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two chairs overlook a quiet lake encouraging government program managers to take a strategy offsite.

Rethinking the Strategic Offsite: A Summer Vacation for Your Office

With June quickly approaching, offices are abuzz with employees scheduling and coordinating summer vacation time. Vacations are important because they give us the down-time we need as humans to rest, relax, and clear our minds. They also give us a change in scenery, which inspires us and helps us self-reflect and see things with a fresh set of eyes.

But individuals aren’t the only ones who can reap the benefits of down-time and a change of scenery: government program teams can, too. But how? A field trip? An office potluck? Trust falls and a ropes course?

Nope. Our suggestion is to hold a summertime strategic offsite meeting.

Strategic offsite meetings are helpful to government organizations because they allow leaders to have an uninterrupted block of time to reconnect to the mission and purpose of their agency while actively exploring solutions to a set of goals or problems. While strategic offsite meetings have the reputation of being expensive, lengthy, complicated to organize, and only for senior leadership, they don’t have to be any of these things. A strategic offsite can simply be a chance for employees to step back from their daily jobs—physically and professionally—to see their work unit as part of the complex government ecosystem. In vacation terms, the dedicated down-time gives employees a break from putting out the fires of the day, and the change of pace gives them perspective and frees up their imaginations.

In re-envisioning a strategic offsite to bring the benefits of a vacation to your program team, I’m not suggesting that the offsite will be unproductive. Quite the opposite, but it does require careful design in order to be both productive and energizing. What makes the most sense in an abbreviated, casual offsite is to select a single goal, problem, or theme. By scoping the meeting around an issue that really impacts the team, you can focus their energy and provide boundaries that you want to innovate within.

Regardless of the form that makes most sense for your project team or what the area of focus is, here are some tips to aid government managers in designing a summer vacation strategic offsite meeting.

Check Assumptions

Your team is likely already periodically gauging their performance towards the agency’s strategic goals. One thing you could decide to focus on at the offsite is revisiting any starting assumptions about those goals and assess how changes in the environment over the past 12 months may impact the mission in the future.

Reconnect With Your Customers

Most strategic offsites are inwardly focused, meaning they look at program operations instead of program outcomes. To shift this mindset, as part of your offsite, you could invite government customer groups (government-to-citizens, government-to-government, or shared services) to participate by delivering an opening keynote, exploring their use of your products and services, or role-playing a new service design prototype.

Take Some Risks

Strategic offsites should be a safe place to take risks, explore options, and share new ideas in the spirit of expanding the team’s horizons. Consider trying a Collaborative Game, World Cafe, or a Design Sprint to explore new ideas in an environment with a low risk of failure. Even better, embrace the failure for its learning potential like we recently did at Technical Assent’s first Failure Fair.

Actually Go Off Site

An offsite held in Conference Room B following the Monday budget meeting won’t have as big of an impact as getting outside of the building. Seek out public outdoor spaces, reservable locations at interesting sites (like a library or a museum), or even locations frequented by your agency’s customers. Space plays an important role in triggering your team to think outside of their daily routine and look for other patterns.

Wear Your Big Hat

Opportunities to come together as a team and think big picture are increasingly rare. Make the best use of this time by setting an early ground rule that encourages everyone to think with their Big Hat (thinking in terms of the agency mission and the customer impact of that mission versus the what’s best for my team mindset that is associated with Little Hat thinking). For example, this is not a time to debate which projects should suffer the biggest percentage of budget cuts, but to validate that these projects are delivering the right benefits to the right customers.

Have Some Fun

It is easy to get caught up in the seriousness of government work, but it is still a human-driven system. People benefit from the opportunity to build community, network, connect. One of the best outcomes of an event like this is enabling colleagues to find common ground outside of work, which translates to better working relationships. Some ways to add fun into an offsite meeting include casual dress or connecting the offiste to an after-work activity that everyone can participate in, such as a paint-and-wine activity, group bike ride, tour, or family barbeque. You can also intermix group activities such as games, scavenger hunts, or contests. These can be designed to directly contribute to the focus of the offsite, or be unrelated. Warren Buffet, for example, has a contest at his annual shareholder meetings where contestants throw a rolled up newspaper from 35 feet to see who can get it closest to the door.

What are the challenges you’ve observed with government offsites? Tell us more about it in the comments below.

customer experience has a cascading impact like a water droplet in a pond

Part II – How our simple meeting hack succeeded in refreshing executive leaders’ focus on customers

When we left this story a few weeks ago, our protagonist, the senior IT manager, and her team were reviewing a portfolio of IT projects.  Their objective was to recommend, in light of mandatory budget cuts, which projects should be funded and which should be deferred.  She had recognized that the conversation about these projects was overly focused on the impact to the IT organization and the impact to the customer was not being considered. The solution we helped her form was quite simple: hack the existing portfolio dashboard to explicitly identify the customer and describe the mission impact to that customer.

