Goal 5: Build confident, empowered multi-disciplinary teams

“Leaders need a deep appreciation of technology’s role in creating effective policies, improving government services and performance.” The Partnership for Public Service

“It’s hard for me as a director when I don’t have IT project experience.” User research interview with Eraina Ortega, Director, CA Human Resources

Our public servants are smart and dedicated. They want to be able to spend their time on the advanced, difficult problems people bring to them, and for technology to remove routine items from their plate.

Agency, departmental and technology leaders candidly and vulnerably told us about wanting to avoid the failure of bold initiatives. About being scared by technical jargon, and not knowing what’s possible and where to start, but being eager and willing to learn.

All state staff shared the need for an environment that supports learning and of the need for consistent support and guidance. Empowered teams need places that are safe to learn, where they can speak up, test new ideas and have difficult conversations. This means changing our attitude to risk, because failure is necessary to learn.

We also heard loudly that progress means bringing new skills, experience and talent into government. New, critical services like COVID-19 notifications were only possible because designers, user researchers, data engineers and more were brought into our teams.

The vendor community is a critical part of forming these teams. When COVID-19 forced the state to drop the requirement for vendors to be on-site, it became easier for the state to acquire skills, significantly increased the pool of vendors to collaborate with, and allowed the state to experiment with understanding what type of skills might best be met through staff.

Departments and teams have been successful where disciplines deliberately worked together across silos and organizing around common goals, from bottom up, and from the executive level down.

In the end, our people and teams are those who do the work. Together, they will build the infrastructure we need, understand the problems that need solving, and deliver our vision of compassionate, human-centered, effective and efficient government.