Complex stakeholder engagement inside government: lessons learned
We needed to deliver a new digital standard focused on open source projects. Our success would hinge on complex and wide-ranging stakeholder engagement.
The Victorian Government digital standards support the creation of best-practice digital services. They are particularly important in emerging and challenging areas of digital delivery.
The digital standards are endorsed and used by each Victorian Government department, agency and statutory authority and apply to all VPS, not just those working in digital.
Establishing our team
First, we established our team and program of work to deliver the action item to deadline. Read this article by my colleague Meagan Carlsson on her process to manage that.
My role was to write the standard to meet our style guide requirements, build relationships with stakeholders, conduct UX research and take care of communications and engagement planning.
We agreed as a team that we would be available, honest and openly share problems with each other.
We took a hybrid waterfall and agile approach to work towards our deadline. This meant if something wasn’t working or we needed to pivot, we could do so.
Framing our challenge
Our challenge was clear: How might we build the capability of the VPS in making projects open source using the digital standards?
The benefits of open source to the Victorian Government:
• sharing of information and best practice
• increasing trust and transparency in government
• giving back to the community
• increase re-use and decrease cost of development
• increase quality
• learning and development opportunities for developers
Making our projects shareable means we can avoid duplication. It also drives innovation and collaboration across the Victorian Government.
Planning our program of work
Now that we had established our team and challenge, we began to plan our program of work. We spent time defining what it would take to develop and deliver a standard on how to make project open source.
We took a 4-stage approach:
Discovery
• identify key stakeholders and subject matter experts
• desktop research on the topic
• jurisdiction scan (what are the other states doing in this space?)
• user research (focus group and one on one interviews)
Design
• pair write with subject matter experts (you can read more about our pair writing process in this article by my colleague Emma Cameron)
• engage with relevant teams in each of the 8 Victorian Government departments
• engage with subject matter experts across the Victorian Government
At this stage of the project I sat down with Guy Owen, a developer on our Single Digital Presence project. Guy explained the process of making code open source and I typed up our first draft. This became a digital guide to ‘make your project open source’.
Feedback and approval
The following groups reviewed and endorsed the guide:
• project team
• subject matter experts from our branch — Digital, Design and Innovation
• independent consultancy
• subject matter experts from across the Victorian Government
• Office of the General Counsel
• Digital, Design and Innovation branch Executive Director
• Chief Information Officers and Senior Communications Executives from across the Victorian Government
Delivery
•publish standard on the vic.gov.au website
• roll out the communications plan
• project closure and lessons learned workshop
We will monitor performance and user behavior on the standard and continuously improve it into the future. Find out how we take action on insights that tell us how our users and thinking and feeling in this article.
How we navigated complex interests
Stay in scope, act on consensus: stakeholders had differing opinions and different needs from the standard, but we stuck to our defined scope and went with a majority rule to make most content decisions.
Communicate decisions: when we didn’t include something that a stakeholder had strongly suggested we communicated with them why we made the decision. This included backing up our decision with notes from external reviewers. Once we shared our reasoning stakeholders didn’t push back because they understood our rationale.
Create an ideas register: we documented any suggestions we wanted to include but couldn’t because of time constraints. We then let the stakeholder know we would be looking to include that in future and would get back in touch with them when we were ready to progress.
Harness the passion: our standard was intended to be general in nature and only 2 pages long. A common challenge was that stakeholders had niche interests in open source, relating to their own work. We listened to our stakeholders and were also clear about what we could do. This clear communication meant we could focus their passion for open source back into the project at hand.
Our lessons learned
• A human centered design approach is key
• Spend time mapping key stakeholders
• Create a research plan that clearly defines how to track insights from stakeholder interviews
• Engage with stakeholders early and often
• Give stakeholders ownership
• Put in checkpoints to stop, reflect and regroup
• External review and feedback is important
• Credit people’s work. (Our Executive Director announced the guide on LinkedIn and tagged everyone we consulted.)
While we developed and released the open source standard, we also updated the mobile app guide. Right now, we’re working on 3 new standards on privacy, security and data de-identification.
Credits
Meagan Carlsson, Nicholas Rankin, Jithma Beneragama, Guy Owen, Kurt Foster, Anthony Malkoun, Jordan Walsh, Stuart Campbell, Chaminda Subasinghe, Samantha Presser, Donna Benjamin, Gartner, Salsa Digital, Code for Australia, VicRoads, Department of Jobs, Precincts and Regions, Department of Justice and Community Safety.