In the time between status meetings, the IT manager spoke to or visited all of the impacted customers. During these meetings, she listened to the mission and business requirements and did not focus on any specific piece of broken equipment.  As anticipated, the results surprised her – some customers’ issues truly impacted their ability to carry out their objective.  Others were similarly impacted, but had identified redundant capability or alternatives that provided a temporary solution. Based on the customer outreach effort, this collective insight could now be factored into the IT portfolio decision.

A week later, the IT manager held her weekly status meeting with the executive leaders of the IT organization, this time using the improved dashboard prototype and sharing the customer insights.  First, the IT manager described the recommended changes to the dashboard and her logic for restructuring it. Before she even dove into the projects themselves, the switch to customer focus had turned to “on” for the most senior executive in the room. By seeing the impact described in the language of his customers, he was immediately reminded of why these decisions mattered.

“the executive officers from each of our customers are going to come over here and hug you for this”

Keep in mind, this team generally considers themselves to be customer-oriented. However, like many of us when we are faced with a challenge, their natural inclination was to create fixes rather than step back and re-frame the challenge around their customers’ needs. This had been the phantom-like problem plaguing the IT manager and her team in their initial round of meetings.

Implied in the executive’s response is that the dashboard itself is now something he would proudly share with his customers. This immediate reaction towards transparency was not something we had anticipated in this experiment, but it is a great outcome. It promotes an honest relationship with their customers and enables the IT manager’s team to further clarify and validate these impact statements with the customers. Furthermore, sharing the dashboard sends a strong message to the customer that their mission support team understands their challenges, understands their equities, and has to make some tough decisions for the good of the service.

The resolution to this situation has been generally positive; in light of some tough mission decisions, the IT manager and her team was able to position the issues transparently and make recommendations that have a measurable impact to the mission outcomes that her customers care about.  It is important to remember that the original context of these conversations were about making difficult recommendations to the CIO about which projects to fund and which to defer.

Putting the decisions in customer terms can make the actual decision-making much harder, but weighing the mission impact to the customer as a key driver of the decision enables leaders to enter into the decision with their eyes open to the consequence of their decisions.

In the end, our simple change in this situation has sparked a change in the right direction allowing this service-oriented team to integrate customer impact and customer insight into decision-making. It also set the initial groundwork for more open and transparent conversations in the future.

customer experience has a cascading impact like a water droplet in a pond

This Simple Meeting Hack Helps a Problem-Solving Team Refocus on Their Customers

The big impact of a small change

At Technical Assent, we constantly emphasize the model of a service-oriented organization. One of the big reasons we focus on being “service oriented” is because these organizations are better attuned to the needs of their customers and aware of the value they deliver each day. With all of the pressures of running a program day-to-day, we tend to get lost trying to put out the daily fires and often lose sight of our work in the context of what’s in the best interest of our customers. This paradox is amplified when an urgent technical problem emerges and the responsible support team must quickly shift gears to address it. Fortunately, we have a simple hack that can really help the leadership team redirect meeting conversations and get the support team rightly focused on the customer.

Yesterday was a perfect example of this. I had the opportunity to talk to a senior IT manager who is part of a leadership team working through some tough issues in their project portfolio. As a result of funding cuts over the last few years, they have regularly reduced the level of service they provide as available funds have been redistributed to higher priority projects. Facing another round of cuts, her team is evaluating a portfolio of projects and making recommendations to several internal service providers and, ultimately, the chief information officer (CIO), about what should be funded and what will have to be deferred. To facilitate the conversation, the IT manager’s team developed a basic dashboard that outlines each project individually and provides leadership with a status and an impact. Very simply, the dashboard looks something like this.

We have all seen something like this projected on a conference room screen, right?  It looks innocuous enough – a simple project description, followed by a red, yellow, green status indicator, and finally, the What’s In It for Me (WIIFM) impact statement.

When the IT manager presented this at the weekly status meeting, she found that the dashboard was driving the wrong conversation among the leadership team. Based on the information provided, the leaders in the room dove right into the merits of different trade-offs in schedule and discussion about which upgrades provided the fastest technology. The IT manager left the meeting frustrated because the focus seemed to be misplaced. Everything was weighed against the impact to the IT organization instead of against the impact on the IT organization’s real customers, who are the crewmembers operating ships performing public safety missions along the Pacific coast. As she explained…

“For example, the impact of the XYZ server not being implemented is not just an increased implementation timeline. It actually has an operational impact to a number of ships who are operating in our area of responsibility right now. Without these upgrades they are not able to check the weather, receive intelligence briefs, or communicate with other partners.”

Could you hack the meeting?

Faced with this scenario, how does one IT manager use her influence to change the tone of the conversation and focus on the service impact to the end customer?

I see this kind of dilemma often with our clients at Technical Assent, so I suggested a simple experiment. The first step was to hack the existing dashboard to be more explicit about who the customer is and how they are impacted by each project. Our minimally viable product (MVP) of the new dashboard looks something like this.

