In June 2016, we launched the City of Austin’s Design, Technology, and Innovation Fellows program to bring Austin’s passionate and civic-minded designers, developers, researchers, and project managers into government. Inspired by the success of programs at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, 18F, Code for America, and the U.S. Digital Service, we designed our program to bring in specialists to help us tackle some of our city’s biggest challenges.
Our first teams of fellows started in August, and in the past three months we’ve grown to a cohort of ten fellows and fifteen city staff working on projects for permitting, recycling, and web infrastructure. We owe much of this success to learnings and guidance from the organizations mentioned above, and we’ve found ways to adjust their approaches for our unique situation in local government. Here are some of the strategies that have worked for us so far:
Start with desired outcomes
Before we start a project with a department, we write up a Partnership Agreement, which includes information about how we’ll work, estimated costs, and a list of the department’s Desired Outcomes. These goals are written in a way that’s centered on people’s needs (e.g., improve residents’ experiences of applying for construction permits) rather than focused on internal goals (e.g., increase the number of people using a web-based tool for applying for permits).
We also ensure that our teams have the freedom to determine the best way to reach each desired outcome. This is important because many people think about projects with specific solutions or technologies in mind. You’re much more likely to hear a suggestion of “Let’s build an app to fix permitting” over “Let’s empower a multidisciplinary team to research our permitting processes, prototype and test possible improvements, and implement the ones that work”. The broader scope asks the team to figure out what will actually help rather than simply delivering a requested solution.
The unit of delivery is the team
We’re borrowing this statement from the wonderful folks at the UK Government Digital Service, and we love how it fits with their guidance on agile delivery, staffing user researchers, and cross-team collaboration. For each of our projects, we assemble a core team of fellows and subject matter experts at the city and give that team the autonomy and authority to make decisions on how the project should move forward. Each of our teams includes experts in user research, service design, and project management; tech-centered projects also include web developers and product managers.
When you enable these types of specialists to work together toward a common purpose, the combination of skills, perspectives, and ability is pure magic. Alternatively, if you spread your staff too thin — if you assign fellows to work individually on different departments throughout the city — they may not have the right types of experts to work with in order to move their projects forward.
Get out and talk to people
Talking to users is at the core of user-centered design, and we have it easy in local government as the majority of our users live within a short drive from City Hall. Our permitting team has been talking to residents and contractors by joining them in line at our Development Assistance Center, our Convention Center team has received feedback from attendees by attending conventions, and our recycling team has partnered with community groups to identify candidates for in-home interviews about recycling and composting. The insights we’ve gathered from these and other interviews have shaped all of the work we’ve completed to date.
The US Digital Services Playbook puts talking to users at the top of its list, but it’s worth noting that it can be really hard to make this happen in government. We’ve run into issues around getting permission from stakeholders, recruiting the right participants, scheduling interviews after hours and on weekends, compensating participants, and records management for recordings and transcripts. The important thing is to work through these issues and get out and talk to people. Seriously, get out and talk to people.
Make time and space to synthesize
When you walk in our office space in City Hall, you’ll be surrounded by 4-foot by 8-foot foamcore boards. They contain observations from interviews, journey maps, service blueprints, and other artifacts that help us visualize and discuss the problems that we’re trying to solve. By gathering around these artifacts, our team members and stakeholders are able to have much deeper conversations than what we’d get out of a lengthy report or a deck of powerpoint slides (though I do love slide decks — more on that in another article). Digital tools like mural.ly, InVision, Trello, and others can simulate some of these experiences for remote teams, but the ability to map things out in a physical space has a huge advantage.
Keep on building, keep on testing, always be learning
We believe that prototyping and testing will yield better results than decisions made by upfront assumptions, top-down decision-making, or the consensus of assorted committees and task groups. Iterative methods establish a culture of learning, where it’s ok if an approach fails because you’re expected to try a dozen more options the following week.
We bring our project teams together every Thursday afternoon to share what we’ve learned, combined with bi-weekly discipline meetings for research, design, web development, and project management. These are opportunities to celebrate risk-taking, support each other through mistakes, and focus our energy on what’s next.
Join us
We’re hiring additional fellows with backgrounds in user research, content strategy, and front-end and back-end web development. If you’re interested in joining us, check out austintexas.gov/innovation-fellows. You can also follow us on Twitter at @civiqueso and here on Medium by clicking the “Follow” button below.
