Santa Clara CIO Ann Dunkin on empowering people to change government
“I saw how deeply the agency staff cared about their missions and that they were willing to change things for the better, if someone gave them the slightest opportunity.”
“I saw how deeply the agency staff cared about their missions and that they were willing to change things for the better, if someone gave them the slightest opportunity.”
David Zvenyach on why the federal source code policy failed to support open source sharing for agencies and how to fix it.
Learn how human-centered design principles and field research can inform better policy-making.
The RFP from a local government acknowledged the need for a design-first, user-focused approach to the work -- but the scale was massive. The responding firm realized a modular approach was needed in proposing a solution.
A team of IT innovators in San Jose recently selected Scrum as the single most compelling practice from their past year of work to transmit to their organization — a city government of 6,000 employees.
While FLASH was flawed, it showed the tremendous potential of running a contracting process that rewards excellence at designing and building working software, rather than competence in writing proposals and navigating bureaucracy.
Should developers be involved in a project from the beginning, producing working software from the get-go for users to test? Or should projects begin with a discovery phase in which designers work with users to interpret needs before developers start?
You may have to experiment to discover the best application of the agile framework for your agency, but that doesn’t mean the framework itself goes out the window.
Delivering value through an iterative agile process can be difficult when working within a fixed scope government contract. Some trendsetting agencies have embraced agile procurement, but many agencies are still working with contracts intended for waterfall processes.
18F may be financially in the red, but there is a bigger story at play which proves the agile tech consultancy's value to government and citizens outweighs its cost.