The changes to the spreadsheet are simple; our hypothesis is that by presenting new information to the executive leaders – Customer and Impact to the Customer – the tone of the conversation will change. At first, when presenting information in a new way, we expect there to be some disagreement among the executive leaders about who the real customer is and the source of the mission impact data. Then, we predict that as the executive leaders begin wrestling with the real issues at hand, they will start asking for data that further validates the customer impact. This will force the IT manager and her team to dig deeper – to communicate directly with their customers, to validate the mission impact to the organization, and to recommend alternatives.

We predict that after the first conversation with executive leaders, the shift in focus will take root and will drive the next status meeting. The IT manager’s team will then be focused on describing the outcome that their customers need, and not on a specific technology solution. The more service-oriented team will continue to integrate the customer impact into each of the executive leadership conversations, facilitate decisions about providing a certain level of capability based on the impact to customers, and defend their positions using customer narratives and stories.

But the proof is in the pudding, right?  We will test our hypothesis over the next few meetings with executive leaders, track the discussion, note what questions are asked, and observe how responses are framed in order to see if our simple change is indeed causing a trend in the right direction.

Of course, this is just one way for teams to change the tone of meetings to have a focus on becoming more customer-driven. What are some other recommended starting points that you have seen and have worked well in your organization?

eli whitney innovation in muskets

What Eli Whitney’s 1798 Gun-Making Contract Can Teach Us About 21st Century Defense Innovation

In 1798, faced with potential war against France, President John Adams directed a threefold increase in the number of ready army soldiers.  At the time, gun-making was a complex craft; skilled gunsmiths worked by hand to create each distinctive weapon.  The young government didn’t have the capability to manufacture the weapons it needed, so Adams turned to private industry for support.

Eli Whitney, the famed inventor of the cotton gin, won one of the 28-month contracts to produce 10,000 “stands of weapons,” enough to outfit 80% of the army with new muskets. As the story goes, after two years of contract performance, Whitney had produced exactly zero guns. Instead, he had focused his attention on building a better system for building muskets. He built the factory and the machinery, trained a labor force for how to use it, and developed repeatable assembly process.  The result was the first weapons system where one musket behaved similarly to another and used interchangeable parts.

Outputs Vs. Outcomes in Defense Innovation

While there are certainly some starting points here for a conversation about acquisition reform, I’m focusing on a different, larger issue: how a narrow focus on outputs can distract us from pursuing the right outcomes.  Our military faces similar challenges today as they did in 1798, sharing  a need to rapidly scale its capability and evolve to multi-dimensional threat. Back then, they did it with more soldiers and more muskets; today we do it with much more sophisticated, integrated weapon systems.

We’re living in a new era for innovation in the Defense industry.  Defense Secretary Ash Carter is shaping and expanding an innovation unit in Silicon Valley (DIUx)—and the Department of Homeland Security is following suit.  Professors at Stanford University have students and soldiers collaborating to identify “hacks” for the way DoD does business. Groups like the Defense Entrepreneurs Forum (DEF) are facilitating discussions about major issues the Third Offset, Force of the Future, and Goldwater-Nichols Act Reform.  Earlier this month, the Senate Armed Services Committee released its draft of the 2017 Defense Authorization that splits the Pentagon’s largest office in an effort to improve management of research and development  efforts.

These examples suggest a consensus that fostering innovation in our defense machine is imperative to retaining our “edge” over competitors and obstacles—whether we are providing disaster relief and humanitarian support, or fighting large ground wars.  What government and defense leaders  don’t seem to agree on is where to start. What we really need is a system where we are continually getting better at getting better, where real change can happen faster than in 15-20 year increments.

Disrupting the Dominant Cycle of Thinking

Whitney’s brilliance is that he disrupted the dominant cycle of thinking at the time.  Instead of cranking out thousands of hand-crafted rifles, bayonets, and ramrods, he focused on building a system where new technology could be produced faster.  However, our current collective efforts to increase our technological advantages (e.g., Third Offset) seem more focused on buying better muskets—drone muskets, cyber muskets, nano-muskets, human-musket collaboration, inter-continental ballistic muskets—than building a system of innovation.  That needs to change.

Here’s a DoD-specific analogy for what that actually means.  Consider Innovation as an organizational capability gap.  DoD evaluates these gaps across Doctrine, Organization, Training, Muskets (i.e., Materiel such as equipment, tools, systems), Leadership, Policy, Facilities, and Policy (DOTMLPF-P).  Rather than looking first to innovative Materiel (“better muskets”) as we usually do, let’s first actually sit down and think hard about how we can innovate the way the department trains and equips our personnel to solve the problem in the context of the environment in which they must solve it.

Evolving Faster and More Effectively than the Competition

The ultimate strategy to counter competitors’ advantages (real or perceived) is a sustained, organic ability to improve and evolve yourself faster and more effectively than your competitors—rather than building a new portfolio of technologies.  If our objective is to create a system to get better at being better, there are two logical places to start:

Make the “Ability to Adapt” a factor for readiness.

