COVID-19 impact on express entry

COVID-19 has had a great impact worldwide and the Canadian immigration system is no exception. This pandemic has slowed down immigration.

Recent rounds have been focused on candidates in Canada

Due to COVID, the recent rounds have focused on sending invites to the “Canadian Experience Class” program. These are individuals who have had at least one year of skilled work experience in Canada and of course have the language test results (such as IELTS). However some rounds also had Federal Skilled Trades and PNP. So, it will be a little slow for you if you are outside of Canada and trying to get an invite.

What if you are starting the process now?

There are few considerations if you are starting the process now. Agencies have modified the process to for a low-touch experience during COVID times.

1. Security clearance certificate – Pre-COVID, a visit to the local police station or embassy was needed to procure this certificate. Different embassies have changed their guidelines. For instance the Indian embassy in Toronto has changed its guidelines so that folks can send a copy of the passport and fill out their request form to procure the security clearance. So definitely check out their websites for revised guidelines.

2. Language test exams such as IELTS – For select countries, the “IELTS indicator” site has been launched to be able to take the test online. This is just a temporary measure for COVID. For all other countries, in-person tests are still on. Besides, to minimize impacts due to COVID, not all centers are open for business. In order to enforce physical distancing, at a time, fewer folks are allowed in the center. Masks are required during the tests. Visit the IELTS site for details.

3. Educational degree evaluation – Institutions like WES evaluate your educational degree if you had one outside of Canada. While many of the educational institutions support digital transmissions, others don’t. So if you havent procured your evaluation then there could be some delays.

4. The rest of the process should be online only. We highly recommend you to book your slots accordingly so that you can get the security clearance certificate, educational evalution and get thru the language tests sooner. Age is a factor for the express entry score. The sooner you apply the higher your score is. Your application would be there in the pool and will be picked eventually.

5. The uncertainty around US H1B visas is leading to more and more people move to the north of the border. In fact, last year itself, many people got their PR as a backup in case things got worse in the US. And it did help them. Many of them are making their way to Canada. So definitely take the 1^st step and get thru your application. The process is slow in the interim but will catch up in the coming months because the immigration PR numbers are way behind the target numbers and they ‘d like to make up for it.

6. Since many people are actively applying to Canada, the cut-off scores will increase and the earlier you submit, your chances of getting invites is higher.

7. Many folks whose applications were in progress have got to the final step but due to COVID, applicants outside Canada haven't been asked for their passports. It is just a matter of time before this part picks up.

COVID situation in Nova Scotia

Many folks have asked us this question. So we have been lucky to be in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Until now, as of 6^th Sep 2020, there are only 1085 cases and since the last 2 months there has been 0-1 active case in Nova Scotia. By and large people and the authorities have done great to control this. Masks are mandatory in indoor places like restaurants, stores etc..

Schools are opening too in fall but with obviously a much different experience. Many universities too are online but it would be interesting to see how lab experiments or practical projects which cannot be done online would be conducted. We are lucky to be able to do our jobs online and we should appreciate it more often because in a lot of fields, they don't have that luxury. With employers switching over to online way of working, more remote job opportunities are opening up.

Real estate is booming in Halifax because mortgage lenders are offering better interest rates and more people are moving over to this place from especially Toronto and Vancouver areas.

Same is the case with all our neighboring Atlantic provinces, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island. Since COVID is in control in these provinces, they opened the borders for the residents of these provinces I.e no 14 day quarantine needed if you reside in these provinces. Although they are tracking every out-of-state visitor. 14 day self-isolation is needed if you are traveling from anywhere else in Canada or internationally. Nova Scotia is a great tourist destination and we get a lot of visitors between April and November. That is usually a huge source of income. Until July the tourism business did take a huge hit due to restrictions. However when they opened up the Atlantic provinces we are seeing folks traveling to support these local businesses and help them cut down their losses.

We will share more info as the situation evolves with COVID. Please take care and continue working on your application!

Disclaimer - This is our experience in Halifax and others may have it differently.  I am just sharing information from my interactions with others. So, take it with a grain of salt.

Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot

In this post, I‘d like to talk about Rural and Northern Immigration Pilot (RNIP).  As part of this, Canada is trying to attract immigrants to the smaller towns and cities since there are unfilled jobs and more retirees. Besides, they‘d like people to move out of saturated cities such as Toronto and Vancouver. The small cities have a much more affordable cost of living.

