Government Executive August 2012 : Page 31
Wanted: Innovators narrowly at the agency or innovation fellow level, he says, to ensure there’s buy-in from top executives in advance and to make sure projects don’t lose focus. Consistent with his lean startup philosophy, Park says, he also wants to build innovation in government from the ground up, making sure kinks are worked out along the way, and solutions aren’t imposed from the top down. Edward Eitches is president of the National Council of Housing and Urban Development Department locals of the National Association of Government Employees. He supports entrepreneurs in residence programs but calls them a Band-Aid on the larger problem of bureaucratic inefficiency in government and siloed spheres of authority. Eitches helped design a program called the Personnel Clearinghouse at HUD, which would allow employees to move laterally into open jobs for which they have special expertise or where there is more work than their current position offers. The idea is to facilitate something similar to Park’s lean start-up teams, making it easier for the right person to find the right work that would both energize the employee and serve the institution. The program was delayed by months of bureaucratic wrangling, he says, and ultimately was limited to HUD head-quarters in Washington and only with a manager’s OK. As of early July, only three people had switched positions through the seven-month-old program. Eitches made headlines in the govern-ment innovation community in February when he lashed out at Park’s predecessor, Aneesh Chopra, during a farewell event at the Center for American Progress. He argued Chopra’s intense focus on the developing EIR programs did little to pro-mote federal employees’ own creativity. “All these things work to inhibit cre-ativity,” Eitches says. “You have to go through layers of people to get things done, and after all that, performance evaluations generally aren’t written with rewarding innovation in mind. I haven’t seen an [evaluation] element that says you’re an innovator. Maybe there should be one.” The greatest barrier to the lean start-up model in government—and where the private sector’s aid and insight might do the most good—experts say, is govern-ment’s low tolerance for failure. Allen experienced this firsthand dur-ing her work with the aerospace contrac-tor, which she asked not to name. In the aerospace field in particular, she says, any late-stage failure can mean losing billions of dollars if not losing lives. As a result, avoiding failure is valued much more highly than risk-taking and creativity. Even when there’s less on the line, fed-eral employees have developed a strong fear of failure, Stier says, because most program breakdowns are followed by harsh criticism from Congress, the media and the public. The lesson that agencies often take from such experiences is to spend more time ensuring they’re above reproach and less on figuring out new and better ways to do their jobs, he says. Stier cites the General Ser vices Administration’s Western Regions Conference in April, a management debacle with a price tag of more than $800,000, which included $100,000 for pre-conference planning, $5,000 for pri-vate parties and a $3,200 mind reader. The agency’s response to the scandal and ensuing scrutiny was to clamp down on all conferences and training, a move Stier worries will cost the agency much more in good ideas that never find the right audience and possible project teams that never meet. In his public speeches, Park ham-mers on raising the government’s tol-erance for failure and calls “failing fast and failing smart” an important lesson EIRs can bring to government. By using the lean startup and agile development models for government projects, he says, teams can fail early in the process when the stakes are lower rather than falling down on delivery. He concedes, though, that it will take a major culture change for the idea to take hold. “If you fail after six months of strategy and a year or two of work and $100 mil-lion, that’s a really big problem,” he says. “If you fail after three days by five people, that’s much less of a problem. It might help you on the way to a solution. The ironic thing is people who do ‘waterfall’ call it risk mitigation. To me, that’s risky. Lean startup to me is the most conserva-tive solution.” Taking the Challenge You don’t have to travel to Washington to bring your expertise to government. Many agencies also are crowdsourcing their thorny problems through Challenge.gov. The winners can take home prize money and sometimes a government contract. The following projects are online now: Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology is challenging developers to mash up data from the Veterans Affairs Department’s Blue Button online health records system with other data sets to give Blue Button users confidential online access to info about the drugs they’re taking and the diseases they have. Total prize purse: $5,000 Environmental Protection Agency is looking for portable devices that can simultaneously measure the prevalence of certain air pollutants and the physiological changes they might cause. The devices also should transmit results from wearers to a central repository where researchers can crunch the data. Total prize purse: up to $160,000 Veterans Affairs is after new applications to make it easier for hospitals and other health care providers to report errors and other events that endanger patients. The challenge also is open to applications that clean up reported data to reduce double entries, and that help researchers analyze the data. Total prize purse: $70,000 NASA is after a new engine for its Lunar Roving Vehicle that can collect the sun’s energy during the moon’s daylight hours and then power the rover all through the moon’s long night, which can last about 1 4 Earth days. Total prize purse: $1.5 million Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services wants fraud-spotting apps that will verify the identity, credentials and other information about health care providers interested in participating in Medicaid. Total prize purse: $500,000 to $600,000 Labor Department is looking for new tools to boost employment of people with disabilities. Participants can offer skills training or new transportation options for disabled people, or resources that help companies recruit disabled employees. Total prize purse: $2,000 to $5,000 august 2012 | government ex ecutive 31
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