Being ready to meet the demands of a mission is not simply a matter of assessing whether or not you have the right “kit” for the operation.  There is too much variation in the types of environments, the types of missions, and the circumstances surrounding those factors for you to assess readiness on equipment alone.  You have to assess whether or not the people and processes who will use the kit have the ability to adapt what they have (and don’t have) to fit the needs of the operation.

We need personnel who are ready to integrate themselves and their kit into the operation and be successful.  We need processes that allow them to do that—both in the field and in the headquarters functions that support them.  One way to do this might be to re-purpose some of the procurement budget for exercises. Don’t just assess readiness, test it.  Make these exercises faster to plan, less cumbersome to host and participate in, and cover more mission scenarios.  The more frequently we test ourselves, the better we understand our abilities, our needs, and the more we are inspired to innovate with real purpose.

Make non-materiel adaptability and innovation a tenet of the highest level guidance and plans.  

Strategic planning, policy, and doctrine provide a foundation on which much of the DoD’s ’s operations rest.  Like the mindset of our innovation efforts to date, these high level guidance and plans can also become too focused on “muskets.”  This is problematic because these high-level documents take years to formally update.  What’s published is often “behind the times”—describing situations and solutions that occurred in the past rather than enabling future success in what may be a completely new environment.  Fixing the strategic foundation that guides the way we “do” defense requires: 1) moving guidance, policy, and doctrine away from 3-5-year update cycles; and, 2) maintaining focus on enabling adaptability and innovation rather than focus on musket-based (“Materiel”) solutions.

 

John DiLuna and Danielle Wiederoder wrote this with me.

Disney is a leader of customer experience

Crowds vs. Price: Lean Economics for Disney Tickets

Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal published an article about The Walt Disney Company considering a change to demand-based ticket pricing for Disneyland and Disney World. Rather than eventually out-pricing middle class families by continuing to raise overall prices, this change could help alleviate the resorts’ unmagical overcrowding through lower priced tickets during off-peak days.

According to author Ben Fritz, Disney will be surveying previous visitors this week to gauge their reactions to different variable-pricing options.  Though I have not visited either resort in the past few years and will not be among the surveyed, I find the situation intriguing.

Chris Bobbitt, Technical Assent Vice President, commented that this is a good example of Lean management and economics working in tandem.  Disney is an organization that understands its capacity to deliver the experience that it wants, what it costs to do that, what the limits are, and trying to manage demand around that capacity.

Beyond the basic survey questions, I would be curious to know how the behavior of visitors changes on the slow days, or how people might use the park differently, such as use of restaurants and rides.  Further, it would be interesting to see the profiles of the types of people who would take advantage of demand-based pricing.  Are they people who live within driving distance of the resort?  People who don’t have school-aged children?  People who pull kids out of school for an annual trip to California or Florida?

There have been several high-profile cases in the news lately of backlash against service businesses that have use demand-based pricing (e.g., Uber) and one important consideration is those who have access to the service on a pricing model other than pure supply-demand pricing (e.g., senior tickets at the movies, educator discounts).

From a personal perspective as one of the many who does not live within day-trip distance of one of the resorts, going to Disneyland or Disney World involves the choice of dealing with the infuriating crowds during times when my children are not in school or pulling my children out of school during non-peak times.  A more affordable ticket is certainly more incentive to make the latter decision and in consideration of this, I think it would be fantastic if this child-oriented company would provide a special service on non-peak days such as education events, science experiments at the parks, or homework hour with Mickey.

Photo of the Department of Veterans Affairs building in Washington D.C. MyVA is a customer-experience focused government service strategy.

Is MyVA the Future of Government Service Strategy?

Since its release this week, I have been absorbing and digesting the MyVA Integrated Plan published by the Department of Veterans Affairs. For those who haven’t seen it yet, it is the government service strategy for the transformation of VA to become more veteran-driven and ensure the veteran experience is predictable, consistent, and easy.

The MyVA Task Force has accomplished a lot since it was chartered just last year and the document does a nice job of bringing together all of the moving parts in an organization as big as VA. Here are a few highlights that stood out to me as evidence of progress:

VA took a look in the mirror

Using Secretary McDonald’s model for a high performing organization, the MyVA Task Force assessed the current state of the organization – successful outcomes and blemishes included. They looked at the operations, budget, and political environment in the context of their strategy to really understand the constraints they need work within going forward. This upfront transparency will go along way in communicating honestly with VA stakeholders.

VA is translating their government service strategy vision into action

The Plan translates VA’s customer-centric vision into action through five priorities,  Veteran Experience, Employee Experience, Support Service Excellence, Performance Improvement, and Strategic Partnerships. Each priority is supported by several initiatives focused on improving specific aspects of VA – this provides a clear thread between their vision and the actions being taken.

VA is holding themselves accountable

In the Plan, they highlight specific, measurable target outcomes. They talk explicitly about what changes to look for – a single customer-facing website, expanded training and leadership development for employees, and vastly improved internal support services – as evidence of change.

