Part 3: Building Better Digital Services Teams (2018)
[Report] The 2018 State of Digital Transformation
This piece was written by Matt Spector, HKS MPP Student (2016–18)
From June 12–13, 2018, digital HKS and Public Digital convened public sector digital services teams from around the world at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. Teams and experts from nine nations shared stories of success, talked about lessons learned, and discussed the challenges they face in transforming government.
Across the next few weeks, digital HKS will be sharing the most important takeaways from the convening through our blog — and we will also publish the collected learnings as a physical text later this year. We started with an introduction post explaining the full framework; in this post, we propose a preliminary maturity model for public-sector digital services.
Introduction
Government digital services teams — regardless of their size and tenure — continue to face the people challenge, from recruiting the right capabilities for the right operational mandates to the increasingly pressing challenges of overwork. Each can lead to critical talent gaps, with teams failing to cycle people and talent meaningfully. And each of these growth and management challenges can put these teams at risk.
And yet, digital services teams shouldn’t underestimate their power to recruit — because finding qualified people for transformative public services isn’t a competition on salary or title, but on impact and mission. Recruitment rests on an appeal to a sense of duty, a desire to make the world better, and an opportunity to achieve change at scale. While digital services groups in the United States sometimes find themselves competing with tech firms and startups for staff, digital services teams in places like Mexico and Peru have had phenomenal success in recruiting top candidates. This suggests that there is a real appetite out there — and that if digital services groups can drive a genuine mission and real impact, they will be able to build great teams.
There’s an old adage that “civil services have very good immune systems — they are very good at isolating disruptors.” Many digital teams see part of their mission as shifting the skillset and culture of public service — to make disruptors into allies and show that resistors are the problem to be solved. New digital leaders need to purposefully wade through silos to accomplish the hard work of digital transformation, patiently and systematically promoting cultural change through collaborative methodologies and incremental change.
Build Diverse Teams Reflective of Their User Base
It’s critical to build a digital services team that reflects the diversity of the population it serves. Teams that do can leverage broader perspectives and experiences in design processes. The will be far better-equipped to focus on and identify user needs. They will have more credibility with the public service and the public. While hiring standards for this kind of diversity can created a challenge, the best digital services teams practice what they preach. Many leaders will even not attend events or initiatives which do not practice meaningful diversity and inclusion.
Supplement Technical Skillsets: Hire for Consultative and Management Skills
Ontario’s team additionally underscored the need for recruiting digital services team members that have enablement and consultative skills alongside product capability, particularly in building beyond the digital service unit’s delivery capacity to create programs that align with agencies’ interests. These consultative and enablement skills help bridge a critical gap, building actionable plans that allow for operational handoff and the discipline of managing and owning outputs and deliverables over time. In cultivating teams of “kickass product owners,” digital services leaders discussed the dual need for team members who understand the complexities and nuances of policy alongside excellence in product delivery.
Elevate Digital Competencies and Roles within Ministries
Certain jurisdictions, including New Zealand’s national government, have begun to elevate digital competencies as critical roles within ministries. New Zealand stressed the importance of articulating decision rights — clear accountability for the agency’s outcomes across all projects and programs. The risks of decision rights, however, make the digital services team or the agency in question ultimately responsible in case of a product or program failure, and leaders must navigate this divide carefully with each engagement. The team articulated cross-agency initiatives that build beyond silos and created lasting pools of funding for change. New Zealand’s advocacy helped establish a service innovation fund within the government that is contestable by agencies, and is executing the first multiagency life event program. These proof points and aligned incentives helped show civil servants and ministers the value of digital service across the broader government.
Broadcast Achievements in Culture Change
At their core, digital service teams like the digital services operation in Ontario see their mission as one of change management rather than digital achievement, and their critical contribution as “shipping culture” through prioritizing projects and environments of diversity, inclusion and belonging. Experts discussed digital service unit recruitment barriers from lagging technical and management skill to the inertia of bureaucratic hiring processes. Participants underscored the importance of performing government transformation and digital excellence functions brilliantly, reducing or virtually eliminating downtime for existing initiatives and products, and broadcasting achievements by “working out loud,” telling candid and verifiable organizational stories in the environments where they are most likely to be shared and read, to the audiences, citizens, and users who most need to engage.
Conclusions
Digital services leaders face a “people pivot point” in the shift from startup to scale, including overcoming challenges in team growth and operational sustainability. Whether teams are established, each digital services leader underscored the importance of norms and expectations for digital services teams throughout their respective bureaucracies, creating clear lines of accountability, speaking with language that engages potential hires and internal stakeholders, and proves the potential of the digital operation.
The bigger challenge that digital services teams face moving forward is how we go from scale within the team — i.e., building from a small to a large centralized group — from scale across government. If digital services successfully inflects the culture of other departments, many of them might be managing and deploying their own independent agile digital services teams — requiring different-in-kind practices for recruitment, training, and management. We don’t yet know how to operate in that environment — but that’s exactly where some of the most exciting teamwork will be happening over the next decade.