It doesn’t fall under the express entry program and so you aren’t competing with thousands of people in that program. As of now the pilot has 3 cities (Thunder Bay, Sault Ste. Marie and Altona/Rhineland) and 8 more will be participating in it. This is a community based program and ultimately the community makes a recommendation to grant you permanent residence. Every community has its own guidelines and you‘d have to research into the community for making it thru. While you have to meet financial, education and language requirements, meeting community based guidelines is most important. Each of the cities has their own website listing the guidelines. Here is an example for Sault Ste. Marie. If you think you meet these guidelines then you can start looking for a job in that place. The jobs are there on their website. Note that the employer should give you a job offer in a specific format.

This is a great program if you are willing to move to a little-known city or town. The advantage is a small short-term move can give you permanent residency. Remember with permanent residence, you have options to start your own business or switch jobs. If you have applied for permanent residency under RNIP then you also get a one year work permit for that employer so that you can get settled in the community.

Go on to the RNIP website and check out if any of the communities interest you.

Related links - https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/services/immigrate-canada/rural-northern-immigration-pilot.html

PO traits

In meeting several wannabe agile enthusiasts and folks transitioning from waterfall to agile methodology, I realized that a blog post might be helpful for you to understand the traits of a product owner better. You might already be doing some pieces of it. These might be handy for you while applying for PO jobs.

The scrum guide describes the top responsibilities of a PO as below -         

• Clearly expressing Product Backlog items
• Ordering the items in the Product Backlog to best achieve goals and missions;
• Optimizing the value of the work the Development Team performs;
• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the Scrum Team will work on next; and
• Ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed.

I would like to dive deeper into this from my personal experience. This might help you transition better into the role. -

Backlog management

•  Requirements come from multiple areas; typically from business stakeholders, regulatory, technology upgrades.
• This might sound trivial but is very important. You could get requests via email, chat or meetings. You need to ensure that these get listed in your tool eg: JIRA, TFS etc. so that they don’t fall thru the cracks. If you are organized then this is going to be very helpful.
• Constantly interacting with your stakeholders is key. In your previous roles if you have been interacting with stakeholders then you certainly have one of the important PO skill sets.
• You don’t get requirements cut and dry from the different stakeholders. You have to analyze these and get it to a stage where the team can implement them. You might have to factor in technical factors too and rope in your technical lead or developer to get closure on the final set of requirements. In your previous role, if you were a business/system analyst, then you are perfectly positioned to be product owner.
• Technology upgrades and constantly addressing tech debt is the enabler to faster delivery. This is also a backlog item and the skill is to schedule these items at the right time. In some companies, this is a concept that is understood by business but in others, you have to have a conversation with your business. You are not expected to code but you need to work with your technical lead closely to understand the impact to your product.

Decision making & Stakeholder management

• A well-rounded experience definitely helps you to become a better PO. This is because you can talk to business and technical stakeholders and clearly understand what they mean. So, if you have experience on the business and technical side then that is a huge plus. It helps you connect the dots between business and technical requirements.
• What separates you from all the other roles such as a business analyst/tech lead etc. is the fact you get to decide what the team works on next. You are the one person committee that decides what the most valuable thing is to work on.
• You see the whole picture for your product – Feasibility of implementing each of the projects and the value of each of them determines the order in which you do things. In the past, your inputs could have been crucial to the different decisions made in the project. This is also a trait of a product owner.
• This means that you need to negotiate with the different stakeholders on the delivery dates of their requirements.
• Training users with your product – You are the 1^st point of contact for the product.
• Status reporting to all stakeholders – Many of the times the stakeholders are interested in only their requests and so timely status reporting brings transparency to everyone.

Your team is the biggest asset!

This is a common trait along with the scrum master. As a PO, you have to extract the most value from your team. Talking to your team opens many ideas and helps build their trust with you. It helps to make decisions that the team will support and ultimately a win-win situation. You need to be team-person and if you are not a team person then you might want to rethink your role. (Nothing wrong with that !!)

Hope this helps you plan your foray into being a product owner.

Agile/Digital transformation

You may have heard these terms in your workplace or if you are a newbie scrum master/product owner, you may wonder what this is all about. Having been part of 2 companies that are transforming, I‘d like to share some insight.