There is one statement, however, that rubbed me the wrong way. It comes in the final paragraph:

“If we do our jobs well, Veterans won’t think much about what we’ve done or how we’ve done it. They will just know they’re receiving some of the best health care anywhere in the world. They’ll know it didn’t take too long to apply for and receive their deserved benefits. They’ll enjoy the home we helped them to finance. Their lives will be richer because of educational opportunities and community connections VA helped to create. And their families will know they’ve been given the utmost respect and final honors when laid to rest.”

VA is selling themselves short, especially with the first sentence. Perhaps as they begin achieving success, the MyVA team will readjust their aim with their government service strategy so that Veterans will ultimately look to VA as the preferred service provider for healthcare, benefits, and memorial services. They will see the service quality they receive as honoring their decision to serve in the armed forces. And they will see all 300,000+ VA employees as advocates in their corner as they transition into civilian life.

Decades from now, I hope we look back and see this initial effort at VA as transformational for government writ
large. As VA learns, adapts, and succeeds, it will become the framework for how we design, implement, and manage government services in the future. Government agencies will look to customer experience as a way to ground their organizational strategies, engage their employees, and better accomplish their mission.

customer experience in government

For the People…Government as a Service Business (Part 2 of 2)

This is the second of a 2-part article.  You may want to start with Part 1 located here

Government is a Service Business

Service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating the outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific cost and risks. When we purchase something “as a service,” we want to directly experience the outcome or benefit without having to worry about the know-how, systems, and processes it takes to deliver it.

To say that government is a services provider is to say that government delivers value to the governed (that is you and me) by facilitating outcomes the governed want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks of undertaking to achieve these outcomes individually or even in small groups. Take National Defense as an example of a government-provided service. Most people will agree that a nation has a much better chance of withstanding a foreign aggressor if it maintains an army than if the people were to rely on the tenacity of individuals or the valiant efforts of small militias. Other examples include the construction of roads and canals, the conduct of diplomacy and foreign affairs, and general enforcement of the laws of the land.

The 5 Government Services

In fact, everything government does can be categorized as one of five types of services.

  • National Services are government services to the nation as a whole, without intent to benefit one group, region, or industry more than another, including regulation that affects more than one industry. National services are the purest sense of government services and we associate them with the missions of the Department of Defense, the Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
  • Citizen Services are provided directly to members of the public or individuals. Examples include Veterans Benefits, Social Security, Federal Student Aid, Pensions, and the DMV.
  • Industry Services are provided for the benefit of specific industries either as a whole or to firms directly, including industry-specific regulation. Examples include the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and much of the Department of Agriculture.
  • Regional Services are provided to or for the benefit of discrete geographic areas. This includes parts or all of multiple States. Examples are the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Appalachian Regional Commission.
  • Intra-governmental Services are provided to other parts of the government. The work of the General Services Administration is the quintessential example of this type of service. Internal or Shared service providers with departments and agencies such as human resources, acquisition or procurement, information technology, and finance are also forms of intra-governmental services.

Call to Action

Service is about delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes. Customers are the recipient of the value delivered by the service — usually, but not necessarily, the ones who pay for a service. A family goes out to dinner, they are the restaurant’s customers; you buy a new pair of shoes at the mall, you are the shoe store’s customer; a homeless woman receives shelter and meals from a donor-funded organization, the woman — as opposed to the donors — is the organization’s customer.

While these examples are seemingly straightforward, this concept can get lost in the day-to-day operations of a service organization. Customers are a discrete subset of their stakeholders, but at times these other stakeholders have more direct influence, control, or presence which can sometimes distract us from the needs of the consumers. For this reason, it is critical to build a customer-driven mindset into the culture of the organization and integrate it systemically into the core operations of the service. In addition to being good for customers, it also renews the sense of purpose that likely called employees to public service in the first place. Service business philosophy permeates all aspects of program management.

In our practice, we identified nearly a dozen key aspects of a government services where a customer-focused shift can significantly improve overall program performance. This means that solutions to improve your organization’s customer experience will also have a direct impact on your mission’s bottom line — lower costs, more efficient processes, higher employee productivity. Look closely and you will find there is a role for your customers in nearly every aspect of your business.

Not understanding that the mission is always to do something for someone also has consequences. Opportunities to grow on what government does well or eliminate waste are not detected early enough. Not understanding that every mission has a customer means that public service will only sometimes include customer service and public satisfaction as legitimate metrics. Not thinking of itself as a service business means that improvements in government performance will be isolated and driven by a random cadre of passionate leaders constantly challenged by the long-term average of “good enough for government work.”

It Is Time to Change the Tone of Government Services

Government is fundamentally a service business, at least for nations in which government is founded on the consent of the governed. All who touch government would be decidedly better off if they conceived of government as a service business and operated as such. This extensive ecosystem includes government executives and employees, legislators, judges, suppliers, service providers, consultants, lobbyists, and every citizen.

