What can you do?

When a bill passes, orders begin to cascade down a vast hierarchy to implement the new law. This one way process is deeply flawed. To get the outcomes the bill intends, this linear and directive process must become circular and collaborative. Invite the people at the bottom of the waterfall, including tech and design teams, to help write legislation that will be implementable. Include them before it's too late. Make room for their perspective. “Dialogue gets better outcomes than directives.”

Acquiring tech without tech expertise doesn’t work. Competent digital teams in government (along with procurement staff trained in digital) can successfully hire and manage contractors.

They also often solve problems with low-cost lightweight tech or no tech at all. Investments in operating expense (internal capacity in digital) open up new possibilities and make us good stewards of capital expense (contracts with vendors).

One useful guide is the Tech Talent Project’s advice to 2020 presidental transition team. This report (available on request) includes overall guidance for federal government leadership and specific data and recommendations for key federal agencies.

For states, Tech Talent Project recently released Memos for a Tech Transition: Building State Digital Capacity in the First 200 Days covering much of the same territory but tailored for governors’ teams and other state leaders.

It can easily take nine months to fill a position. Half of all hiring actions fail. 90% of competitive hires rely on self-attestation of skills (in other words, we don’t assess them for the skills they claim.) And that’s just hiring. There are equally grim barriers in recruiting, retention, training, and career development. There are dozens of existing recommendations that would move us in the right direction, and more to be made. Let’s get behind some concrete, specific changes. Most of them don’t require changes to law.

Tens of thousands of public servants are diligently performing tasks that do little or nothing towards the stated goal. It’s not about more of them, or even fewer. It’s about leveraging the human capital we have effectively. We need people with today’s skills and approaches, and the mandate to use them. That will require redefining processes and retraining the workforce.

Public servants are stuck between two distinct systems of accountability. They must answer to outcomes, but their careers depend on fidelity to processes, and those processes are frequently at odds with delivering those outcomes. Where do those processes originate? Often from policymakers seeking to hold public servants accountable. The more administrative agencies fear the criticism of policymakers, the more processes they put in place to protect themselves, limiting their ability to adapt to changing conditions.

Oversight can come from many directions: legislatures, inspectors general, GAO, auditors. One digital leader counted eighty-seven documents, eleven “stage gate” reviews, and twenty- one different oversight roles on a single project. Most of this oversight is conducted by staffers with little understanding of how to build good digital products. Rather than track actual progress, they instead focus on compliance with a veritable ocean of processes and procedures, few of which contribute to good outcomes. More oversight results in worse tech.

We have too much oversight, but also the wrong kind. Oversight bodies shouldn’t ask how well a team has stuck to a plan created years ago or how many formal requirements have been met on paper (a meaningless metric). They should ask what the team has learned since it started or the results of the latest user tests. They should ask to log in and try to use the product themselves. If we want digital services that work for people, we have to hold them accountable to the processes that work today and the outcomes we expect them to achieve.

“The waterfall method amounts to a pledge by all parties not to learn anything while doing the work.” (Clay Shirky) Megaprojects by definition cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars, and it can take decades to find out how poorly they work, if they work at all. By requiring agencies to define all the requirements up front before appropriating funds, our funding system precludes learning and the ability to adapt to changing conditions. It should be trivial to fund discovery sprints and easy to fund prototypes. Ongoing funding should be based on the demonstrated learnings and progress, not an arbitrary project plan drawn up before a single line of code was written.

It is with the best of intentions that lawmakers add mandates. But we’ve been adding for so long that it can take decades to become reasonably competent in the policies that govern many programs. This complexity prevents government from being able to operate at scale. Lawmakers need to take responsibility for working with agencies to reduce that complexity, not exacerbate it. Don’t add when you can subtract.

If these ideas resonate with you, and you’d like to discuss them further, reach out to me here.