How Boston hacked and procured its way to a better permitting system
The City of Boston’s permit requirements are intended to ensure safe, equitable, and transparent development. However, the application system was also frustrating for many Bostonians. The Mayor launched a city-wide reform initiative in 2014. Central to this campaign was overhauling the City’s online permitting and licensing experience. This included a wide-scale stakeholder consultation, a hackathon to engage local entrepreneurs, and an iterative, needs-driven sourcing document.
Boston’s Unmet Permitting Needs
Boston issues over 60 different types of permits, with a total of 86,000 permits issued per year, meaning that permitting is a major channel through which Boston’s citizens interact with municipal services. Effective, predictable, and clear permitting is essential, for example, to the early success of start-ups and small businesses.
However, applicants struggled to identify the required steps and the timeline associated with each process. They frequently had to engage with multiple municipal contact points. Delays impacted not only applicants but also internal processes: in March 2014, the city had a backlog of around 3,500 open building complaints, with only 56% of permits issued on time.
“Permitting is a basic interaction between the public and government, and should be designed based on user needs”
Joel Mahoney, Co-Founder, Open Counter
Recognizing this fundamental disconnect between citizens’ needs and the city’s service, the City of Boston committed to comprehensively reforming the permitting process to make it more transparent, streamlined, and customer-friendly. This action was taken from the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics.
The first step was to map the key bottlenecks that stakeholders faced by engaging citizens from across the city, ranging from DIY homeowners to experienced contractors. Inspectional Services Department staff also shared their detailed knowledge of the systems and the customer frustrations they heard on a daily basis. This helped the local government to better understand the problems and therefore define what needed to be solved.
A Needs-Driven Procurement Process
To tackle these issues, the City of Boston sought a partner to collaboratively build digital tools that made the permitting process a terrific experience. The procurement process followed closely on a hackathon held by the City in August 2014, both of which were guided by a needs-based scoping document. The hackathon and the needs-based RFP helped open up the process to non-traditional participants, attracting attention and interest from a large number of entrepreneurs.
Hackathon
Partially funded through a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the hackathon was hosted by the Mayor and held in District Hall. The hackathon invited designers, coders, builders, business owners, and other engaged citizens to create custom applications through an application programming interface which fed directly into the City’s permitting system.
Conscious of the reality that most products developed at hackathons are never finished or implemented, the City designed the hackathon to achieve two clear goals:
Firstly, it aimed to engage a wide range of entrepreneurs in the procurement process. The event served as an opportunity for potential bidders to learn more about the upcoming procurement process, including the bottlenecks in Boston’s existing permitting system previously identified users, and meet potential partners. The hackathon was successful in engaging new audiences, with over 60 people attending, several of whom ended up submitting a proposal in response to the sourcing document. Additionally, the hackathon sparked several long-term partnerships between participants.
Secondly, the hackathon was designed to address four pain points identified above. Participants were divided into four separate groups, each tackling one of these needs, which were phrased as questions.
- Which permits do I need? A single project may require multiple permits. Applicants need a clear, intuitive, and enjoyable guide that will help applicants identify the permits they need to start working.
- What’s my address of record? Every project needs to be linked to an address in the City’s master database. In the current system, finding your address is more difficult than it should be. The City’s new online system needs a clear way to search addresses and suggest alternatives, getting it right the first time.
- Can I apply for that permit online? Developers will be challenged to provide a very practical solution using the City’s new API to create a simple online or mobile application for Street Occupancy permits required to block space for a moving truck.
- Where am I in the approval process? Complex building projects can take months to review and permit, even if the process works correctly. Residents need a clear way to track all permits associated with their project, helping them understand the time frame for intended work.
This targeted approach helped produce a successful prototype, which was further developed in partnership with the City of Boston.
Users are able to follow each step of the permit review process. This includes having access to the full information on how long each step should take, and which City staff are responsible for individual steps. Together, this gives users an accurate sense of how long the overall process will take, what information they need to submit, and whether there were any unexpected delays.
The Request for Proposals
The sourcing document published by the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics and Department of Innovation & Technology had two key features: 1) a declaration of the needs to be met by the market and 2) a language that was deliberately clear, inclusive and — most notably — encouraging. The process of planning and launching the hackathon, which included reaching out and engaging with local entrepreneurial and developer communities, helped sharpen the sourcing document and make it accessible. The RFP also included a video that had been produced for the hackathon, which highlighted the challenges customers faced. Many vendors cited this end-user perspective as incredibly helpful.
There are three things that make a good RfP:
* Emphasize a problem not a solution
* Look for a partner not a vendor
* Be delightful
Chris Osgood, Co-Chair of Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, City of Boston
Before drafting an RfP, ask yourself these questions:
* What is the problem today
* What do we want to achieve
* What is absolutely necessary
* What would be nice to have* How will we measure success
Matt Mayrl, Boston’s Deputy CIO
The sourcing document drew applications from a diverse set of providers. Almost 50% of the respondents were entirely new to public procurement, some of whom certainly would not have submitted in a regular procurement process. The final contract to upgrade the city’s permitting and licensing system was awarded to two businesses working in partnership.
“This kind of RfP makes us feel at home”
Joel Mahoney, Co-Founder, Open Counter
One was a firm that helps cities support local economic development, while the other is a leading provider in civic engagement tools for government. These two firms will work together with the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT) to design and deploy the new online permitting system. The final system will help coordinate workflow and integrate various systems across departments. The system is due to be complete within a time frame of two years.
An integrated approach to solving permitting issues:
This procurement process was accompanied by a series of integrated measures, legal streamlining, additional citizen support, and a transversal municipal agency to help coordinate projects across departments.
- An inter-agency permitting team helped coordinate between departments. Three departments cooperated in the effort: The Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics, the Department of Innovation and Technology (DoIT), and the Inspectional Services Department.
- A streamlining of the appeals process for small businesses and 1–2 family owner-occupied residential applications.
- Regulatory tweaks to reduce the permitting burden on low-impact uses (such as art galleries and bakeries).
- A short-term roll out of information kiosks at common permitting sites throughout the city, which connected entrepreneurs with City of Boston business development specialists, trained to help small businesses with their permitting and licensing applications.
As a result of these reforms, undertaken in parallel with the procurement process, permitting in the City of Boston improved along the following measures by December 23, 2014:
- Speed. The rate of permits issued on time rose from 56% in March to 75%. Since March, the average time it takes to review and issue a long-term permit has been reduced by 5 days to 23 days.
- Effectiveness. ISD issued 12,500 more permits in 2014 than in 2013 (an increase of 21%)
- Customer service. In December, there were only 289 open building complaints, compared to a backlog of about 3,500 in March 2014.
- Ease of use. 19 out of 60 permit applications are now completely online.
“Specifications in an RfP might make the outcome more predictable, but having no flexibility means missing opportunities for innovation!”
Joel Mahoney, Co-Founder, Open Counter
Key Takeaways
This case study illustrates how a clear, collaborative, and inclusive definition of needs can form the fundamental basis of a procurement process. These identified needs formed the basis of the hackathon, leading to directly applicable results. Finally, the sourcing document was clear, easy to understand, non-prescriptive, and kept citizen needs at the core of the procurement. This helped engage a wider range of problem solvers and ensured their efforts were aligned with the problem to be solved.