Once we acknowledge that government is fundamentally the provision of services we will be better able to assess government value and performance. The debates over what missions the government should and shouldn’t undertake will continue as long as the Republic stands, but each time a new service is provisioned or a program funded, it should start out with a clear understanding of who the customers’ are they are expected to serve, what risks are the customers’ trying to avoid, and what outcomes those customers are expecting.

customer experience in government

For the People – Government as a Service Business (Part 1 of 2)

Can you recall your last great service experience? Maybe it was at a restaurant, a hotel, coffee shop, or a dry cleaner. Perhaps the clerk remembered your name or your preference. Or the service was particularly easy to use, available on your schedule at the push of a button. Or instead of being way over the top, maybe it just served its purpose simply without being overly complicated. In any case, the chances are your experience didn’t happen by accident. Rest assured that the service provider knows you have other alternatives and, in order to stay relevant, put considerable energy into understanding their customers’ needs and crafting their services to meet them. Furthermore, they are continually monitoring the customer experience and looking for ways to improve, lest be judged irrelevant and cast to the wayside. As customers, it may be transparent to us during the transaction but the service providers behind really great service experiences are working hard behind the scenes to bring it all together.

We believe that a similar model should apply to government services. Government is a service provider (we believe it is the world’s largest). Government has customers. These customers have a choice whether or not to transact with the government or seek out an alternative solution elsewhere. Customers may not exchange money at each transaction, but we do pay for government services. And yet, when people recall their best service experiences, examples in government hardly ever make the top of the list.

Service is a founding principle

The nature of government as a service business has its roots in the social contract that binds the governed and the governing and legitimizes government. While retracing the origins of the modern state beginning from the Magna Carta would be tedious, it is interesting to note that these concepts are hardwired into our democracy. We can look at the three men who together are the philosophical architects of modern Western government — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. They provide the notion of a social contract between the governed and their government.

  1. In Hobbes’s Leviathan, society occurs when fundamentally selfish individuals come together and cede some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs (elevating themselves from the nasty, brutish state of nature by, for example, John giving up his right to kill Chris if Chris does the same for John). A social contract exists when all individuals in a population beneath a sovereign authority cede some of their natural rights for the sake of protection.
  2. Locke’s conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes’s in a number of ways, importantly that it featured a separation of sovereign powers and the consent of the governed is a constant essential for legitimacy (Hobbes allowed for the occasional abuse of power by the sovereign). In the Second Treatise of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, the social contract exists to provide civil society — a “neutral judge” that could therefore protect the lives, liberty, and property of those who lived within it. Locke’s social contract was particularly influential for the framers of the American Constitution.
  3. To Rousseau, the social contract derived its legitimacy from popular sovereignty, the direct rule by the people as a whole in law-making. In Rousseau’s The Social Contract, the law, inasmuch as it is voted by the people’s representatives, is not a limitation of individual freedom, but rather its expression; and enforcement of law, including criminal law, is not a restriction on individual liberty, as the individual, as a citizen, explicitly agreed to be constrained if, as a private individual, he did not respect his own will as formulated in the general will.

When we bring these schools of thought together, government is formed when citizens collectively agree to cede individual sovereignty to an individual or group (the sovereign) in exchange for the provision of a defined portfolio of services. In the United States, this portfolio of services is summarized in the Preamble to the Constitution as, “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

While it may seem a little wonky at first, there are some grounding principles here that should matter when we conceive of the services that government provides. Ok, so what? Part 2 of this article describes how a shift in thinking towards a customer-driven strategy could improve the performance of government services.

This is part 1 of a 2-part article.  If you enjoyed it, jump to Part 2 here.

transformation of government services

Services at the Tip of the Spear

We got through “WHY”, now let’s talk “WHAT”

In our last post, we argued that the government is foremost a service organization. While the statement itself may not seem particularly revolutionary, accepting government as services has some important implications.

If you accept government as a service provider then you also accept that governments have customers and those customers have expectations. This implies that customers make a choice whether or not to engage with the services provided by government. As a program manager and leader, it is important to understand these principles whether you provide a public-facing service or an internal service within a specific Department or Agency.  In this article, we survey the aspects of a public sector organization that could benefit from a service-oriented approach.

The operational component of an organization is almost always the best candidate for a service-oriented approach; improvements in core operations are the best way to drive better mission outcomes. This is the tip of the spear, if you will, for organizations and should have the most direct connection with carrying out the core mission of the agency. They benefit from having a clear service definition and direct contact with their customers.

For many (but not all) agencies, the people that support operations carry out their work in the public view – federal law enforcement officers, judges, diplomats, or job safety inspectors – can more easily name the direct beneficiaries of the services they provide. Continually operating in the public eye is not always glorious – it means that bad customer experiences are immediately scrutinized and business processes are continually measured for consistency, reliability, and fairness. For these reasons, the operations that execute the core mission of the organization present tremendous opportunity to focus on how what these services actually are and how they are designed and delivered.

