Canadian Government Executive - Volume 21 - Issue 7

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Government needs to learn from those
who know how to make stuff happen in
this new age. Start-ups like , a
website focused on making sense of the
thousands of conferences that take place
each day around the world; and heavy-
weights like Amazon all have a common
delivery ethos. They’re agile, but not with
a capital “A.” Their teams are not wedded
to a process; instead, they have an agile
mindset. They got started, and ever since
have worked it out along the way.
That’s why start-ups often outpace long-
established, resource-rich multination-
als. And it’s how you effect change in a
bureaucracy. Digital transformation is
about doing: delivering often, iteratively,
and repetitively. Starting small, before
scaling-up.
Simon Willison of famously
said, “You can now build working soft-
ware in less time than it takes to have the
meeting to describe it.” He launched in
August 2010 just one week after writing
the first line of code.
Last month I wrote about how
designing world-class digital
services starts by putting user
needs first. It’s as true in gov-
ernment as in private enterprise. Perhaps
more so. As Jennifer Pahlka of Code for
America asserts, it’s “what government is
supposed to do.”
But in a world constrained by legacy
silos of code and culture, of habit and
practice, of lock-in to big IT and legacy
infrastructure, how do we put user-first
principles into action? How do we get
government to understand that how it
does things (the delivery) is as important
as what it does, the policy?
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos uses the “two
pizza rule” to drive a fast, agile team cul-
ture: if a team can’t be fed with two pizzas,
it’s too big. His teams push new code live
every 12 seconds and can test a new fea-
ture on 5,000 real users by turning it on for
just 45 seconds.
In the UK, the team and culture behind
is more of a large tech startup
than a ponderous bureaucracy. In its first
year, it released some 1,500 application
changes to . Unlike a typical gov-
ernment IT project, the ethos is that the
service will never be finished.
Agile is all about building a core digital
service quickly and then iterating it, con-
tinually improving it to make it better.
Starting with the smallest thing you can
build that will deliver user value — in ag-
ile parlance, a Minimum Viable Product
(MVP).
What’s so attractive about this is that it
gets a working version of a service in front
of real users very quickly. It gives you data
from testing with those users, and it low-
6 / Canadian Government Executive// September 2015
Service delivery
Think of a prison visit in the UK
Changing by Doing?
Roger
Oldham