- Geeks are the doers, the creators, the ones often relegated to the basement, desk stereotypically strewn with Doritos crumbs and Mountain Dew cans. To them, the status quo is nails screeching down the world’s largest chalkboard. They may be coders, designers, or UX experts, but at their core, they’re hackers. They’re excited about the next big thing, and have the means to make it happen, at least technically.
- Suits are the sayers, the thought leaders, the ones in the corner office, desk stereotypically strewn with business cards and printed Power Point decks. To them, the future is an opportunity to improve on key performance metrics. They may be CxOs, program managers, or policymakers, but at their core, they’re not technical (at least not any more). They’re excited about the next big thing, and may have the means to make it happen, at least in terms of capital, both political and financial.
The odd thing is that, despite being in an industry predicated almost exclusively on the need to communicate, geeks and suits rarely talk to each other.
Government IT: The difference between 18F and USDS
18F’s secret sauce is that it is insistently dogmatic about collaborating in the open, and after expending a great deal of organizational energy painting a picture of a citizen-centric future and doing their best to inspire agency stakeholders that the way 18F approaches technology is vastly superior to the status quo, they will simply refuse to work with an agency unless the agency agrees to adopt 18F’s culture and workflow, at least for the project at hand.
For 18F, the goal isn’t simply to deliver the piece of software that they were asked to create, but to leave the partner agency with a better sense of and appreciation for what modern software development looks like outside the Beltway.
.. Whereas a win for 18F might be for a partner agency to grace the front cover of the Washington Post, for USDS, the goal is the exact opposite: to prevent a short list of technology-backed policy initiatives from making the news, at least not from a technology standpoint.
The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America
But in failing to finish it, they pushed the government to better understand technology. During this time, they began to seek permission from their own federal sub-agency to use a technology that will seem basic to programmers but which Healthcare.gov had not previously used in any way: Amazon Web Services.
.. So during those early months, working side by side with the tech surge, MPL began to improvise. They figured out that they could use Akamai, a cloud provider that already had the government’s blessing, to launch static websites that handled complex functions in the user’s browser, rather than on an exterior server.
.. Around the middle of 2014, the MPL team got key federal government contacts—including the testing team—to use Hipchat, a group chatroom similar to Slack.
Switching to a chat client represented a huge improvement over “these huge email chains, with all these attachments,” Yu said. It also allowed small offices within CMS, such as the Healthcare.gov testing team, to quickly shoot questions and clarifications to the MPL team.
.. In interviews, many of them repeated the same idea: that leading by example, technologically, made people more likely to try new methods than simply saying, “hey, we should all do this.”
.. The government’s method of running software turned on a sequential design strategy known as “the waterfall”: a central calendar, the Gantt chart to end all Gantt charts, that promulgated when every task would finish. The government tried running software development as a bureaucratic process, with project managers managing project managers, and the whole thing broke.
.. The team instead worked in an “agile” way, which favors small, cross-disciplinary teams that stay in close communication with each other while quickly finishing iterative improvements to a product (often software).
The government was eager to embrace agile methods, but it didn’t always understand them.
.. “And I’m like, how is that agile? That’s a three-month plan—down to like, a plan every day of those three months. ‘What if you learn something on like the third week that changes the rest of the plan?,’” Yu remembers asking. “And they were like, oh, well it’s the rest of the plan, so it can’t change.”
.. “There’s whole tiers of organizations especially in these large contracting organizations that do nothing but manage the schedule, so if the schedule is slipping, that’s their highest alarm bell going off,” Bhobe says.
.. Where the previous version required a user to flip through some 76 pages, App 2.0 uses, at most, 16.
.. “The thing about needs is, you don’t mix the solution with the need, so you actually say, this is a need we need to solve. And you use the creativity and the energy of the team to figure out what the best way to address that might be,” he told me.
.. It also indexed family members by presuming everyone would have a unique birthday—meaning twins couldn’t both have accounts.
..But the MPL team’s experience hints that contractors, or at least their government supervisors, were less actually using agile methods than aping its lingo. Team members found the government averse to the agile process because, to quote Yu, they asked, “what if there’s bugs?”
Joel: My First Bill Gates Review
“Bill doesn’t really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you’ve got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don’t know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it’s never happened before.”
.. Is Ballmer going to be another John Sculley, who nearly drove Apple into extinction because the board of directors thought that selling Pepsi was good preparation for running a computer company? The cult of the MBA likes to believe that you can run organizations that do things that you don’t understand.