As an operational program manager, you should assess how your organization is structured to deliver a positive service experience in line with your Congressional and Executive charters:

  • Charter. What is the essential mission in our charter and what outcomes (outside the program) will indicate how well we are accomplishing this mission? Everything begins here.
  • Workforce. People are the essence of every service business – they conceive and design the services for customers and they are also the primary means of delivery. Service businesses have substantially different needs from manufacturing or resource extraction businesses because your people must be equipped to interact with one of the most complex systems inexistence – another person! The talent that you are able to attract, develop, promote, and retain are the advocates of your organization’s culture. As operators, these are the truest representations of your brand to your customers and therefore, the recruiting, hiring, training, promoting, and retaining this talent must be grounded in the culture and business needs of the organization.
  • Business Processes. Service-oriented processes should be designed to produce outcomes, not outputs. An outcome has value associated with it that will benefit the end user. This requires that you have an ongoing appreciation for the customers’ needs. Understanding the journey that your customer goes through when they interface with your business processes and noting the points where they are truly delighted and the points where they get frustrated is a key first step.
  • Internal Partnerships. In our next piece, we will dive into some of the enabling activities that work in the background to keep the operations afloat. In these cases, the operator is their customer and you should have the same service expectations as your customers. In this case, manage the relationships with those service providers to ensure that your needs are sufficiently articulated and that you are providing sufficient input to their services to give them the opportunity to serve the broader mission more effectively.
  • Portfolio, Program, and Project Management. Individual successes of service-orientation should certainly be celebrated but are not necessarily the end-game. Developing a service-oriented experience for customers across all platforms where you do business authentically represents that being service-minded is permeating your culture.
  • Performance Management.  As an experienced operator, you inherently know the operational indicators that drive success on a specific mission or project.  Understanding what makes that service sustainable over the long-term and how to deliver repeatable results requires a broader focus.  Correlating measurements of customer outcomes to measurements of internal operations to measurements of workforce development is critical to effective service delivery.  This approach requires that you balance objective operational metrics equally to the softer, qualitative elements of innovation, professional development, and customer intent to transact.
  • Stakeholder Outreach and Engagement.  This is a node for listening and for projecting.  When an organization understands itself as a service business, it naturally becomes more sensitive and responsive to customer needs and input.  If your mission is too complex to easily understand, then as yourself what you are doing to demystify it for the consumption of the broader population.  This also brings clarity and focus to strategy and operations, allowing agency messages become easier to articulate and communicate.  Organizations should be able to discuss in detail what it is doing for whom and how well it is doing it.  This ultimately allows citizens and their elected representatives to make better judgments about the value delivered for specific portions of our social contract.

 

In our next piece, we will explore some of the enabling activities that work to keep operations rolling.  As always, we welcome your thoughts in the comments below or to getstarted@technicalassent.com.

transformation of government services

For the People: Government as a Service Business

Can you recall your last great service experience – when someone went out of their way to delight you?  Maybe it was at a restaurant, a hotel, coffee shop, or a dry cleaner.  Perhaps they remembered your name or your preference or the service was easy to use, available when you needed it, or served its purpose without being overly complicated.  Chances are, your experience didn’t happen by accident.  That service provider knows that you have other alternatives and, in order to stay relevant, must put considerable energy into understanding their customers’ needs.  Furthermore, they are continually monitoring the  customer experience and improving.  It may be transparent to us during the transaction but your provider is working hard behind the scenes to bring it all together.

We believe that a similar model should apply to government services.  Government has customers who have a choice whether or not to transact.  Government services that continually monitor their customers’ experience and improve it will remain relevant.  This concept extends beyond the typically considered government-to-citizen services and across the other four major services areas in the government portfolio.  Programs that are responsible for workforce management, budget planning, or IT services within an agency or as a shared service also have customers that expect to be treated with the same care and courtesy as they would receive in their private life.  Do you have a clear understanding of why your organization exists and who it serves?

Not understanding that the mission is always to do something for someone also has consequences.  Opportunities to grow on what government does well or eliminate waste are not detected early enough.  Not understanding that every mission has a customer means that public service will only sometimes include customer service and public satisfaction with government performance will remain the lowest when compared to other key service sectors.  Not thinking of itself as a service business means that improvements in government performance will be isolated and driven by a random cadre of passionate leaders constantly challenged by the long-term average of “good enough for government work.”

Service is a founding principle.  The nature of government as a service business has its roots in the social contract that binds the governed and the governing and legitimizes government.  While retracing the origins of the modern state beginning from the Magna Carta would be tedious, some historical and philosophical context is useful so let’s dive just a little deeper.  We can look at the three men who together are the philosophical architects of modern Western government — Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  They provide the notion of a social contract between the governed and their government.

