Building Unity for enterprise grant management across government

For the hybrid team at the Information Systems Branch (ISB) in the Management Services Division (MSD) supporting the Economy Sector (HMA, JEDI, TACS, and LBR), the excitement is building as they prepare to scale their product and service across government.

Since June 2023, the team has been hard at work building Unity — a modern, human-centered enterprise grant management system developed by government, for government. They’re following an Agile approach: designing in the open, building iteratively, delivering in stages, and focusing on service design principles from the start.

Now operational, the platform has proven its stability, adaptability, and readiness to support broader adoption across ministries.

“We’ve built Unity for grant management across the Economy Sector,” the team says, “and now that it’s tested, and with ever-evolving features and functionality, we are well positioned to roll out Unity as a common service across government.”

Grant management is a major focus for B.C., with hundreds of millions of dollars distributed every year across various sectors to individuals, businesses and nonprofits.

Historically, many programs across government have built, bought or licensed their own individual grant management solutions. This siloed approach can lead to higher customization, maintenance and licensing costs, challenges in exchanging data between program areas and delays in launching programs for months after announcement.

The team pictured Unity not as a custom one-off solution, but as a foundational, common service that could scale across government without requiring technical specialists to customize it for individual program area needs. But first, there was a critical decision to make…

To buy or to build?

Before they could start, the MSD team had to figure out whether buying a pre-existing system was the best path.

“Early on, we really put effort into getting demonstrations and presentations from across government, from various program areas who were using grant management platforms,” the team recalls. “We looked at 6 or 7 different types of applications: custom solutions, commercial off-the-shelf solutions, full-blown Enterprise Resource Planning and Customer Relationship Management systems.”

A request for proposals attracted 5 submissions, but after careful review, none met the vision for a scalable, government-wide common service — especially considering the licensing and customization costs that would grow exponentially as more users and cross government ministry program areas joined.

The team explains, “The cost to buy a system for just a couple of areas was only the beginning. If you kept adding more program areas, licensing, customization, integration, and maintenance costs would skyrocket. Over time, a custom solution would be much more cost-effective.”

This realization provided the business case for custom-building Unity so it could grow with government needs while keeping costs sustainable. A team of in-house developers partnered with private sector contractors to make it happen.

A hybrid team approach rooted in service design

Building Unity called for a hybrid team model — aligning with the CITZ Digital Principles and B.C.’s Digital Code of Practice and a mandate to align with government’s push for connected services.

“We didn’t just hand everything to a contractor,” the team notes. “We built a hybrid team — combining internal MSD and Economy Program Area resources with contractors — across development, architecture, business analysis, and UX / service design.”

Service design was at the heart of Unity’s approach. Three business analysts embedded in different program areas gathered input, wrote user stories, and supported onboarding and training. A UX/UI Design expert and a contracted Service Design and Change Management Team ensured that the customer journey stayed intuitive, accessible, and human-centered at every step.

Of course, coordinating a hybrid team wasn’t without challenges. “At one point, we scaled up to 9 developers temporarily for some UX work, from our permanent dev team of 5,” the team shares. “Scheduling meetings across four different time zones was an interesting challenge, and keeping everyone busy meant planning two or three sprints ahead — sometimes even more.”

The hybrid model also fostered collaboration across ministries. The product team includes staff from Finance and CITZ, and a Corporate Financial System Project Team was mobilized to support payment integration early on.

Financial controls and cross-government collaboration

During the Financial Risk and Controls Review (FRCR) — a crucial step for any provincial financial system — the team brought in colleagues from Financial Services Branches, Audit and Advisory Services and Corporate Accounting Services. Rather than treating it as a point-in-time investment, they co-developed a robust foundation for the payment and approvals workflows that anchored Unity’s FRCR. The payments approval workflows were designed with an eye to being a common service – with potential to be leveraged universally, and capable of supporting payments stemming from any type of application or assessment process.

“Our goal,” the team explains, “was to make Unity’s FRCR extendable across government — so new program areas could onboard without doing a separate FRCR. Instead, they’d simply attest to alignment with our business processes, review the control framework, and submit a supporting Briefing Note up to their ADM and through to the Comptroller General.” The teams have used this process for the last four onboarding instances and every time it gets faster, smoother and more seamless.

This approach saves program areas and the Ministry of Finance time, resources and money — real savings that can be better spent delivering services to people in British Columbia.

Collaboration and contractors

As Unity took shape, partnerships across government stayed critical. The team worked closely with the CITZ Common Hosted Forms Service team, integrated into their scrums, and actively fed back bugs and feature requests. Regular ongoing engagement across grant program teams continues to solidify the value of an accessible grant management platform and through these active conversations, exploration of new features, functionality and use cases emerge.

Procurement strategies keep things moving, leveraging pre-established supply arrangements in place with 5 strategic vendors, speeding up onboarding for any additional SME contractors. Meanwhile, “Code with Us” procurement enabled quick hiring for dedicated tasks over a few sprints.

A success story in the making

One of the team’s biggest accomplishments has been its speed.

The hybrid team came together in June of 2023, and delivered a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) by November 2023. As of April 2025, four program areas are live with multiple grant streams in each area active, and one more is actively onboarding. Now that the platform is tested, stable and evolving, the next step is continued adoption across government with a goal of the platform and service eventually being available to all as a foundational tool and common service. Meanwhile, the system is live, learning, and continuously improving, supported through an internal operational team as more users work within it.

Unity is more than just a grant management system — it’s a living example of what happens when we build in the open, design around real user needs, and work across ministries with shared purpose. By embracing the CITZ Digital Principles and thinking beyond one-off solutions and point in time investments,  the team is showing how government can deliver smarter, faster, and more accessible services that actually make life easier — for staff administering programs, and for the people in B.C. who rely on them. Unity reminds us that when diverse, service-focused teams come together, we don’t just build systems — we build capacity, community and lasting value across government.