Unit 8
How David Eaves teaches Unit 8 (part 3)
Procurement and Child Welfare Services Case
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 8 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. See how parts one, two and three are taught.
This page is part of 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 this courses previous units, students have been introduced to practices and administrative approaches that are both made possible by, and needed, in a digital era. However, persuading a large bureaucracy to adopt these new practices and approaches - to change its modus operandi - requires overcoming technical, political and administrative risks.
In this class, David explores these risks by examining California’s decision to adopt both an agile and modular approach as it seeks to update a mission critical "legacy" system. The objective of the class is multifaceted. It seeks to show how key leaders sought to inject digital era practices into the state bureaucracy. It explores the issue of procurement, a core element of public administration and a frequent barrier to successful digital transformation. It also seeks to illustrate how the technically correct solution may not be preferable. And pushes students to think about both the conditions that need to be in place to effectively push for change as well as how governments can circumvent and manage risks as they seek to adopt digital era capabilities.
📖 Context for this case (adapted from the case abstract): In October 2015, two senior California officials: Marybel Batjer, Secretary for Government Operations, and Michael Wilkening, Undersecretary for the Health and Human Services Agency, seized on an idea that had the potential to turn the state’s long dysfunctional technology procurement process on its head.
After years of planning, ****California was about to request bids for a new child welfare management system to replace a twenty-year-old technology that served millions of California’s children. The request for bids called for a “waterfall” approach to software development, where all aspects of the project would follow a pre-ordained sequence and likely cost the state nearly half a billion dollars.
Just weeks before ****the request was to be released Batjer and Wilkening proposed an alternative “architecture” that would break up the “monolith” proposal into its component parts. Rather than build and replace one giant system with another, why not replace the system in parts—or in modules? Second, for each of these modules, teams of programmers and social workers could work together to build a prototype and iterate till the final product satisfied the needs of the state—in a process known as “agile” development.
But could California’s bureaucracy, with its stringent procurement rules, pivot to a modular approach? And could Batjer and Wilkening convince state staff and county partners to experiment with agile development, a methodology never attempted in California government before?
This Class' Learning Objectives
By the end of this lecture students should be able to:
-Articulate of the role of procurement in implementing digital era services and policies
Enumerate some barriers that tend to exist in governments
Understand how to encourage buy-in from key stakeholders
Articulate an example of agile-like process in a government context
How this class relates to the Digital Era Competencies
💡 This class has a specific focus on Competencies:
Competency 5 - Barriers
Competency 3 - Multidisciplinary
Competency 6 - Openness
See all eight digital era competencies here.
Assigned Reading and Practical Resources
Core Reading (Required)
Cracking the Monolith: California's Child Welfare Services Disrupts Technology Procurement (2015), Harvard Kennedy School Case written by Anjani Datla and David Eaves
Do we still need systems integrators? (2017), Article by David Eaves
As they work through the readings in advance, students should have in mind the following questions to help them prepare for class:
Would you have authorized a modular and agile approach in this case? If yes or no, why?
Does the level of risk around this innovation in procurement feel acceptable to you. If yes, or no, why?
Does the traditional abandoned approach outlined in the case feel familiar to you? Can you describe in details an experience you had and what drove the outcome?
Assuming the protagonists adopt the new approach, what organization capacities should they be focused on putting in place to maximize the odds of success?
Resources Reading (Required)
De-risking custom technology projects (2019), Handbook by Robin Carnahan, Randy Hart, and Waldo Jaquith
Advanced Reading (Optional)
Changing the Way the Department of Defense Develops and Buys Software (2019), Article by Richard Murray
Software Acquisition and Practices (SWAP), Study report by the US Defense Innovation Board
Detailed Class Breakdown
Class plan: 75 minutes
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 - The nuances of technical innovation – 45'
Purpose of this segment
Even when a technical solution seems preferable, administrative and political challenges and risks might make the decision less obvious. In this case, the agile approach itself does not provide the magic wand to fix all technology problems. Changes in management practices will have to follow for success. The purpose of this segment is to make students aware of the challenges and risks when dealing with digital transformations in governments.
Created by Lant Pritchett by adapting Mark Moore's strategic triangle of public value
Discussion Questions and Debrief
1) Discussion 1: The technical innovation
In the first part of this segment, the objective is to ensure students understand the technical innovation contemplated by Batjer and Wilkening. The question posed to students is "What are the innovations in this case?" In the debrief, facilitators can highlight three innovations:
Agile Software Development: contractors would work together to build a prototype and iterate until the final product satisfied the needs of the state
Modular Architecture: rather than build and replace the entire legacy system over the course of many years, the system would be broken into modules, built independently by different contractors at, and pushed out to users in the space of months or years.
