Improving Federal Government Services

Editor's Notes

• #3: 18F is a digital consultancy inside the U.S. government, for the U.S. government.
• #4: there was the P.I.F. program — an initiative to bring industry talent into government for short “tours of duty” to work on projects with the potential to create jobs, save taxpayer money and even save lives.
• #5: During its 2nd year, the Fellowship was operationalized inside the G.S.A. and there was growing discussion about how to bring folks in for longer than 6-12 months. [ GSA is a federal agency that employs about 12,000 people across the country. It handles government wide policy, real estate, procurement, and key operations for the federal government. ]
• #6: About two years ago, some of my colleagues, after their 6 month fellowship was completed, started 18F
• #7: 18F is a digital consultancy FOR the U.S. government INSIDE the U.S. government. We are federal employees working alongside innovators in other federal agencies. And FYI, the name is an homage to “30 Rock” — GSA headquarters in DC are at 18th & F streets. This photo is from a recent all hands meeting, but we are rarely physically together. We hire where the talent is, so we’re a distributed team
• #8: I work in downtown San Francisco.
• #9: most of us work remotely, routinely interacting through video conference and sharing documents online
• #13: We’ve seen first-hand what we read in the research. When new behaviors lead to results, people change their thinking… That’s what leads to widespread culture change. https://hbr.org/2012/07/cultural-change-that-sticks/ar/1
• #14: Eric Ries, who catalyzed the Lean Startup movement, defines an MVP as a the smallest possible thing you can learn from… it might not even be software, maybe a paper protoytpe, or even a human interaction.
• #15: we focus on the actual needs of the people who use the software. It’s a strange truth in designing software that often people describe a potential solution which won’t actually help them. We seek to create the solution that people need, which is often not exactly what they are asking for.
• #16: We’re iterative, experimental, and failure tolerant. We don't plan two years of development before we start. As we work, we pay careful attention to what succeeds — and what doesn't. We fail small, so we don’t fail big.
• #17: We quantify our work with metrics and feedback, which, in turn, informs our thinking and our next round of building.
• #18: Our projects are designed and built in public. That means open source, open data, and open APIs. Working transparently helps us develop faster, make better decisions, gather meaningful feedback, and keep costs low.
• #19: Whether we can impart these ways of thinking successfully is more important than the scale of any given project or line of business.
• #20: We are governed by the economy act and all of our work is paid for by federal agencies, but we
• #21: Current legacy system no longer meets the needs of California (HHS/Administration of Children, Youth, and Families) https://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2015/11/30/a-new-approach-to-procuring-government-technology-in-california/ http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2015/12/07/child-welfare-technology-in-california-part-two/
• #24: Revised the state’s Terms and Conditions for greater competitiveness and protect HHS/CA’s interests, especially around Open Source/Agile. Communicated tangible benefits of Agile, User-Centered Design, and Modular Procurement, by demonstrating how to put these practices into action
• #25: A large team worked together to make this happen image credit: http://www.codeforamerica.org/blog/2015/12/07/child-welfare-technology-in-california-part-two/
• #26: An example of a specific software project I worked on at 18F….
• #27: This might sound weird… of course, software is there to solve a problem, but most people want to leap straight the solution, but we find that we learn a lot from digging deeply into the problem and clearly articulating it
• #28: We’re targeted here at this problem of empowering federal employees. Fed does a survey every year, only 37% of fed employees believe creativity and innovation are rewarded. Office of Personnel Management and agency leads are concerned about this, and consider it a dismal fact about being a federal employee and the environment we work in. The beleaguered federal worker is a common stereotype, but employee engagement is actually a huge problem across the US. Less than one-third (31.5%) of U.S. workers were engaged in their jobs in 2014, according to a gallup poll. http://www.gallup.com/poll/181289/majority-employees-not-engaged-despite-gains-2014.aspx
• #29: with 2.7M civilian employees
• #30: They are our target audience. Give them better tools to work and collaborate with their colleagues, causes those people to be productive and amplifies their effectiveness.
• #31: The product supports cross-team collaboration, which we have found increases impact of fed workers while also providing professional development opportunities. But it started with an idea, a theory of how this might work... image source: http://www.digitalgov.gov/2014/04/28/in-crowdsourcing-competitions-defining-the-problem-is-half-the-battle/
• #32: Remember, delivery is our strategy…. this means we figure things out by delivering them, and through delivering software in collaboration with agency partners, we train people about how to work in this new way.
• #33: We’re not really focused on designing the software, that is just part of it... We design human experiences and then software drives the scale of those experiences. We often start with observing how people are interacting in the real world, then validate our ideas with mockups and prototypes, before creating software.
• #34: We often also look at outside research. In this case, the software is designed to create cultural change and there are a lot of other folks working on the same question. Research has found that the best way to do this is to work within the culture and by emphasizing just a few key behaviors, people will adopt those behaviors and even find new ways of supporting each other.
