Unit 4
How David Eaves teaches Unit 4 (part 1)
CalFresh Case Study
What is this page?
This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 4 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. Read how part two of Unit 4 is taught here.
It is the first in a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in various contexts. See here how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit.
Who is this page for?
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
Class Overview
In the previous unit, we explored the difference between project management methodologies that emphasize planning (referred to in this course as waterfall-like approaches) and the ones that emphasize learning (referred to in this course as agile-like approaches). The agile-like approaches focus on learning by engaging with a product or services users throughout the development process, gathering data about effectiveness, compatibility with existing workflows and other information that might improve or limit the impact of the work. Central to this iterative learning approach is taking a user-centered approach to drive better policy implementation.
In this class, we will dive deep into a case about a website for applicants to California's food stamp program. The case - Hacking Bureaucracy: Reimagining California's Food Stamp Program In The Digital Age - illustrates how the process of scaling and expanding the scope of the service introduced complexities that hindered the government's ability to focus on users. Throughout the analysis, students are encouraged to reflect on how the Code for America team employed user-centered design to improve enrollment outcomes and the barriers they faced. In doing so, they examine the implications for public policy.
💡 Context for the Hacking Bureaucracy: Reimagining California's Food Stamp Program In The Digital Age
In 2014, three former Code for America fellows embarked on a one-year skunk works journey to use technology to improve the enrollment process for California’s SNAP (food stamp) program, called MyBenefits CalWIN. Their hope was to simplify the process and increase the number of San Francisco residents receiving the benefits. The case describes a user-centered approach to identifying bottlenecks within the MyBenefits CalWIN enrollment process and the low cost, fast solution the group ultimately proposed and built. The case asks students to consider the opportunities, challenges and risks created by information technology in the public sector and whether taking a user-centered approach to policy implementation can improve social service delivery.
Although this class is focused on the MyBenefits CalWIN case, facilitators can alternatively present other cases of government systems which were considered hard to navigate and that went through a user-focused revamp.
⛔ The Hacking Bureaucracy: Reimagining California's Food Stamp Program In The Digital Age case study is sadly not open access. However a free copy for review can be downloaded from the HKS Case Store.
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this class students should be able to:
Describe some of the main activities that make up human-centered design
Understand when public servants will need to deploy human-centered design skills - Understand that user needs and technologies keep evolving and digital services must evolve with them
Understand how program governance and incentives can harm an organizations ability to focus on users
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 This class has a specific focus on Competency 1 - Users. See all eight competencies here.
Assigned Reading and Practical Resources
As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class:
What are the previous dominant management theories for government? How do digital technologies reinforce or challenge these ideas?
What are the types of challenges do governments face as they engage in digital transformations? Relate challenges you've experienced in your own work to the readings.
Required Readings
Digital Era Governance: IT Corporates, the State and e-Government (2006), Book Chapter by Dunleavy, Margetts, Bastow, & Tinkler
The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962), Book by Marshall McLuhan
Digital Government: Not Complicated, Just Hard (2014), Video from Code for America performing Tom Loosemore, Deputy Director of the U.K.'s Government Digital Services
Optional Advanced Reading
Public value creation in digital government [pages 13-17] (2019), Article by Panos Panagiotopoulos, Bram Klievink, and Antonio Cordella
Building the Virtual State [Chapter 4] (2001), Book Chapter by Jane Fountain
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 75 minutes
See David's slides for this class.
The segments below describe the dynamics of each part of the class. The videos were edited to only display the most relevant parts of each section:
Segment 1 - Case History – 15'
The goal of this section is to clarify the context around the case study.
🙏 I'd like to express gratitude to Dave Guarino, Jake Solomon, Alan Williams, Rebecca Ackerman and the Code for America team for sharing this story. I'd like to particularly thank Dave Guarino who has shared his experience of this case with class on numerous occasions and whose slides I've adopted and cited during my presentation.
Purpose of this segment
This class is based on a case study about a journey to improve the enrollment process for California’s SNAP (food stamp) program via the MyBenefits CalWIN website. But before moving to the case analysis, this section builds common understanding about the program and context around the intervention.
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion Questions
The section opens with questions that help deconstructing the program. Facilitators should cover the following points:
What is the program about?
What is the size of the program?
Who is eligible?
How to apply?
How to use the benefit?
How to re-apply?
After aligning students around a basic understanding of the SNAP program and context, facilitators can move to the problem: that at the time of the intervention a low proportion of the eligible population - 66% - received the benefit. In this part, students are encouraged to reflect on the consequences for various stakeholders of this low enrollment rate. Typically, administrative challenges such as budget reallocation or financial pressure on local governments are the focus of discussion. Oftentimes this focus on administrative and technical issues avoids the largest and most critical consequence - that many citizens remain needlessly hungry.
Segment 2 - The Registration Process – 30'
This section reflects on the process that led to a convoluted usability of the original MyBenefits CalWIN website.
Purpose of this segment
It is not uncommon or entirely surprising for online government services to be hard to navigate. What students need to be taught is the incentives, structures and systems that produce this outcome over and over again - despite the efforts of well intentioned public servants. The purpose of this section is to use the case to reflect on what lead the service to evolve over time into becoming convoluted and hard to use.
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion Questions
David starts this segment with a video of the MyBenefits CalWIN registration process, which was reported to take an hour and a half to complete. Students are broken into groups to discuss the following questions:
How did the MyBenefits CalWIN application process get to be so convoluted?