History

Let’s take you back 100 years from today! No internet, no seamless collaboration between creative minds across the world. The jobs back then are obsolete today. I don’t have to sell you on that. Specifically talking about computers and mainframes, only big companies could afford them since they used to cost a fortune and occupy space for an entire room. This was the perfect situation for big companies to thrive. Scientific advances were there but not as much to threaten the existence of big giants.

Fast forward to the early 2000s

With the rise of the internet, more creative minds collaborating throughout the world led to rise of startups. Every possible industry is digitizing and thereby information technology and software development is hot. Companies are getting closer to the end-consumer because consumers have choices – national and international. The world is getting smaller in that sense. With artificial intelligence, companies are trying to predict want the consumers want. The line between industries is also blurring. Who would have thought the meteoric rise of a company Uber would pose a threat to taxi industry! In terms of financial services, there are several small startups offering better investments than the big giants – ALL making it easy to manage your investments online. Earlier, the companies knew their competitor. But with the lines blurring, it is hard to even predict who your competitor is.

What are these big/medium companies trying to solve?

As you might have guessed, with the landscape described as above, companies today have a ton of problems. Unless you are a company that just sprung out in the last 5 years, as the COO and CIO of an older company, I would be worried.

First off, the organization structure of older companies has accumulated fat over the years. Previously, your career path looked somewhat like this; team member -> team lead -> manager -> senior manager ->  director -> vice president -> C level.  In other words, your career progression was managing team leads, departments and there were several levels to that. Over time, this has caused teams building the product to move further away from customers. It took months or even years to get features delivered due to inefficient processes of getting work prioritized. Adding several levels within the organization has not added much value. In order to be more nimble, companies have to empower their people. They want to have all the relevant people on the team for faster delivery and proximity to customers.

There are several companies that still follow the waterfall process, where problems are not exposed until the end. The “2019 state of agile” survey still denotes that there is still a significant population of companies that haven’t adopted agile. To play devil’s advocate, it requires the C Level folks to understand the problem to be able to take the risk and also astute planning to transform an organization that was using waterfall to agile. It is a big shift and cannot be done overnight.

Enter agile delivery – Companies that started following agile are in for something else. Be careful what you ask for. J Whether you follow scrum or Kanban, any form of agile exposes the flaws of the system. C-level execs can now see when teams are working on projects that they requested and when they finished. As a result, it exposes the fat in the system. One of the things that management wants to measure is the time taken from the ideation phase to customer delivery. Typically, a significant portion of the time taken is due to the time taken to even get into the team’s backlog. That is why the C level execs are looking for ways to prune that process. In one of the companies I worked, they had all these senior managers in middle management reapply for the new roles because as part of the transformation they are cutting down roles that are redundant.

Managing career progression of employees is also a very big HR and C level problem. Junior folks are concerned about what their next goal should be. They don’t want to work towards something that will be cut off. Middle management folks are frustrated because in the past, they were rewarded for being managers and not being in the trenches. For many of them it would have been years before they were part of an actual delivery and all of a sudden they lost marketable skills! It is a huge change of mindset too for these folks. It is either change or get let go. So, the C level guys have to retrain these folks for new roles.

Finding a scaling solution for the company

To compete with startups in your industry, you have to solve the additional problem of scale. By now, most of you must have heard about the “Spotify model” for agile or even he SAFE model. Many execs treat it like a silver bullet to all their problems. For sure, agile has made teams faster. However, for big/medium companies that have over 5000 employees, you have don’t have a “model” that you can apply as-is for scaling. Communications from top management to the teams needs to be improved. You have to solve the real demons facing you. For example, the “Spotify model” doesn’t really solve the problem of how an idea can get into a team’s backlog for execution. It has to be something that the top management has to figure out. If you are a regulated company, there are several processes and documentation that has to get done. If you want to do weekly or even daily releases like Amazon, Google then you have to solve these problems too. No model can tell you that. Food for thought is depending on your industry, is releasing daily required? J Is this what your customers want truly? You have to inventory the problems that are truly slowing you down and solution those with your employees. There is only so much you get for free!

Hope that this gives you some insight into agile/digital transformation that you might be hearing about.