Iterative Procurement Process: vendors who performed in developing and deploying modules early in the process would be rewarded based with more work - on an iterative approach that sought to reward actual performance
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion 2: The implementation challenges
In this section students are encouraged to step into the shoes of the two case protagonists. The question is: "If you were the decision maker, would you be in favor of this new approach?" (Note: Facilitators can use a polling tool to count the votes). In this recording, 96% of students voted in favor of moving forward with the innovative procurement approach. Although this is a particularly high number, a majority of students often vote yes. Given the course materials, there is often a strong bias towards, and belief in the benefits of, agile approaches. If the vote is more even, class discussion should be encouraged, if there is a clear majority, the instructor should challenge students on their position.
Some issues students should be weighing include:
political risk of failure
insufficient state capacity to implement the new approach
lack of technical capabilities
insufficient time to explore and vet a new approach at the last minute
child welfare services is too sensitive a domain to pursue a novel approach
Video of David teaching this segment
Discussion 3: The political challenges
The last discussion in this section focuses on the politics at play in this decision. Proposing and approving a big process change involves not only significant political capital, but also a willingness to take risks. What conditions existed in this case - and might exist with a degree of frequency - that allow senior (or junior) public servants to successfully advocate for new practices.
Some conditions include:
having senior government officials supporting the change - "top cover" can provide public servants with the freedom and ability to innovate and adopt new processes (in this case the governor)
exploiting past failures in the system - large public failures create opportunities to propose new methodologies and approaches (in this case, multiple waterfall projects that have failed across the state government)
exploiting similar success - in this case, a recently completed digital project that was allowed to work outside the normal processes succeeded, creating a valuable precedent that could be replicated (in this case the healthcare exchange website that was stood up in record time, and forewent the tradition procurement and implementation processes)
a coalition of advocates that support the new methodologies and practices that build awareness and create support among internal and external stakeholders (in this case, a community that included Todd Park from the White House and Jen Pahlka from Code for America)
Video of David teaching this segment
Segment 2 The technological innovations and the Wardley Map
Purpose of this segment
David relates this to Wardley mapping and then we hear from practitioners. After the theoretical brainstorm around the possible challenges and risks that this case presented, David invites Mike Wilkening to present his own experience and answer students' questions.
Video of David teaching this segment
👉 In this video, David and Mike stayed for 30 extra minutes to answer students' questions.
Discussion and Reflections
In this section, David interviews Mike Wilkening about the case and issues discussed in the earlier segments. Some of the takeaways of this conversation were:
Successes and Failures: One risk is that students taking this course will believe agile like approaches are a silver bullet that ensure success. This is not the case. In many ways, the procurement process was a success - the state attracted many new vendors, many of whom were expert in processes and technologies it was seeking to shift towards. On the other hand, but new approach created a number of new unanticipated demands that it struggled to adapt to.
Unanticipated new internal capabilities: The adoption of an agile and modular approach, created new pressures on the organization
Example: Traditionally a procurement included a "prime" contractor who coordinated all the subcontractors (the "subs"). Central to the primes work is ensuring effective coordination and interoperability between all the parties. By decomposing the contract into small chunks the state of California inadvertently took over these coordinating responsibilities, a capability it did not possess in house.
Methodological orthodoxy led to non-optimal decisions: Pushed by management and excited about the work, the project team at times become overzealous both in their methodology and in their desire to avoid "traditional" contracting partners. This biased their decision-making.
Example: the team spent time and energy building an open source solution for a low cost off the shelf product that would have been much easier to adopt
The faster learning pace made it worth it: While the challenge of learning new capabilities forced the team to move slower than it wished, the agile approach still lead to live working code being deployed in under 20 months. This meant the state start to both get feedback from users within the first years of deployment as well as derive value from its investment far earlier than the 7-10 year timeline a waterfall project would have entailed.
The scale made the project a showcase: Even with its struggles, the large scale of the project caught people's attention across the state government. It turned this case into a reference for other projects in California's government which sought to implement both modular and agile approaches.
Their team members' success became their struggle: The skills development by the project team members were was so valuable that they kept poached by other departments. This high rate of attrition made it harder for the project team to build strong long term capabilities and meet deadlines.
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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.