Product and project management

Government Product Managers Play a Key Role in UX

Government product managers sit at the intersection of three circles—business, design and technology. We play a key role in user experience (UX), because we are tasked with understanding users to build a product that is desirable and viable. This product could be a paper or online form, a website or a mobile app. Product management

Karen Trebon

Nov 27, 2015

New Playbook Details What It’s Like to Work with 18F Delivery

If you or your agency have thought about working with 18F but are unsure of how we work with our partners, we have a new set of guidelines to help you out. The 18F Delivery Partner Playbook is specifically targeted at federal offices interested in working with 18F to build digital services. The playbook is

Will Slack

Nov 20, 2015

GSA.gov Refreshed with Eye Toward Mobile Users

GSA unveiled a refreshed GSA.gov website yesterday with a more crisp design layout, improved usability, and features geared more toward mobile users. Increasingly, website traffic is coming from mobile users. With this in mind, GSA unveiled a newly refreshed GSA.gov website on Nov. 16. “Our ultimate goal for the refresh

Jeff Woodworth

Nov 17, 2015

Modernizing Federal Cybersecurity

Summary: Today, the Administration directed a series of actions to continue strengthening Federal cybersecurity & modernizing the government’s technology infrastructure. Strengthening the cybersecurity of Federal networks, systems, and data is one of the most important challenges we face as a Nation. Every day, public and private sector leaders—my team included—are directing significant resources to address

Tony Scott

Nov 02, 2015

DigitalGov Summit Recap: Innovation Through Customer Experience

A panel discussion at the 2015 DigitalGov Citizen Services Summit delved into customer experience (CX) work at three agencies with diverse missions.

Ashley Wichman

Oct 30, 2015

Empowering the Voice of Citizens at Core of GSA Open Government

We are proud to announce our commitment to the third U.S. National Action Plan for Open Government, released this week at the Open Government Partnership (OGP) Global Summit in Mexico City, Mexico,

Justin Herman

Oct 29, 2015

GSA Open Government Builds Solutions and Gives Voice to Citizens

Our work at the General Services Administration encompass many of the pillars of Open Government, from giving a greater voice to citizens to through Public Participation innovations like Challenge.gov to making the

Phaedra Chrousos

Oct 29, 2015

#NIHDigital Summit: Optimizing Digital to Reach Patients, Scientists, Clinicians and the Public

On October 19th, NIH brought together nearly 1,500 digital and health experts in person and via webcast. The event featured two keynote speakers and panels that showcased the unique perspectives of patients and caregivers, health

Alison Lemon

Oct 26, 2015

Modernizing Federal Information Policy

Today, the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is proposing for the first time in fifteen years revisions to the Federal Government’s governing document establishing policies for the management of Federal information resources: Circular A-130, Managing Information as a Strategic Resource.

Anne Rung

Tony Scott

Howard Shelanski

Oct 21, 2015

Innovation

The White House, Back To The Future Day, and the Road to Innovation

The White House is marking Back to the Future Day with a series of conversations with innovators across the country. Follow along here.

Toni Bonitto

Oct 21, 2015

National Customer Service Week Is Over, but Our Work Is Not!

Get your customer personas right, and you will improve the customer experience (CX) for the rest of your audience. That’s advice Rick Parrish from Forrester Research gave in response to an audience question during the September 29 DigitalGov University webinar on the state of CX in the federal government. Your key customers are those that are most important to the organization, and often most

Karen Trebon

Oct 20, 2015

Open Source Micro-Purchasing: An Experiment in Federal Acquisition

18F is an open-source team. We currently have hundreds of publicly available repositories, with dozens under active development. We’ve had numerous contributions from colleagues within government, and contributions from members of the public. But in the next few weeks, we are going to run an experiment: we want to contract for contributions. And we want

Dave Zvenyach

Oct 16, 2015

Bringing Water Protection into the Modern Age

Information technology is everywhere. How we communicate, and how we share with one another has gone digital, saving paper, time, money, and making it easier to get information faster and more reliably. Forty-three years ago, when the Clean Water Act was enacted, things moved a little slower. But the significance and impact of this important

Cynthia Giles

Oct 01, 2015

How OSTP Crowdsourced A Crowdsourcing Toolkit

To promote crowdsourcing, one effective tool is, well, crowdsourcing. Today, the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the Federal Community of Practice for Crowdsourcing and Citizen Science (CCS) unveiled the Citizen Science and Crowdsourcing Toolkit. The toolkit contains information, resources, and best practices federal agencies can use to harness the power

Ashley Wichman

Sep 30, 2015

Understanding Your Customer

How well do you know your customers? There’s a new guide out from the Excellence In Government (EIG) Fellows Program to help you do just that. Led by the Partnership for Public Service, EIG is a federal government initiative to train future leaders. This year, three hundred federal employees took the EIG journey to learn

Andrea D. Williamson

Sep 22, 2015

How a Two-Day Sprint Moved an Agency Twenty Years Forward

At 18F Consulting, we experiment with ways to empower agencies to build cost-efficient, excellent digital solutions. Recently we partnered with the Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division (WHD) to run a two day “Design/Dev Agile Sprint.” Background: Investigators in Wage and Hour Division The Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division is responsible for

Jesse Taggert

Sep 21, 2015

Using Customer Feedback to Improve HealthCare.gov

We recently polled the Customer Experience Community of Practice (CX-COP) to discover what kinds of training people needed most to improve customer experience at their agency.

Jacqueline Snee

Sep 17, 2015

How Will You Celebrate Customer Service Week?

In 1992, Congress passed Public Law No: 102-481, which proclaimed the first full week in October as National Customer Service Week.

Rachel Flagg

Sep 11, 2015

Announcing the Agile BPA Awards: A Conversation About the Process

In January, 18F Consulting announced a new kind of process for vendors to compete for software acquisition contracts. The Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) process would be open to existing vendors on Schedule 70, and require vendors to submit a working prototype based on a public dataset—and then show their work in a publicly available

Sep 01, 2015

HUD’s Switchboard Puts Customer Experience and Customer Service Together

Customer experience is about making sure needs are met. It’s certainly not a new concept for business; every bookstore has a customer service section. Government agencies are slightly different though. Often people are driven to public services by need or regulation, not choice. Government traditionally didn’t need to court positive attention. The increasing prominence of

Zachary Lerner

Aug 27, 2015

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