• #35: Key behavior here is people presenting an opportunity to a wide group of people, getting other people to sign up for that. People post an opportunity, any fed employee can post one.
• #36: Here, a citizen science toolkit, which anyone could sign up for.. Normally this kind of opportunity is only available to highly networked federal employees, a very small percentage of federal employees actually know someone who works at the white house. So you have to have a very well-developed network to have access to this type of thing.
• #37: In this case a group of 5 people signed up for it, some of them has never worked with on such a high profile project..
• #38: People tell people about their work that has impact. The WordPress developer who worked on this site wasn’t well-known to the white house. She wanted to gain experience and improve her wordpress skills, and was able to build this for the white house. She then gave a talk about it at a conference. This had a significant, positive impact on her career. We see these on high-profile projects driving agency priorities, but also more mundane stuff like guest blog posts and javascript widgets.
• #39: Identify positive culture traits you want to amplify. What are the positive things about our government’s environment?
• #40: Turns out we have an incredible culture of mission-driven service, passionate about achieving the mission of their agency
• #41: I was surprise to realize that we actually have a culture of data-driven learning. I was talking with former GSA agency Administrator, Dan Tangherlini, I told him about this culture we bring from industry of “failing fast” that doesn’t resonate particularly well inside gov. He pointed out that we don’t actually seek failure, we want to fail small to create an ultimate success, he advised to latch onto the learning aspect of it. This is why we do quick iterations, to learn early, reduce risk. Gov loves to generate reports on all the information we collect to understand how to improve our country, if we can transform that into the digital realm, we’re collecting data and if doesn’t feel like we’re transforming culture, we’re just re-naming and teaching some new techniques.
• #42: A 2011 Executive Order 13571 (on Streamlining Service Delivery and Improving Customer Service) was followed in 2012 by a comprehensive Digital Government Strategy that outlined how agencies would innovate… “To make the most use of our resources and “innovate with less”, we need to share more effectively... and be smart about creating new tools, applications, systems, websites and domains. “
• #43: it highlighted “crowdsourcing” as an effective approach
• #44: As part of the President’s Second Term Management Agenda, the Office of Personnel Management took on the People & Culture goal and issued a memo calling for agencies to participate in this kind of cross-team collaboration... strategy documents and memos do help in government, they provide “air cover” and comfort to government employees that fear taking risk, but they don’t make the change
• #45: Last summer we studied this phenomenon which is happening across the federal government, as part of a project with the Office of Personnel Management. We saw that successful programs have stakeholders at every level, agency heads, people in unions who know employees want development opportunities, and most importantly individual employees who want to get involved, and supervisors who will support them. Looking at this diagram, when you are just starting out, can be overwhelming, but it doesn’t start this way...
• #48: Change happens when people start changing their behaviors in small ways, and that can be facilitated by technology. In this particular program, an MVP was created using a wordpress blog, which proved the model of people interacting across agencies. Tasks were posted as a static blog post, with a button that sent an email to a human being who worked behind-the-scenes to send email to introduce participants to each other. Lean Startup calls this a “conceirge approach” to prototypting. It only scales so far, but is a cheap way to prove out the interaction, creating us a community of people we could go back to and learn from, researching what is really working for people....
• #49: … we scaled that, using some open source software that had been originally developed by the State Department.
• #50: and we improved the open source software…
• #51: including the default messaging, which we pulled from language we heard during our user research of the community
• #52: Software is made out of code… “source” in open source refers to its source code... Products, Libraries, Gems, packages, modules, etc. As big as something like Microsoft Office or as small as something like a web form that checks to make sure you've filled in every field.
• #53: Sarah - Historically (back in the 1960s) much of the software that you could buy also shipped with the source code, since customers were engineers who could modify it. Most open source software we use today is available at no cost, and can be used as is or modified by software developers. Sometimes open source products are as good or better than their commercial alternatives, and sometimes not.
• #54: US Gov open source
• #55: Government Open Source dates back to 1970s. Also, the origins of the Internet at DARPA, SRI and elsewhere included a good amount of government funded open source projects.
• #56: However, the projects that the government was open sourcing were more like print publishing than the way we now think about open source projects.
• #58: Sasha
• #59: Open source is part of our agreements with agencies Our projects start with an empty repository of code
• #63: in addition to creating transparency, open source allows others to reuse our work….
• #64: For over 2 years GSA’s Digital Analytics Program has been working with other federal agencies to equip their websites with common analytics tools. 18f built a dashboard.
• #70: Code for America Natural language search
• #74: Sarah -- contribute & community
• #75: sometimes it is as simple as a bug report
• #76: or making an automated test more robust by improving a few lines of code
• #77: oauth2_proxy We added alternate providers for MyUSA Other people used our work to add more providers
• #79: Sarah - this sectipm
• #80: documentation, getting started guide, “beginner’s mind”
• #86: Open Communication , standups