What was the original goal of the website?
Debrief and Discussion
In the debrief, one explanation for MyBenefits CalWIN's complexity that students raise is that the administrators lacked user focus. Perhaps they merely moved paper forms online without redesigning the process or focused on helping the wrong users (possibly administrators and not recipients). Facilitators should engage these ideas and, after some time, push students to reflect on the origins and evolution of the system. Who created the website? (Answer: The City and County of San Fransisco). Why would San Francisco share their application with neighboring counties and cities? (One answer: to share the maintenance burden and to spread a best practice)
The goal here is to highlight that the creators of the original application had a strong user focus (reflected in their efforts to use "street language" in the process) and the team had direct contact with citizens. The point being that the project was user focused in the beginning. Instead of being driven by a lack of skills, problems began to creep in as a result of success. As the program scaled to more users, and took on more services, it became less focused. Well-intended stakeholders - with citizens interests in mind - made rational choices that worsened the system's usability. In particular, the option of adding additional questions to the onboarding form could help qualify users for additional services. This had the potential to help users get more benefits. But these changes - some exogenous and some at the hands of the service team - also slowly eroded the usability of the service - something David likes to call the "entropy of crappiness."
This process can happen even when stakeholders are well-intended and user focused. A scaling process that adds stakeholders will require highly effective governance to help manage decisions and, over time, vendors. In addition, the project will need dedicated roles that maintain a connection to users needs (ideally empowered product managers). Maintaining all three of these activities - user focus, the right roles, and effective governance (and thus vendor management) is essential.
Segment 3 - The User-centric Learning Journey - 20'
The goal of this section is to equip students with a methodology to navigate and make user-centric changes within large complex bureaucracies.
Purpose of this segment
If understanding user's needs is critical, how can administrators do a better job at understanding them, and what barriers prevent them from doing so? The purpose of this section is to make students reflect on a range of practices that they can use to learn about users.
Discussion and Debrief
David starts this section by asking students to take notes and think about what steps Guarino, Williams, Solomon and Ackerman took to consider the user's experience and what they learned in the process.
In the debrief, facilitators should look out for comments that include the following items to explore as learning points:
Going through the process of using the service oneself to experience the journey and problems faced
Mapping the user journey, the pains, gains and thoughts throughout the experience
Mapping the emotional stages of each step of the journey
David also shows a slide created by David Guarino which outlines the users journey in the case. In the figure, steps are highlighted with varied colors which signal the different organizations that are responsible for each of them.
A slide showing the steps that a user must go through to enroll in SNAP, with colours showing how these phases are owned by different organisations.
Slides from the course. The main slide says "I believe the most important digital skill is empathy"
At this point, there is an opportunity to get students to discuss the challenge of managing services that span multiple departments or even levels of government. David also spends time on the individual leadership challenges and personal incentives that run counter to this work. For example, confronting failures or gaps in services one oversees can challenge an individuals or organizations sense of competence and self worth. True leaders overcome such concerns and mobilize those to help those most in need. The goal for the instructor is to get students to understand the complexity of this work. It is simultaneously about understand organizational and systems behavior, about a set of practices, and about individual mindset and leadership.
Reflections
Finally, facilitators can close with a number of possible key messages. David suggests the following:
The needs of a small number of Government stakeholders should not trump the needs of the vast majority of the users – Choose someone to own the user experience in the team
Stakeholders and development teams aren’t the users – Testing should be done with and by real users
A great technical solution sometimes isn’t the best solution for the users - The most important skills in the digital age are empathy and humility
Different users have different needs, pains, gains and realities - Choosing who the user is in a service is a political act
Video of David teaching this segment
A slide from the course that says "Shirley Chisholm - First African American Fermale elected to the Congress. When elected, house leadership shunted her to the agriculture committee. She used the position to help crease the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Wome, Infants and Children (WIC). Thank you to Lucas Santos MPP 21"
Segment 4 - Wrapping up - 10'
The goal of this section is to make students connect the class's learnings with their previous experiences and to reflect on what they could have done to have a better user focus.
Video of David teaching this segment
Exercise
The goal of analyzing any case study study is to transpose the learnings of the class to a more concrete setting. But to solidify the lessons learned, one must reflect on his or her actions.
To do this, David runs an exercise where students are asked to think about a project they participated in the past and to reflect on how they could have better engaged with users and enabled more learning. After a few minutes of introspection, he asks students to share their thoughts. The goals here are both to get students to relate the ideas from class to their own work, and remind them how pervasive the challenges of simplifying government services is.
Debrief
In the debrief, he highlights that in the digital era management and technology are helpful, but what is truly needed is humility and empathy towards the people who are impacted by the work.
Finally, David likes to close the class giving recognition to the amazing Shirley Chisholm, the creator of the SNAP program and the first African American female elected to the Congress whose bio and accomplishments are inspiring.
Common questions from students faculty could prepare for:
- What are the skillsets that you should consider for hiring professionals?
- Does a company's stage affect the distribution of planners and town planners that are needed?
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Acknowledgements
David Eaves would like to note that this material was made possible by numerous practitioners and other faculty who have generously shared stories, pedagogy and their practices. David is also grateful to the students of DPI 662 at the Harvard Kennedy School for enriching the course and providing consent to have the material and questions shared. Finally, an enormous thank you must be given to Beatriz Vasconcellos, who helped assemble and organize the content on this page.