Gold Belt Can Help
This blog is written by Adam Nie, an Intern for the Department of Innovation and Performance and recent graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s Public Administration Master’s program. The department hopes that this blog provides unique insight into our work for any prospective interns or employees.
I have always been someone with a wide range of interests. Throughout my senior year of high school, I considered programs in everything from Physics to Fashion Design. During undergrad at the University of Pittsburgh, I wound up pursuing a double degree in Political Science and Supply Chain Management with a couple artsy minors. When asked, I’d say something about wanting to apply operations tools outside of a corporate setting. The minors were just for fun.
With the pandemic job market still shaky in the Spring of 2021, I stayed at Pitt after graduation, getting a Master’s in Public Administration. My graduate courses gave me language for all the work that government does outside of politics. One of my grad school professors, Chris Belasco, who moonlights as Pittsburgh’s Chief Data Officer, referred me to the city’s Innovation Team.
The Innovation Team sits within the Department of Innovation and Performance (I&P). I&P covers a range of technical functions, like making sure that employees have the devices and applications they need and protecting the city’s cybersecurity. It also extends further into helping the city analyze the data it collects and improve its processes. That’s the Innovation part.
The Innovation Team had around ten people on it when I started. Some work with local startups to pilot new products with city departments. Others manage the relationships between I&P and the rest of the city. My direct colleagues focus on process improvement, giving city employees the support to transform their own work.
One of the main ways we support employee innovations is through Gold Belt. Gold Belt is a course that combines short coaching sessions with an interactive online module. Employees who take Gold Belt map out a process that has been bothering them, identify waste, and come up with ways to change it. This counters the idea that governments can’t improve. As one student put it, “To do things one way just because that’s the way they were done is not the Gold Belt way.”
Over the course of my internship, I helped to expand the types of trainings we offered and market those trainings to city employees. For our expanded offerings, this meant figuring out how best to meet demand with our limited resources. Since I’ve been here, we have led workshops that use Legos to demonstrate assembly lines, tweaked the online Gold Belt module, and experimented with bringing back in-person Gold Belt sessions cut off by quarantine. Starting in January 2023, we split Gold Belt into Gold Belt Standard and Gold Belt Lite, with the latter giving employees an even easier way to learn the basics of process mapping. Each of these experiments required new guides, new slides, and new templates, which we continue to improve as we go along.
Marketing Gold Belt has brought even more variety. When I started in March 2022, the team already had communication channels in place. All-user emails went out regularly with course signup links. An internal SharePoint site hosted class photos, a social media feed, and a video introduction. Posters in the I&P office highlighted employees who completed their innovations.
These materials provided a strong starting point. Nevertheless, the city had tried to standardize its branding since they were created, and many new employees had taken the program. My first task was to design a poster template to match the department’s current branding. I then conducted video interviews with current employees who have completed innovations, transcribed those interviews and formatted them into new posters. The new template makes it easier to highlight success stories across multiple platforms by copying the same information to a Gold Belt Stories page in SharePoint and to display screens at the I&P front desk.
Because our class offerings are always changing, our marketing needs to change with them. I’ve had great conversations with my team about how to connect each new course to its audience. When we try a different approach, we treat it like an experiment, just like we ask students to do in Gold Belt. Marketing for a government process improvement course combines my academic fields — including the artsy ones.
When Professor Belasco shared the job posting for this internship, full of buzzwords like Six Sigma that I recognized from undergrad, I knew that it was the perfect fit for my public sector logistics vision. I couldn’t have predicted how well the position would shape itself to my interests. From animating screen graphics for the department’s front desk area to brainstorming pithy subject lines for all user emails, this internship has allowed me to incorporate my creative skills in a way that I never expected.
City government is a massive ecosystem with people from every background doing all kinds of jobs. Through my Gold Belt interviews, I gained insight not only into the work of I&P but also of the work of employees in other departments. I got to collaborate on projects like the program evaluation sprint that CJ Ostrosky wrote about here. I even learned from our colleagues in other cities. When else would I have heard about Sao Paulo’s upcoming park initiatives or Sugarland, Texas’ wild hog problem?
For me as an intern, the exposure to a wide range of career paths and emphasis on professional development has been ideal. People say that government never changes, but I have been a part of a program, team, and department undertaking constant change. No matter what your skills are, city government has a place for you.
