wilhitem
commented
6 years ago sent to CTM-odd@austintexas.gov
Hello ODD Flock of Love Chickens!!!
Please take a moment to read through the content that follows. I could be direct but I’m feeling mushy so please do humor me as there is important information in here, I promise!
Something I wish I had done earlier than now is a deeper reflection on our team and recognizing individual contributions of our members while they are on the team. There are multiple people I wish I had done that with, most recently Julia. I had the chance to personally sit down with Julia and thank her prior to her departure, but I would like to make more of an effort to do this on a regular cadence going forward.
In bittersweet news, Celine will be parting with the City of Austin in two weeks for a new opportunity, and I am torn between being excited for her and sad to see her go. I am overwhelmingly grateful for the work that she’s contributed to our teams, and I will always fondly remember working with her, all the back to our travels around Austin almost two years ago for the early field interviews with Austin Resource Recovery.
I’ll work with Celine to schedule a team celebration for all us Love Chickens.
.....more on her contributions below!!!!
Approximately one year ago, the Digital Services Discovery Project launched with Ben Guhin, Brian Smith, Amalie Barras, and myself working with a large stakeholder group from across the city with the key challenge of ‘establishing a scalable technology framework for the city’s digital services that meets the needs of city staff as they deliver services to residents across departments and initiatives.’
As we developed our initial roadmap which included creating four additional initiatives, we were lucky enough to add Celine (in her boot) within the first month.
During Celine’s tenure on this project, she developed one of the most powerful artifacts to date to explain the difficulties in software procurement at the city that really changed the conversation at the executive level. We crafted multiple iterations on the whiteboard wall with our small crew before Celine transformed it into the powerful image that we use to this day to help people understand the multiple pain points encountered from people across the city trying to solve problems. Iteration 3:
Artifact that continues to be references across City departments:
Collaborating with our stakeholder group, this initial team also crafted the Digital Service Values which are core principles guiding the Office of Design and Delivery’s mission today.
We quickly grew from a core team of 4, adding Amenity Applewhite, Ashlee Harris, Laura Trujillo, Mateo Clarke, and many more after that. While this project started simple, we knew to tackle the bigger challenge meant approaching the policy, technology, human management, and framing for the city. As many of you know our mission evolved from our original challenge of ‘establishing a scalable technology framework for the city’s digital services that meets the needs of city staff as they deliver services to residents across departments and initiatives.’ to what Celine made into a more accessible and understandable framing:
Build living digital services that grow and adapt with resident needs.
We have adapted this slightly today as the Office of Design and Delivery’s scope has grown to include the service design around empowering the human potential of everyone supporting the City of Austin, but that required just one change: remove the word digital to encompass all services.
And that is exactly what our team of ODDities is doing today. Ashlee, Laura, and Courtney have created an amazing Funshop program which started with the goal of training our content authors on how to write user centered service information and is turning into the core of our service transformation program for the entire City of Austin. Our design team has developed a workflow that supports the needs of both staff and residents, and our dev team has developed a modular technology framework that supports integrating silos along with Nerdshops to help us all connect with our inner-nerdness and each other. Our Collab and Knowledge Management teams are unravelling some pretty gnarly processes to make an experience both internal staff and users appreciate. Austin now is a Waze partner and with this news, we will not only have an open source platform that is accessible to our residents with the new CTXfloods, but also we will be able to meet our residents and emergency responders where they are within the apps that help them navigate safely during storm events.
On every front, we have learned from our counterparts internationally and collaborated with experts within the city to adapt best practices that improve service delivery for the City of Austin often exceeding user expectations. As one of our stakeholders said recently:
“This is a wow moment, so many things you guys talk about have been such persistent hard to solve challenges like single sign on, translation, forms piece. Those are things that have been lurking and haven’t known how to attack it. Just looking at what you have accomplished is so huge. Just want to say thank you and how much I appreciate what you are doing. What you are doing is going to have such a huge impact.”
We’ve seen a lot of changes as we stand up our new Office of Design & Delivery and figure out how to set a foundation for this work that can support the kind of transformational change that’s necessary for delivering better services for our residents.
Updates for this week
We have an exciting week ahead of us, with many of y’alls attending the Code for America Summit Wednesday through Friday and others representing the City of Austin at ATXHack4Change over the weekend. Amenity Applewhite, Mateo Clarke, Simi Damani, Ben Guhin, and myself will be presenting at the CfA Summit, and we’re looking forward to learning from other cities and building partnerships to help scale our impact within the City of Austin and across the country.
As we mentioned in last week’s Tech Stack Sprint Review, we also received a formal response from Stephen Elkins that he’ll continue to honor the use of ADL that has been accrued by our team members as we determine a long-term policy for moving forward. We also learned that CTM will be increasing the allotted budget for next fiscal year – I’ll be working out the details on this with CTM’s finance team and can have an update for y’alls on the numbers by the end of June.
Stickers and business cards: Ben is finalizing business cards for us ODDities, and much like the Love Chicken stickers seen below, they are amazing.
Feel free to harrass Guhin directly for updates or if you need more stickers to hand out at upcoming events. ;)
If you need anything from Ben, Gerald, or myself, you can now open and check on the status of issues in our ODD-OPS repo!!!
All my chicken love, Marni
create list of updates to team