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Creating a culture of innovation at your agency
on September 12, 2022
When we talk about "innovation" in government tech, what do we mean? 18F surveyed multiple digital innovation groups in cultural heritage institutions and federal agencies on this very question. As an innovation group ourselves, the results both challenged us and strengthened our confidence in the importance of trying new approaches in the government space.
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Navigating ATOs
on October 19, 2021
ATO processes work differently at different federal agencies. As a technology and design consultancy inside the United States government, 18F has worked on ATOs at many of them. We are still learning and experimenting, but there are definite patterns we have seen work well across multiple agencies.
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A federal guide to de-risk government technology projects
on September 9, 2020
Announcing the federal field guide to de-risk government technology
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A token of our affection - A field guide to USWDS 2
on April 21, 2020
We recently worked with the cloud.gov team to update their public site, cloud.gov, to United States Web Design System 2. The USWDS provided concepts we were able to use to translate designs into code a lot faster and deliver higher fidelity results once we understood how to use them.
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Continuous learning for product managers
on March 24, 2020
As product managers, we never stop learning because products never stop evolving and changing. You need to quickly get up to speed on a product’s technical implementation, design, user research, and business needs.
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Areas for growth part 2: mixed methods
on February 27, 2020
Mixed methods is an approach in the social sciences in which you gather both quantitative and qualitative data in an effort to make more informed and integrated interpretations based on the combined strengths of both types of data.
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Areas for growth part 1: Continual appreciative dialogue
on February 20, 2020
Continual Appreciative Dialogue (CAD) is the practice of expressing recurring praise or gratitude to a teammate or collaborator in conversation and throughout a working relationship. The practice of CAD is special because it is uncommon.
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Barriers to Government’s Adoption of User-centered Design — And How To Address Them
on November 7, 2019
Last summer, we embarked on a 10x project to explore (and potentially improve) user-centered design practices across the federal government.
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You might not be as agile as you think you are
on May 29, 2019
The mandate to be agile is everywhere. But agile isn’t an on-off switch. It’s a skill and a mindset that is developed over time, through dedicated work, open teams, and lots (and lots) of practice
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Six ways we’ve recently improved TTS’s Design Research Guild
on March 7, 2019
A few months ago, the TTS’s Design Research Guild started brainstorming ways to better position itself for success. In this post, we’ll share the six ways we’ve recently worked to improve the guild.
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Cloud is not a virtue
on February 7, 2019
Federal agencies, like every other industry, are moving to cloud computing for their infrastructure. The economies of scale lead to a number of benefits, but unfortunately, having a server launched in the cloud does not magically make infrastructure better. Government should leverage cloud wisely to yield benefits
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Modular contracting and working in the open
on October 25, 2018
Working in the open is a key component of building trust between governments and vendor partners. Read about how the State of Alaska is using openness and code sharing to foster greater trust between government project teams and vendor teams as part of a large legacy system overhaul.
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ETL: Extract, Transform, Learn
on August 9, 2018
Providing government data to the public almost always requires building a data processing pipeline between its place of origin and the systems that will serve it. Data must be copied, transferred between digital storage formats, reshaped to meet the needs of reporting systems, groomed for readability, and cleansed for accuracy.
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What we learned from building a pool of agile vendors
on July 26, 2018
In 2015, 18F had an idea for a better way for federal agencies to hire private vendors to build products and services using agile development techniques. We wanted to see what would happen if we used an existing government process (called a blanket purchase agreement) and tailored it to the needs of agencies looking to update their digital services.
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Taking the ATO process from 6 months to 30 days
on July 19, 2018
Security compliance is a major factor in launching a software system in the federal government. The Authority To Operate compliance process for systems within our division of GSA was taking more than six months for every system. With the new process, we have cleared the backlog and reduced the turnaround time to under a month.
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Five contracting tweaks that have yielded 18F better procurements (thus far)
on July 17, 2018
Here are five procurement hacks — both in the context of our Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) and in general — that we’ve made in the past few years to make the procurement process a bit more joyful and effective.
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Aiming for obsolescence: Lessons from an 18F product transition
on May 1, 2018
Four years into 18F’s work, transition is a topic of frequent conversation among our team. Every organization and every project is different. At the same time, every transition offers lessons that can be applied to the next.
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4 lessons from building our own recruiting tool
on November 8, 2017
As of September, GSA is running its own recruiting tool for moderated design research. In this post, we would like to share four key lessons we learned while building this tool, including the ways in which software development can serve as a starting point for broader conversations about information practice, privacy, and security.
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What makes a great vendor team for acquisition product development?
on August 30, 2017
From our experience with the Agile Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA), we’ve found that in order to build effective cross-functional teams and successful IT projects, we need alignment on several principles
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From launch to landing: How NASA took control of its HTTPS mission
on May 25, 2017
In 2015, the White House Office of Management and Budget released M-15-13, a "Policy to Require Secure Connections across Federal Websites and Web Services" the memo emphasizes the importance of protecting the privacy and security of the public's browsing activities on teh web. This is a guest post by Karim Said of NASA who was instrumental in NASA's successful HTTPS and HSTS migration.
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DATA Act prototype: Simplicity is key
on August 29, 2016
To ensure that agencies could focus on the important work of joining their internal systems without unnecessary technology distractions, we (the 18F and Treasury prototype team) sought to deliver the simplest possible interface that would accept agency data using the simplest possible format for that data.
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Strategies for starting your own writing lab
on July 19, 2016
Interested in spinning up your own Writing Lab? Use these tips as your starting point.
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When a micro-purchase doesn’t work out, we try to learn from it
on July 7, 2016
Two months ago, the 18F acquisitions team ran a public micro-purchase auction to find a vendor to develop a small new feature for 18F's cloud.gov, and for the first time after several successful micro-purchases for other products, the contracted vendor didn’t deliver the code on time. This was very interesting to us we’re early in the life of the micro-purchase platform, and we believe that failure is a great way to learn. In the spirit of experimentation and sharing our lessons, here’s how we went about analyzing this, and here’s what we learned.
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6 ways a writing lab will help your organization
on June 30, 2016
Wondering if a writing lab might be right for your organization? Reviewing the benefits 18F has seen from our Writing Lab might help you figure out if starting your own is the way to go.
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5 lessons in object-oriented design from Sandi Metz
on June 24, 2016
Last month, I completed Sandi Metz's object-oriented design course. It was three intense days of working through refactoring exercises and discussing code as a group with my class of 30 students. I got a ton out of the class and returned to my work at 18F excited to practice what I'd learned. I've rounded up my top lessons from the course for you to enjoy.
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Tips for adapting analytics.usa.gov from Tennessee, Boulder, and Philadelphia
on January 6, 2016
The city of Philadelphia, the city of Boulder, and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation have all adapted analytics.usa.gov for their own use. We recently talked to them about how they adapted the platform and what advice they’d have for others who'd like to do the same.
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Early lessons from the micro-purchase experiment
on November 6, 2015
Well, we sure didn’t expect this. But the winning bid for the first iteration of the 18F micro-purchase experiment was $1. And on Wednesday, the winner delivered a solution that passed our acceptance criteria.
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UX lessons learned from a procurement project
on March 6, 2015
UX designer Nick Brethauer talks about how user research better informs the products 18F builds.
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