Part 2b: Digital Maturity Self Assessment Exercise (2019)

This tool is designed to provoke conversations about capabilities and theories of change among digital service team members. Below are instructions to an exercise we’ve conducted with about 30 digital service teams around the world.

By David Eaves and Lauren Lombardo

The What and Why of the Digital-Services Maturity Model

In 2018 we released a maturity model designed to help public-sector digital-services units benchmark their capabilities. The model is designed to help digital-services teams talk and learn from one another. Outlined below is a simple exercise I’ve used with dozens of digital service teams around the world. It has led to helpful and important conversations. I’ve designed the exercises so that you can do them independently, but I’d be glad to provide support if you need it. The exercises are meant to enable teams to:

• Align on current capabilities. All too often, teams aren’t aware of their own capabilities and resources. This can be caused by team growth and specialization, and teams that underestimate their capabilities can be overcautious, while those that overestimate them may overreach and put themselves at risk.
• Align on strategy and theory of change. Another risk is that teams won’t be aligned on their goals and thus on the capabilities they need to develop to make progress. Teams will confront myriad problems and it’s tempting to engage on each one, but that can pull the team in multiple directions. Having the organization aligned around the goal, theory of change, and strategy is critical given how poorly resourced most digital-services teams are. It’s crucial to make sure everyone is rowing in the same direction.
• Facilitate the sharing of lessons learned. By providing a common language and framework, this exercise helps teams identify capabilities that they have not developed but other teams have, assess whether those capabilities are useful, and inquire about how to build those capabilities.

Exercises

Before getting started, print out the maturity model for everyone on your team. You can find a copy at http:// bit.ly/DGMModel.

Download at https://bit.ly/DigGovMM

Exercise 1: Gaining Alignment around Capabilities

1. Determine where your team falls within each area by asking each member to circle one box in each row, as shown, corresponding to where they think the team is at.

Circle what level of capability you believe your team has

2. Review everyone’s responses as a group to help align your team. Later, you can aggregate this information to get a sense of where the majority of people think you are performing high or low.

Exercise 2: Gaining Alignment around Theory of Change

1. Tell participants that you are giving them 10 prioritization points. I sometimes refer to these points as “Mike Bracken points,” in honor of the UK’s former chief digital officer and co-convener of our event.

• These points represent where participants think the organization as a whole should concentrate its efforts in building new capabilities. They represent investment, or where team leaders should allocate their attention.
• For the sake of clarity I sometimes ask that participants think about how they would prioritize their efforts over the next 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years. The time period is up to your discretion.

2. Ask participants to assign these points to where they believe the organization should invest more time building out the capabilities of that row.

• Points must be assigned to a row, as shown. Do not assign points to a specific box.
• Points can be assigned in increments of 1 to 10, and can be assigned in any configuration as long as the total number of points per row does not exceed 10. Thus, for example, one could assign 2 or 5 or all 10 points to any given row.

Write in the “points” (up to 10) to the left of a column.

3. Review how everyone assigned their points and assess the areas the team thinks are most important to prioritize

Note for the facilitator: During the debriefing, many participants will spread their points across 7 to 10 rows with 1 or 2 points each. But we highly recommend that 3 or 4 points each be assigned instead to the 2 or 3 rows that will provide the most leverage. Assigning your points across more rows increases the likelihood you’ll spread your energy too thin and do everything poorly.