Preparing technologists for public sector work through a remote, part-time program: TELI
By: Dana Chisnell
Tags: Govtech, Public Service, Service Delivery, Civictech

Capitol dome from inside, looking up. Lansing, Michigan

Preparing technologists for public sector work through a remote, part-time program: TELI

Government is the scaling vector for social change. But we need trained people to reach positive outcomes. We prototyped a repeatable model. Dana Chisnell Follow Jan 27 · 10 min read

The concept was simple: Prepare private sector technologists for working in the public sector or with public sector partners. But we needed to determine how practical the idea was, how to design an effective program, and how to measure its effectiveness.

As we started to put the initiative together (with our partners at Aspen Tech Policy Hub and Tech Talent Project), we came to realize that it defied classification. It wasn’t exactly an executive program. It wasn’t really a fellowship. We’d created a cross-curriculum, extended workshop. It featured “classroom” lecture and interactive learning, guest speakers on specific topics, experiential learning through “field” projects done by small teams, weekly coaching and feedback for teams, large information sharing sessions with people inside and outside the program, and an intensive “capstone” project as a “final exam.”

Eventually, we gave it a name: Tech Executive Leadership Initiative, or TELI for short.

The U.S. government struggles to deliver services efficiently and effectively the way it works right now

Project Redesign formed around the idea that government is the scaling vector for social change. But 3 problems prevent government from effectively serving the public and efficiently delivering public services:

The U.S. government needs to modernize in a range of ways, including embracing 21st Century skills, methods, and tools.

American technologists aren’t trained for government contexts, so they aren’t ready to help tackle complex social problems.

Communities living the experience of poor government services have not been but should be centered in policy design, delivery, or government accountability.

Federal government has focused on modernizing government through technology projects. It is true that many of the systems that underlie government services were designed and built decades ago. Some do need to be updated. Others need to be replaced. But the problem with delivering effective services to the public isn’t that the government relies on legacy technology. It’s that government relies on early 19th Century management and bureaucratic practices that treat policy implementation and service delivery like factory work.

Improving outcomes for the public means making policy design and implementation people-centered

At Project Redesign, we want to improve outcomes for the American public. We believe that the best way to do that is by making policy design and implementation more people-centered, multidisciplinary, agile, and modern.

A program built through partnerships

We partnered with the Tech Talent Project and the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub to create a new kind of training program for private sector technologists interested in moving to the public sector.

TELI, our prototype program — a hybrid of approaches from Aspen Tech Policy Hub and Project Redesign that we delivered remotely, part time — gave the 3 partners a way to test some ideas. To truly modernize the federal government, we need new way of thinking, new processes, and new people. But there are not enough people who are trained and ready to be effective in the public sector. And while technologists in the private sector are at least familiar with the ideas in human-centered design (HCD) or design thinking, TELI was an experiment in which we tried to close some of the gaps by working through an educational and practical program with technologists who were excited about helping government better serve people.

For people to make a successful transition from the private sector to public service, they need grounding in basics about how government works, how policy gets made, and what the tech landscape is for implementing public policy.

We created a structure and format to meet participants where they were

In structure, TELI echoed executive education programs in some ways. But with the pandemic, it wasn’t possible to meet together in person. So, that made it unnecessary to have day-long and week-long, full time program. Instead, participants kept their full time jobs and worked through TELI part time. Class time, team time, and check-ins all happened remotely. We formed cross-functional teams. The teams worked on projects that gave them a way to apply what they learned in the class time. [TELI syllabus]

The curriculum and why we designed it that way

As we reviewed what we learned from the people we interviewed in Spring 2020 and looked forward to thousands of new people joining government from the private sector, we identified topics that came out of the experiences our interviewees told us about. They fell into roughly two large categories:

How policy and government work

What service delivery looks like

Key concepts we wanted to cover in TELI

For people to make a successful transition from the private sector to public service, they need grounding in basics about how government works, how policy gets made, and what the tech landscape is for implementing public policy. While many participants were somewhat versed in HCD because the companies they worked for used some version of it for product development, TELI gave them an opportunity to apply similar methods and techniques to policy design and implementation. At Project Redesign, our priority was on these key concepts:

21st Century government services need modern approaches to policy making, technology, and design.

There are well-defined practices that public servants can follow to reduce the difficulty of designing and delivering more human-centered services.

Designing the right policy and tech implementation needs the deepest possible understanding of the problem as the public experiences it.

Learning objectives

If TELI was effective, in the first year in government, participants should be able to apply what they’ve learned to:

Understand how government structures differ from industry

Lead and manage stakeholders, peers, and direct reports without formal authority in high risk, highly political contexts

Design, research, analyze, and execute policies in ambiguous, complex, and fast-paced environment

Drive projects to successful delivery within entrenched bureaucracies and under-resourced partners with limited financial tools

Communicate effectively via concise, accurate, accessible, and timely written materials

Operationalize ethical, fiduciary, and legal responsibility to the American people

Build a healthy culture of collaboration, learning, risk creation, direct feedback, and leadership development for public servants

TELI leaders applied course content in team projects

We tied the two courses together through projects where teams could apply what they learned. One was a project that stretched across the 8 weeks of the program based on a policy challenge. Teams learned the methods and techniques as they moved through the phases of their projects.

Close to the end of the program, we formed new teams, who then went to work on a second project that they needed to deliver on at the end of 48 hours. With the second project, TELI leaders got to test what they’d learned across the program in a new challenge.

