Product and project management

News and Events on Product and project management

456 posts

U.S. Web Design Standards Releases Version 1.0

The U.S. Web Design Standards are a library of design guidelines and code to help government developers quickly create trustworthy, accessible, and consistent digital government services. Last month, we announced the 1.0 release of the Standards, a milestone that signals the Standards are a stable, trustworthy resource for government designers and developers. By using the

Mar 13, 2017

Letting Go of 85 Percent of Our Email Subscribers

Late last year, Business.USA.gov (BUSA) began transitioning its web presence to USA.gov and with its content, came its social media and email accounts. While transferring ownership of a Twitter account is fairly easy to do from a technical standpoint, transferring email ownership and tools is not. We had to tackle

Mar 13, 2017

The Data Briefing: Finding the New Federal Government Technologists

This week, I want to briefly discuss the human resources challenges in finding the new IT technology workers for the government. As agencies move toward microservices, artificial intelligence chatbots, and deep learning application programming interfaces (APIs), the demand for experts in these fields continues to grow fast. The universities and professional development programs are not

Mar 08, 2017

DigitalGov Year in Review: Our Top Blogs, Resources, and Writers for 2016

DigitalGov had a pretty great year in 2016, and that was largely due to a bevy of talented and dedicated writers from over 50 agencies and departments across all 3 branches of the federal government (Thank you!!!). Below, we’ll review some program highlights from the last year, including our top-viewed articles and resources, and tell you how you, too, can contribute to DigitalGov in 2017.

Feb 03, 2017

The Life-Changing Magic of Writing Release Notes

A key part of agile development is constantly shipping new features. The team behind the Federal Election Commission’s (FEC) beta website ships new features at least once every two weeks. Sometimes the features are big, noticeable changes, such as the new home page we recently launched. And other times they’re small (a copy edit, an

Jan 19, 2017

Five Lessons Learned During a Content Audit

As part of USAGov’s efforts to provide our audience with the reliable and quality information that they need, this summer, the Health, Education & Benefits (HE&B) topic desk completed its first content audit. Methodology and Results Data informed every step we took. In order to determine which areas to focus on first, the desk gathered

Dec 05, 2016

In a Marketing Minute: Connecting Teams, Promotions, and Ideas

Every first week of every month, USAGov’s marketing team sends an office-wide email newsletter to give an update on past and current marketing efforts and campaigns. It’s how we try to help keep the rest of the office in the know. The monthly newsletter can spur a content idea, a future marketing endeavor, and act

Dec 05, 2016

FIPNet Digital Imaging Partner Guidance Now Available

Guidance for Contributing Digital Content to FDsys (govinfo) is now available on FDLP.gov. Federal Information Preservation Network (FIPNet) digital imaging partners now have guidance documentation for creating and contributing digitally-imaged U.S. Government content to Federal Digital System (FDsys)/govinfo*. The guidance specifications are based on current best practices from the Federal Agency Digitization Guidelines Initiative and

Dec 02, 2016

The Future of Technology at GSA

The potential to transform government and impact the lives of Americans is tremendous. Our country needs the government to work well, and technology is the key to that.

Dec 02, 2016

Lessons Learned: Evaluating Video Content

If you were to perform research on the value proposition of training videos, you would notice that opinions are split on their efficacy. Despite all the tools that are out there that can help you evaluate video quality, views, and drop-off, there are some things that should be considered in the analysis of your organization’s

Dec 01, 2016

Health IT Services SIN — Ready to Serve Agencies

This summer I announced the the release of our new Health IT Services Special Item Number (SIN 132–56) on IT Schedule 70. Now, I am happy to report that the SIN has been awarded to 65 highly qualified industry partners — with that number continuing to grow daily as new contracts are being awarded. With such a

Nov 29, 2016

Digging Deep Using the Core Model

The core model is a thinking tool that can be used to get team members from different perspectives (stakeholders, developers, editors, etc.) to start thinking collaboratively. The end goal is that the group will have a common understanding of user needs, business goals, and how different pages should be connected.

Nov 18, 2016

New Trademark App Open Source Code on GitHub

Improving the way the government delivers information technology (IT) solutions to its customers isn’t just a goal, it’s our mission. We at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office know that by publishing our open source code, the public can help us come up with new and better IT solutions. In advance of the new Federal

Nov 18, 2016

Congress.gov Homepage Highlights, Alerts, and More Enhancements

This has been an exciting and successful year for Congress.gov. We accomplished a major milestone when we retired THOMAS in July. Over the course of 2016, we completed a number of enhancements to Congress.gov. In April we expanded quick search to include the Congressional Record, Committee Reports, Nominations, Treaty Documents, and Communications. In May we launched several new RSS feeds and

Nov 16, 2016