  1. In Hobbes’s Leviathan, society occurs when fundamentally selfish individuals come together and cede some of their individual rights so that others would cede theirs (elevating themselves from the nasty, brutish state of nature by, for example, John giving up his right to kill Rebecca if Rebecca does the same for John).  A social contract exists when all individuals in a population beneath a sovereign authority cede some of their natural rights for the sake of protection.
  2. Locke’s conception of the social contract differed from Hobbes’s in a number of ways, importantly that it featured a separation of sovereign powers and the consent of the governed is a constant essential for legitimacy (Hobbes allowed for the occasional abuse of power by the sovereign).  In the Second Treatise of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, the social contract exists to provide civil society — a “neutral judge” that could therefore protect the lives, liberty, and property of those who lived within it.  Locke’s social contract was particularly influential for the framers of the American Constitution.
  3. To Rousseau, the social contract derived its legitimacy from popular sovereignty, the direct rule by the people as a whole in law-making.  In Rousseau’s The Social Contract, the law, inasmuch as it is voted by the people’s representatives, is not a limitation of individual freedom, but rather its expression; and enforcement of law, including criminal law, is not a restriction on individual liberty, as the individual, as a citizen, explicitly agreed to be constrained if, as a private individual, he did not respect his own will as formulated in the general will.

So when we bring these schools of thought together, government is formed when citizens collectively agree to cede individual sovereignty to an individual or group (the sovereign) in exchange for the provision of a defined portfolio of services.  In the United States, this portfolio of services is summarized in the Preamble to the Constitution as, “establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Government is a Service Business.  Service is a means of delivering value to customers by facilitating the outcomes customers want to achieve without the ownership of specific cost and risks.  When we purchase something “as a service,” we want to directly experience the outcome or benefit without having to worry about the know-how, systems, and processes and it takes to deliver it.

To say that government is a services provider is to say that government delivers value to the governed (that is you and me) by facilitating outcomes the governed want to achieve without the ownership of specific costs and risks of undertaking to achieve these outcomes individually or even in small groups.  Take National Defense as an example of a government-provided service.  Most people will agree that a nation has a much better chance of withstanding a foreign aggressor if it maintains an army than if the people were to rely on the tenacity of individuals or the valiant efforts of small militias.  Other examples include the construction of roads and canals, the conduct of diplomacy and foreign affairs, and general enforcement of the laws of the land.

In fact, everything government does can be categorized as one of five types of services.

    • National Services are government services to the nation as a whole, without intent to benefit one group, region, or industry more than another, including regulation that affects more than one industry.  National services are the purest sense of government services and we associate them with the missions of the Department of Defense, the Congress, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency.
    • Citizen Services are provided directly to members of the public or individuals.  Examples include Veterans Benefits, Social Security, Federal Student Aid, Pensions, and the DMV.
    • Industry Services are provided for the benefit of specific industries either as a whole or to firms directly, including industry-specific regulation.  Examples include the Federal Aviation Administration's air traffic control, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and much of the Department of Agriculture.
    • Regional Services are provided to or for the benefit of discrete geographic areas.  This includes parts or all of multiple States.  Examples are the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Appalachian Regional Commission.
    • Intra-governmental Services are provided to other parts of the government.  The work of the General Services Administration is the quintessential example of this type of service.  Internal service providers with departments and agencies such as human resources, acquisition or procurement, information technology, and finance are also forms of intra-governmental services.

Call to Action.  Service is about delivering value to customers by facilitating outcomes.  Customers are the recipient of the value delivered by the service — usually, but not necessarily, the ones who pay for a service.  A family goes out to dinner, the are the restaurant’s customers; you buy a new pair of shoes at the mall, you are the shoe store’s customer; a homeless woman receives shelter and meals from a donor-funded organization, the woman — as opposed to the donors — is the organization’s customer.

While seemingly straightforward, this concept can get lost in the day-to-day operations of a service organization.  Customers are a discrete subset of their stakeholders, but at times these other stakeholders have more direct influence, control, or presence which can sometimes distract us from the needs of the consumers.  For this reason, it is critical to build a customer-driven mindset into the culture of the organization and integrate it systemically into the core operations of the service.  In addition to being good for customers, it also renews the sense of purpose that likely called people to public service in the first place.  Service business philosophy permeates all aspects of program management.

In our practice, we identified nearly a dozen key aspects of a government services where a customer-focused shift can significantly improve overall program performance.  In the coming weeks, we will explore the customers’ role in business architecture, strategy & planning, and operations.  Look closely and you will find there is a role for your customers in nearly every aspect of your business.

It is time to change the tone of government services.  Government is fundamentally a service business, at least for nations in which government is founded on the consent of the governed.  All who touch government would be decidedly better off if they conceived of government as a service business and operated as such.  This extensive ecosystem includes government executives and employees, legislators, judges, suppliers, service providers, consultants, lobbyists, and every citizen.

Once we understand that government is fundamentally the provision of services, and develop a common picture as to what that means, we can view government value and performance clearly.  The debates over what missions the government should and shouldn’t undertake will continue as long as the Republic stands, but success and operational excellence for any given mission or function can add a new method in the quest for objectivity.