Disclaimer – Thoughts and opinions are personal and based on the author’s experience only

Should you have technical background as a scrum master/product owner?

Agile delivery has been popular over the last few years. Although it started with software delivery, it is now popular with other industries. Sometimes during interviews for scrum master on a software team or even during conversations, you could be asked if have a technical background. Personally I did have a technical background before I turned scrum master and product owner. There are both pros and cons.

Why are people interested with technical background?

Typically what they mean is, if you have been in any part of software development – For example -Analyst, Developer, Tester. If you were in any part of software delivery, then you would have experienced SDLC i.e. software development lifecycle. More than anything, software development is collaborative work. You cannot operate in isolation. For example, you have to collaborate on design, tests, other teams. If you would have worked in a software delivery team, you would know what it is to work with other people. It is not uncommon that if you were a successful team player, then you would be empathetic towards your team. Scrum ceremonies are important but that’s not the only thing that the scrum master is responsible for. No one wants a “task master” just trying to get statuses. Soft skills are HARD and perhaps harder than learning technical skills. They would want someone that understands the team’s problems.

Organization structure

Every organization is different and form scrum teams differently. Some teams are truly full cycle i.e. extremely less dependency on external teams. In my opinion though, many companies can never truly have full cycle teams because eventually they are too big to be independent. You could be more efficient and even release independently. However, it takes a village to release the final product! In most cases, to truly release a minimum viable product, there are multiple teams involved. Some common examples of the way teams are formed.

·         Technology focus - Some teams do API or UI or database work exclusively.

·         Own part of the flow – Some teams might own specific functionalities. For example, search feature page could be an app by itself and your team could do UI, API, database etc. However, the reality is that you get projects involving multiple features. In other words, you are just part of the project. Although you may be able to release independently, the project cannot be turned “on” unless everyone else is done. In short, in most companies, no matter how you slice and dice the teams, you cannot operate in isolation.

 Understanding the responsibilities of your team & your dependent teams is really important.

Pros of having a technical background

·         Removing impediments is one of the responsibilities of a scrum master. If you understand the organization structure as mentioned above then you will be able to figure out the network required for your team to operate.

·         Champion your team’s pain points – I see this even with the best of tech leads/developers/testers. If you need decisions/clarifications from external teams/senior staff then you need to champion your team’s pain points. A lot of times, your team might not be in the forum (for example - scrum of scrums meeting) to raise these but you as scrum master might be involved. Understanding pain points might help you raise risks appropriately. Knowing the network of people and understanding pain points will lead to faster removal of impediments. You can involve the right people at the right time depending on the situation.

·         Better conversation with the team – Many companies are involved in agile transformation to be able to deliver faster. This means that modernizing the tech stack. Teams will face challenges and need help from outside the team such as from architects, open source companies etc. Supporting your team and understanding when they are truly blocked is important. Talking to your developers and testers can help your understand their problems better.

·         Identifying risks – With an understanding of your team’s ecosystem, you can watch out for risks. For example - Company execs love agile delivery but also still give you deadlines around production delivery! That mindset has still not changed. Sometimes your project might have fundamental questions unanswered. With a technical background, you tend to see RED sooner.

Cons of having a technical background

·         You have to learn to shut up J appropriately – While you will understand your world properly if you have had a technical background, you‘d have to back off when it comes to technical decisions. Software design is an art. There are several ways to accomplish the same thing. The tech lead/developers/testers will figure that out. If you have a different idea, you could ask a leading question but know that it is NOT your call. Your job is to get consensus and figure out if there are blockers. It is hard to do that, I admit and do not take anything to heart! Your role has now changed to a consensus builder and working with tech leads/developers/testers to create the best solution. Using your background for better conversations is a tough skill!

What part of technical background do I really use?

It is long since I coded but as a scrum master/product owner, I use my analytical skills more than anything else. Understanding the flow between major components/applications is the key to several conversations – like who owns different components. The right conversations with the right people move the needle. As a scrum master, you are often in a position to drive this. I try to use my background to have the right conversations!

What can you do if you don’t have a technical experience?

The good news is that you can still be successful without such expertise. Learning basic concepts can help you prepare for your career as scrum master in software delivery. The article describes the training and readings you can do to prepare for the future.

Disclaimer – This blog is just based on the author’s personal experience. Use your own discretion.