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USDS Digital Services Playbook

playbook.cio.gov

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Re: USDS Digital Services Playbook

#71

Post by wslack »

ajcp wrote: post #2

While this is all well and good it feels like a slick "thought leadership" campaign that provides little in the way of actual solutions to the issues USG orgs face when building/providing digital services. The challenge is not the "approach", but rather a system that constrains the ability to even begin that approach. I find #7 especially hollow: > We need talented people working in government who have experience cre…

This is hard for practical reasons. The civil service needs to be a place where everyone can get a job without knowing someone inside, so a lot of best practices in the private sector (referral-based hiring) don't easily translate.

It's akin to the Postal Service visiting everyone's mailbox each day - not efficient, but important.

THAT SAID, there are massive improvements that can happen in hiring - if agencies have incentives to pursue them!

Re: USDS Digital Services Playbook

#72

Post by wslack »

zippy5 wrote: post #22
jolux wrote: post #19

I think the biggest problem any US government agency has (federal or state) in producing services that leverage modern technology is that they cannot afford to pay people market rates. We have a mentality in the US that government cannot do anything right, but it seems of late (last 40 years or so) that we are kneecapping government's ability to execute and then complaining about it when it can't and making pronounce…

It’s one thing to pay a highly competent person 6 figures. It’s an entirely different thing if you can’t fire them. I’m not saying that the government doesn’t need more competent people but it’s not going to work if there’s a bigger carrot and no stick.

Part of a solution for that are term-limited civil service jobs - that keeps a rotation of talent and low performers can't stay forever.

That said, you raise an important problem - how do you manage poor performers without allowing a bad-faith political official to fire people unfairly?

Re: USDS Digital Services Playbook

#73

Post by wslack »

random5634 wrote: post #24

The first point would be gamechanging. Also used to do govt work. I'm sure everyone has stories. My takeaways. 1) Understand what people need -> AND LET THEM DO IT. 2) DO NOT ADD A SINGLE NEW THING with the IT / automation. If the old system doesn't have it DO NOT ADD IT. No 20 extra fields for demographics if you didn't track that before. That can be added later IF it's a MUST. If they would take away all various fi…

> The IT folks say that passwords have to change every 90 days

This is explicitly not the NIST recommendation (the group in gov that sets some security standards), but the word is not getting out quickly.

Re: USDS Digital Services Playbook

#74

Post by jolux »

wslack wrote: post #69
jolux wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but this is not the case with state governments. My point may have been diluted by including the federal government.

True, and not something that can be changed through technology, but there are good digital services operating in quite a few states!

I'm part of one :)

Re: USDS Digital Services Playbook

#75

Post by pm »

jzwinck wrote: post #21
kqr wrote: post #6

As an outsider, I hold the USDS in great regard. Probably too much because of Marianne Belotti's writings from her time there, but also from what I would like to think are more nuanced perspectives. My country does not have anything like it, but what countries do?

Singapore: https://www.tech.gov.sg/ Australia: https://www.dta.gov.au/

An acquaintance worked as CTO of the DTA, and ultimately it was a joke. The skills were there, but the clout to bust through politics was not there, so nothing ever got done. He ended up leaving after less than a year.

Re: USDS Digital Services Playbook

#76

Post by motohagiography »

This breaks govt and public service culture, but that's the point.

Technology really drives those organizations, just very slowly, as they've finally got the hang of those whole "client/ server" concept, and the notion of providing "services" at all.

Of course the most hilarious aspects of this are when departments foist hours of farcical forms on your projects and insist they are providing you a "service," where the service is compliance with their gating demands to fill out forms. (looking at you, infosec) Many of these organizations have evolved precisely to deflect accountability, as authority without responsibility is the ultimate measure of bureaucratic success.

I am an advocate for this playbook, but change will take time, probably until we've moved on to something better...

Re: USDS Digital Services Playbook

#77

Post by llimllib »

At Ad Hoc, we have a version of this that expands on the USDS one with our own experiences and opinions: https://www.adhocteam.us/playbook/

If you want to make change in the government, and don't want to become a federal employee, being a contractor is an alternative that you might consider: https://www.adhocteam.us/join/

It can be frustrating work, but it can also be enormously satisfying; I've been doing it now for ~6 years. Feel free to ask me questions if you want, I'm not a recruiter, just an engineer that's been building government products for a few years and trying to improve how they get built.

Re: USDS Digital Services Playbook

#78

Post by throwafed98 »

shanear wrote: post #36
stevesycombacct wrote: post #17

I have a lot of heartburn reading something like this. I spent a decade in government consulting trying to implement anything resembling "data science" or "DevOps" and got repeatedly shut down by higher ups or by random bureaucrats that saw any modern practices, including any technology, as a threat. Excel macros working one day, then prohibited the next by new IT policies. Directors demanding that service line bosse…

These plays can work. Why? Because USDS employees are government employees with escalation paths all the way up to the very top which gives them a lot of power to break down bureaucratic barriers to modern software development that government contractors & consultants would have no chance of doing. They then can bring in contractors to work in the relatively modern shell that they've created. For example, here's a pr…

Contractors can also be part of the problem. Very few contracting firms with access to blanket purchase agreements are willing to dump proprietary tech—as it’s their cashcow. For example, Oracle is huge in the federal gov, and Oracle DBAs are billed at a premium over a dev who can just make Postgres work. Worse, Oracle isn’t the problem rather the problem is some legacy tech or middleware no one has ever heard of that is incredibly fragile and has been hacked into a partially working solution by a vendor over a five year period and management isn’t willing to expend the financial, social, nor political capital to correct and forget about management acknowledging sunk costs.

IMO, USDS makes this worse as someone like Matt Cutts has the cachet to bring in the playbook and get execs to listen. Whereas, I’ve been doing this for 3 years and routinely have to fend off coup attempts as the term “mvp” sounds like a joke to other career employees. As such, it’s often easier to check the box of the federal acquisition requirements and collect a paycheck versus hustling to build a vanilla web app using JavaScript a rest api and Postgres before the checkbox folks shut you down because the baselined version of Jenkins is 5 years old and you installed version 2.26x without a request for change.

So how do we scale this story? Inform politicals and bureaucrats that incentives matter, successful tech start-ups are exception not the rule, sunk costs are real, and you don’t need a catchy name like 18f nor the catchet of celeb dev to right a failing project.

Re: USDS Digital Services Playbook

#79

Post by _spoonman »

stevesycombacct wrote: post #17

I have a lot of heartburn reading something like this. I spent a decade in government consulting trying to implement anything resembling "data science" or "DevOps" and got repeatedly shut down by higher ups or by random bureaucrats that saw any modern practices, including any technology, as a threat. Excel macros working one day, then prohibited the next by new IT policies. Directors demanding that service line bosse…

I also work in government consulting. The govt thinks “DevOps” is developers and ops folks sitting in the same room.
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