Page 62 - FCW, March 2017

FCW Perspectives
a one-way transactional relationship.” That requires more than simply lis- tening, another official said. “Business process re-engineering is a huge part of this, identifying the root cause,” she said. “If I told you about a prob- lem yesterday, if you continue to do it, then you’re not listening. If we begin to show that we are engaged, we are changing, you’ll see their expectations
and satisfaction are off the charts.” Yet “there is only so much of that, I would posit, that can be done remote- ly,” the official added. “You have to look people in the eye.” She did note, how- ever, that social media “really helps us drive down and point us in the right
direction.”
“Analytics prove value,” another offi-
cial said. “They also prove the risks. You should be treating everything on a spectrum from real, hard ethnographic
research to hardcore data around how you’re supposed to be evaluat- ing it. It’s not going to be obvious which ones you do and when. It’s going to be based on your product vision and where you are in shaping that product vision.”
Second, assemble the right team
True engagement requires more than focus groups and user-centered design, the participants agreed. Sites and systems must be built, deployed and rapidly iterated — no
easy task given traditional acquisition approaches, rigid security standards and ingrained agency habits.
Agile development has been essen- tial to addressing those challenges, the roundtable participants agreed — not only because it allows for rapid changes as feedback comes in, but also because it pulls in outside specialists who might otherwise create obstacles and instead gets them focused on solutions.
“We had a revelation with one of our contracting officers who had helped with several of our procure- ments,” one official recalled. “She did not understand agile until a two-week sprint development process, [when] she came and sat in all of the meetings, saw the team work, saw the product owner change priorities on the fly in a sprint planning session.”
“That was kind of like base- ball,” he added. “If someone writes the rules of baseball down and you read them, you will not understand how baseball works. You have to go watch a baseball game.”
Similarly, several participants said, bringing acquisition and security specialists onto the team helps the developers and design- ers see things differently. “When we talk about acquisitions and security as barriers to good prod- ucts, that misses the point,” one official said. “If we can stop treat- ing acquisitions as a thing to be avoided and [the Federal Informa-
tion Security Modernization Act] as a thing to be avoided but instead as nec- essary conditions to be successful and to create guidance by which you can innovate faster...that’s the world that we want to live in. We’re not there, but it’s fundamentally a world that we need to move toward.”
Building such expert teams is eas- ier said than done, the participants acknowledged. One talked about his agency’s goal of bringing a procurement specialist into the CIO’s office, “whose only task is strategy and technology procurement strategy, and that’s their job 100 percent of the time.” But that is not a discrete role at most agencies, he said, and there’s not a federal job classification that fits it — even though such a person would “be a tremendous force multiplier.”
Expert teams also are far more prac- tical than trying to staff every agency program with leading-edge digital tal- ent. “You’re not going to see, ‘Go find 20,000 awesome engineers and design- ers and just fix all the problems,’” one participant said, prompting laughter and nods around the table. “It’s just not a thing. If it were a thing, it would be done by now. The government has the ability to do that sort of work. But, really, we need to invest in people, in teams, again.”
62 March 2017 FCW.COM