At VMware Tanzu Labs (formerly Pivotal Labs), we have a culture of constant learning and process improvement. So it won’t come as a surprise that many of the people on our team recently read Jennifer Pahlka’s Recoding America: Why Government Is Failing in the Digital Age and How We Can Do Better, a book circulating widely among government technologists for its insights about public digital services.
The book does an excellent job illustrating many of the problems government entities face in the digital age—problems we see every day in our consulting work with our public sector clients. Here are a few of the most common challenges presented by Pahlka, and how we help our own clients overcome them.
Risk management
Increased oversight has become pervasive throughout government. This oversight and fear of litigation has resulted in a more risk-averse government culture. With excess oversight, government agencies have responded by layering on more bureaucratic processes in an attempt to mitigate risk. Today, tech teams across government spend more time concerning themselves with preventing litigation rather than delivering a product.
Every lawsuit over process and procedure has an undeniable impact not only on the culture of the agency it targets but on the zeitgeist of government…. Each one makes government less tolerant of risk. Each one makes the bureaucracy more technically correct but entirely less helpful…. Culture changes slowly, even in times of great upheaval. (p. 158–159)
Our Tanzu Labs teams employ the agile methodology of Lean Startup, in part as a risk management technique, for even our largest public sector clients. Rather than layering complex bureaucratic processes into software from the start, we enable our teams to test, build, and deploy the riskiest part first. This methodology allows our government clients to continuously reduce risk while building software solutions fast.
Speed of delivery
In the digital age, agencies are in the business of providing the public with digital services, but oftentimes agencies cannot provide these quickly or reliably.
Government can no longer function without technical solutions to its internal or externally facing processes. If an agency can’t deliver software as fast as policy can be written, it has failed in its most basic promise to the American people, or as Pahlka puts it: “An agency that can’t update its software quickly enough to adapt to a new policy—or at least implement some creative but reasonably consistent and effective hack in the meantime—can’t do its job.” (p. 116)
Pahlka speaks to the importance of getting software into the hands of users, not only to uphold the promise of a government for the people, but to build trust between the people and its government. “Delivery must come first. The only way to build trust with them is to earn it.” (p. 271)
The principle of speed of delivery is held closely by our team at Tanzu Labs. Our balanced teams of product managers, product designers, and software engineers work side-by-side with our client counterparts to get applications to production as quickly as possible, learning from real users and iterating on the application based on those learnings. This “Build, Measure, Learn” cycle has enabled public sector clients (such as the United States’ Army, Space Force, Air Force, and Citizenship and Immigration Services) to respond to the needs of their users, allowing agencies to respond to changing policy with software.
Product management
Despite the ubiquity of product management in technology, the role still does not formally exist in most government organizations.
Product management as an official discipline is rare in government, but it’s not just that there’s no job classification for it. In the most extreme cases, it feels like it simply cannot exist here; not only are implementers not empowered to make choices but the people above them aren’t even willing to consider the option. (p. 190–191)
Even when government tech teams are given the title “product manager,” they often struggle to do the basics of their job, e.g., deciding what to build and what not to build. It’s just as important to create an environment where teams can make decisions outside of preexisting requirements as it is to create a product management role.
Pahlka points to examples of times when true product management responsibilities were embraced by technical teams, despite lack of leadership support.
But ignoring leadership’s outbursts and staying focused on priorities can help, and that’s what both the surge team and the career civil servants wound up doing. Together, they took the initiative to make tradeoffs and set priorities based on user needs. They hadn’t started out with a product manager, but they did the best they could to make up for that. (p. 191)
While the persistence and dedication of these unofficial product managers is necessary and commendable, we have seen that it isn’t sustainable. Without an environment that supports product management, organizations are setting up their technical teams to fail.
Tanzu Labs product managers collaborate with our government counterparts not only on the mechanics of product management, but we also demonstrate the importance and value of strong product management in organizations that have minimal experience with that role. Our clients have been able to point to the success of the product managers that we have enabled across the government to justify creation of more of these product strategy roles, allowing them to scale their capacity to build technology in-house and deliver more impactful software products to support their mission.
Whether you’re a seasoned product manager or a first-timer, our Product Management Playbook can help elevate your understanding of the roles, tools, patterns, and methods that lay at the foundation of a healthy and effective product management practice.
Technical competency
A history and tradition of government outsourcing its technical projects to vendors has resulted in government becoming expert in contracting and vendors becoming expert in getting contracts, rather than the government and vendors becoming expert in delivering technical solutions. There is a shortage of technical competency within the government in part because of this contracting tradition, but also due to a lack of in-house technical expertise.
However, Pahlka suggests that government organizations can build digital capabilities through changes to their workforces: both by hiring people with expertise and by training existing employees.
Building the capability we need does take funding. But it should be spent on people before contracts, operating expenditures before capital expenditures. We need to create positions within government charged with digital strategy and product management, and we need to make sure those are filled by people with the proper expertise. I don’t necessarily mean that we need to grow the government workforce overall: training our current public servants in digital skills is as important as hiring new talent… (p. 264)
Tanzu Labs is uniquely positioned to help with this call to train public servants in digital skills; it’s what we’ve been doing for 30 years, since our beginning as Pivotal Labs. With our public sector clients, we have created microcultures across government that value investment in in-house technologists and demonstrate that those teams can be instrumental in agencies delivering on their mission.
At Tanzu Labs, we have seen these four problems in many of our public sector engagements, and they are often the reasons that clients come to us for help. We love figuring out how to solve technical and organizational challenges with our customers, helping them so they can embrace today’s digital challenges.
Resources to learn more
Solution overview: Deliver Outstanding Digital Services with VMware Tanzu Labs
White paper: A Practical Approach to Application Modernization for Government Agencies
White paper: Is Software a Thing You Buy or a Competency You Build?
Webinar: Modern Software Delivering Business Value at Startup Speed