COVID and other factors constrained the design of TELI

There were a few constraints. In a perfect world — one without an ongoing pandemic — we might have created a different program. We might have made a program where the teams could be co-located, working together closer to full time. Even without everyone needing to self-isolate because of COVID, we contemplated a program that could include people who were only available part time. COVID was a forcing function on going fully remote. But going remote also gave us a chance to evaluate whether a fully remote fellowship program might be an effective option for future programs. As a prototype, TELI has been useful in helping us learn how similar future efforts might work.

In addition to participants being remote, they were also all part-time, and distributed across time zones.

Making the challenge projects realistic enough was a huge… challenge. First, we were outside government, with little or no access to officials in government who could be our stakeholders and experts. While we chose the challenge topics because we had ready access to some expertise within the teaching team and our immediate partners, that didn’t go far enough to answer important questions for the teams as they did their discovery research. The next iterations of a program like this one should be designed to have committed stakeholder/partners who have a big policy challenge, but who don’t have a solution in mind, yet.

We had one more challenge: timing. We wanted to finish the program so we might have access to policy experts before the 2020 presidential election, because some of them might be unavailable when a potential transition would start. More importantly, Betsy Cooper, head of the Aspen Tech Policy Hub, would go out on a planned leave in the middle of September, and we needed to ensure that her topics were covered before that happened. We were squeezed from both ends on time.

One other factor in timing was funding. As a tiny civic incubator, Project Redesign did not have a ready source of funding that would allow us to start the project without grants specifically for the project. Moving funders forward outside the typical grant making periods required attention that we found tough to make time for while designing and developing TELI, and working on other projects.

Teams produced near-professional policy outputs

Outputs from the project teams showed that It’s possible to begin to prepare people for government through a combination of experiential learning and guest lectures on targeted topics from people with government experience. Although some participants started out the program expressing frustration with the openness of the purposeful lack of direction in the challenge projects, all the teams came through that with pretty solid outputs.

As one of the TELI participants said:

Working through the initial frustration was key to learning how to be effective in a government context, and in particular understanding how to use the principles of HCD to distill problem statements from complex areas with many systems, experts and stakeholders.

Participants went from knowing little about government and policy to delivering great work. The outputs from the projects were so good and so worthwhile that we published them on the Project Redesign website to open them up publicly as policy design or implementation proposals. You can read them here:

Accelerating Naturalizations with Video Interviews

Centralized Services for Unemployment ID Verification

Federal Grants for State Digital Service Delivery

Policy as Code

The Next National Unemployment Crisis

Cross-functional teams brought value to policy discovery and design

The experience of working in cross-functional teams with little management direction was incredibly valuable. Leaders from the private sector aren’t used to working this way, and the projects gave them exposure and practical experience. The participants appreciated the different types of experience that their teammates brought to the challenge project and 48-hour project (such as having combinations of GC/CDO/CTO/CIO candidates).

Participants got value of the program

Participants seemed to enjoy the program generally, and gave TELI high ratings overall in the end-of-program and mid-program surveys. Participants got a lot out of hearing from guest speakers about their own experiences in government. Post-program, several individuals told us that they keep in touch with their teammates, and they’re looking forward to having a support network built on their relationships with TELI participants and instructors. At least one participant will go on to join the new administration as a senior advisor for delivery.

Using agile, human-centered design approaches helped us improve throughout the program

As a teaching team, we pivoted well to respond to participant feedback at mid-program and we responded quickly to leaders’ needs. Participants seemed to feel supported throughout. For example, based on feedback from the mid-term survey, we moved to less instruction about methods for human-centered design, and more about tech and leadership landscape. Where we felt HCD topics were important to include in the program but not important enough to spend class time, we moved them to videos that participants could watch on their own time.

A success factor was instructors who had worked in government and had connections to experts

As former government practitioners, the course instructors could speak from experience, rather than purely theoretically or teaching through case studies. Participants had access to instructors who could guide teams and help them focus, both through the process and on what was feasible.

In addition, we could easily tap a network of formers who helped deliver content, or who teams interviewed for discovery research, or gave input and feedback on projects.

Changes we would make for the next version

The project outputs show that the participants did learn through the program. But we also learned several lessons that we would build into the next version of the program (should there be one).

Tailor the curriculum. Develop class time, lectures, reading, and exercises to create optional courses for different types of leaders (CTO, CIO, CDO, GC), but keep a few core concepts to connect people to the overall program. This approach will make a more complex program with more moving parts, but we think future participants will get more out of what they do, and they may feel more in control of their time commitment. (The program description for TELI 2.0 reflects the shift in this direction, already.)

Develop class time, lectures, reading, and exercises to create optional courses for different types of leaders (CTO, CIO, CDO, GC), but keep a few core concepts to connect people to the overall program. This approach will make a more complex program with more moving parts, but we think future participants will get more out of what they do, and they may feel more in control of their time commitment. (The program description for TELI 2.0 reflects the shift in this direction, already.) Eliminate the 48-hour exercise. By the time we did it, participants were exhausted. We also did it over a weekend, which meant that participants sacrificed time with family.

Ready to move carefully and fix things

It’s possible to begin to prepare people for government through a combination of experiential learning and guest lectures on targeted topics from people with government experience. From outside government, before they arrive at an agency.

Although a dedicated, in-person program might have delivered even better results, running TELI as a part time, remote program did work to reach our goals of exposing folks to ideas and practices they need in government work.

See the full syllabus and all of the readings for a taste of what the course was like (or do the readings yourself for a self-study!). The Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub and the Tech Talent Project are about to kick off TELI 2.0 based on what the project partners and the teaching team learned in the prototype.

Most of the participants in the program completed the 8 weeks even more revved up about public service than they were when they started. Was TELI enough to make a difference, to help new public servants be effective sooner? We’ll know in about a year.