The 2026 Guide
Index

Team capability

Every government service needs people to build it and keep it running: to work out what users need, design it, write the code, test it, watch it in production, and fix it when it breaks. Team capability is having the right mix of those skills, and holding enough of them inside the department so the service can be governed and moved even when a supplier does the building.

Most digital work runs best as one multidisciplinary team, a single group that covers the skills a service needs from start to finish. The Government of Canada builds this capability in-house under the Directive on Digital Talent and the GC Digital Talent Strategy.

In practice, most departments do not have deep digital teams of their own, and across the Government of Canada in-house capability is thin. Much of the building is done by suppliers. That makes the in-house side matter even more. Even a small service needs enough people, on the team or a short call away, who understand it well enough to steer it, judge the work, and step in if a supplier leaves.

A capable team comes down to the right roles, knowing who else you need and keeping them close, and skills kept current.

What good looks like

  • A named product owner is empowered to set priorities and make decisions for the service.

  • The team covers the roles a digital service needs: product and delivery management, user research, design, development, and operations.

  • Enough people in the department understand the service to govern it, judge a supplier's work, and run a move if one is needed.

  • The team has the authority and the access to do the work, and the standing to make decisions.

  • The department knows who it needs for the service, on the team or a call away, and can reach them.

  • Skills are kept current, with time and budget set aside for training.

  • More than one person understands each important part of the service, so no single departure leaves a gap.

The cost of skipping it

Team capability is easy to skip. A supplier can be hired to do the work, and the service still launches.

The cost shows up later, and it is steep:

  • You get locked in. With no one inside who understands the service, the supplier holds every answer and sets the price at each renewal. This is the trap avoiding lock-in is about.
  • You cannot govern the work. To judge whether a supplier's research, security, or design is any good, someone on the department's side has to know what good looks like. Without that, the department signs off on work it cannot check.
  • You cannot leave. Moving a service to a new supplier, or bringing it back in-house, needs people who understand it. A department that kept no one loses that option.
  • The department falls behind its own service. Knowledge fades, the service ages, and the department ends up unable to safely change the thing it is accountable for.

The Government of Canada makes this a requirement in the Directive on Digital Talent, because a department that keeps no capability cannot govern its services, cannot leave a supplier, and cannot improve what it runs.

A closer look

Whose job it is

Team capability is shared across a department.

  • The product owner or delivery lead runs the team day to day and sets what it works on next.
  • Human resources and hiring managers recruit, classify, and staff the digital roles.
  • The team members researchers, designers, developers, operations, do the work and keep their own skills current.
  • The department's digital talent community is a shared resource the team draws on for recruitment routes and specialist skills.
  • The business owner of the application makes sure the service has the people and skills it needs, holds enough capability in-house, and funds the training to keep it.

Comparison

Two ways to build a team

Pax

Meet Pax. They built a small multidisciplinary team around the permit system:

  • kept a product owner, a developer, and a service designer in-house, and brought in specialists as needed
  • wrote down the decisions that mattered and kept the documentation current
  • rotated people through the work so more than one person understood each part
  • set aside time for training through the CSPS Digital Academy

The result: when the supplier changed, the service kept running, the team could read the new work and push back on a weak change, and a move stayed possible.

What Team capability looks like in each phase

Team capability changes shape across the life of a service.

Assemble the team.

The department works out which roles the service needs, and decides which capability to keep in-house and which to bring in.

It gets a product owner in place with the authority to make decisions.

Capability planned in now sets what the service can do for years.

Further reading

For setting up and running a multidisciplinary service team, with roles, contractors, and training, The team in the UK Service Manual is a full guide. Australia's Managing teams guidance covers how to staff a service across its life and which roles to keep in-house. For a runnable self-assessment a team can use to check its own health, Atlassian's Team Health Monitor walks through eight attributes.

See also

Assumptions this page makes

You are already working to the Government of Canada Digital Standards, design with users, iterate and improve frequently, work in the open, use open standards, address security and privacy, build in accessibility, empower staff, be good data stewards, design ethical services, and collaborate widely, and to the law on privacy, security, official languages, and accessibility. The standards say how the government works in the digital world. The six Government of Canada digital competencies say what every public servant has to be able to do to work that way, and the team page covers them. This guide builds on those.