been using deployment pipelines for several years. However, to maintain security and integrity within a shared environment, only internal technical staff can do deployments on these pipelines.
Building the Polaris pipeline
NRS Digital Services has set its sights on becoming an enabler and has invested in automation. Team OSCAR (Observability, Secrets management, Code management, Automated Releases) developed the Polaris pipeline, which enables applications to be deployed by project teams without compromising security protocols.
Since late 2024, applications have been onboarded to the pipeline. The pipeline is reshaping not only technical processes but also the people processes that support deployments. The goal is to allow project teams—clients, developers, and release managers—to build and deploy what they need, when they need it. NRS Digital Services will continue to safeguard infrastructure, uphold best practices, and provide guidance and expertise for complex deployments. By enabling project teams to deploy when they need to, the amount of administration is minimized as is internal scheduling that used to be part of each deployment.
A transformation journey
In 2025, NRS Digital Services began the Deployment Improvement Service initiative to redesign how releases and deployments are managed for applications hosted on-premise. Alluvial has had the privilege of working closely with both leadership and staff to drive this transformation, applying Agile principles every step of the way:
- Transparency: Work has been conducted in the open through a large Mural board that serves as a planning and workshop space, information radar, and reference tool. We connected with people across the organization to gather insights, capture lessons learned and validate findings.
- Inspection: The journey began with discovery: story mapping the daily experiences of people involved in deployments, analyzing two years of deployment records, and conducting interviews with vendors and clients. New insights were continually added to the Mural board. From there, we moved into co-design, running group workshops and targeted discussions to draft streamlined deployment workflows.
- Adaptation: The team has taken an incremental, adaptive approach to design and change management. Rather than prescribing a rigid roadmap, we plan in short cycles, pivoting and refining along the way as new information comes to light. Our next phase—operational testing—will involve observing deployments, identifying friction points, and validating documentation to ensure clients, developers, and internal teams can succeed in their roles.
Looking ahead
The deployment improvement journey is ongoing, and like all complex transformations, it requires patience, learning, and adjustment. By working transparently, inspecting regularly, and adapting as we go, NRS Digital Services is building the capacity to support project teams with greater autonomy and confidence.
At Alluvial, we’re proud to be a partner in this work—helping bring Agile principles to life in the BC government.