Competency 4 of 8 - Iteration
“A digital era public service leader understands the importance of iteration and rapid feedback loops, and can create a working environment that can continuously learn and improve outcomes."
Background to this competency
Bureaucracies love a detailed plan. At the heart of any important government project is the existence of a plan that 'covers every base' - that records in precise detail exactly how every part of a project will be delivered once 'implementation' begins.
This approach is critical when building things out of large amounts of concrete, steel and cement - whether roads, bridges, schools or hospitals. These projects need extremely detailed up-front planning because a small planning error in the construction of a tunnel or a canal can cost many millions - and potentially lives.
Governments have built roads and tunnels for so long that planning-centric project management approaches became orthodox for all government projects. This worked very well for a long time, facilitating some historic achievements along the way.
However, over the past two decades, digital technologies have upended the assumptions that are underpinned up-front planning. The 1990s and 2000s were riddled with public sector technology projects that failed, often in financially and politically costly ways. This was despite the fact that they were generally managed using 'state of art' planning practices that deployed hugely detailed planning documents that claimed to foresee and handle every scenario and edge case.
Even when such systems were 'completed' they often failed to deliver benefits. Projects often ended up painful to use, or were simply so complicated that nobody knew how to modify or repair them, leaving a problem of legacy IT. Politicians and managers were often left frustrated - unable to understand why their administrations failed at what appeared to be straightforward projects.
What had happened, ever so subtly, was the revenge of complexity: Government planners believed they could handle projects of any sophistication because by the end of the 20th century they had delivered on so many extraordinary achievements. However, those huge flagship projects - moon rockets, dams and tunnels under the sea - were not complex in the way that a single person's pension payment can be complex.
A digital service turns out to be fundamentally less amenable to up-front planned solutions than government mega-projects.
A new cadre of project managers - primarily in the tech sector - observed and responded to this problem. Having experienced and identified the limits to big-up-front-planning, they developed new project management techniques that work with the grain of complexity, instead of against it.
This cohort invented Agile project management (and numerous close siblings), which despite their differences all share one thing. Instead of trying to plan all the details of a project up front, they rely on quickly building prototypes that are tested by real users. Those users give feedback, and the plan is revised. This happens repeatedly, and as a result projects tend to deliver services that are fundamentally better for the people who use them.
Starting around 2010 governments started to experiment with Agile project management. But at the time of writing this transition to Agile is still very much in its early days.
Meaning of the competency
Public service leaders need to:
Be familiar with the idea that different kinds of projects need different kinds of project management;
Be able to recognise the characteristics, strengths and weaknesses of different project management approaches;
Have the ability to choose appropriate project management methodologies for different types of projects;
To be able to explain why some policies and services are much more likely to succeed if they are rapidly iterated.
To understand how an iterative working culture should be managed. This means creating an environment that fosters a psychological safety, a respect for evidence, and an encouragement of diverse ideas and perspectives.
None of the above requires that all public service leaders need to be experts in the details of project management techniques. However, they do have to have enough familiarity with these methods to ensure that their own decisions and management practices do not undermine the working patterns of a team that is trying to work in an Agile fashion.
Why was this competency developed and agreed?
Our list of 8 core competencies is designed to sit alongside current, existing competencies often taught in schools of public administration or public policy. All eight of our competencies therefore represent capabilities that are either not being taught to current and future public servants or that require some updating to succeed in the digital era.
Most public service skills are about teaching decision-makers to get things right the first time. Whether economic forecasting or public finance planning, the goal is to teach people skills that allow them to predict the future and shape it according to the way they interpret their policy mandate.
The purpose of this competency is not to state that forecasting is impossible or inappropriate. It is to extend a future public leaders toolkit and enable them to ascertain when planning and when iterating is appropriate and have the skills to persuade and then stand up a team to adopt the appropriate approach.
Reading Suggestion
The Agile Manifesto, Explained - Kris Hughes
Using scrum in outsourced government projects: An action research - de Sousa, T. L., Venson, E., Figueiredo, R. M. D., Kosloski, R. A., & Ribeiro, L. C. M.
Agile and adaptive governance in crisis response: Lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic - Janssen, M., & van der Voort, H.
Agile government: Systematic literature review and future research - Mergel, I., Gong, Y., & Bertot, J.
The New Practice of Public Problem Solving - Slaughter, A, McGuiness, T
Agile government: Systematic literature review and future research, in: Government Information Quarterly, 35(2): 291-298 - Mergel, I., Gong, Y., & Bertot, J.