The transformation research report identified the four top barriers to digital transformation:
Extreme technical debt, heavy enough to prevent small engineering teams from choosing their tools and doing rapid, iterative releases.
Difficulty concretizing the benefits of transformation. We don’t say quantifying, because that’s the problem: many benefits are clear, but qualitative in nature. This makes it hard to get buy-in for ongoing work.
Teams that can’t make project decisions without leadership approval. This costs time and effort for both management and staff, and makes it hard for transformative practices to become the norm.
Failure to connect directly to users (whether they’re employees or the public). It’s harder to muster the will to seek out the most impactful practices when you don’t have a picture of the impacted people in your mind.
We sought to dig deeper into this list to find out what barriers education may be able to help alleviate, and barriers where other interventions might be more effective. Some of our findings corroborate those listed above, and some are specific to education. We believe some form of education (formal or informal) is probably an ingredient to overcoming any barrier, but in some cases education must be paired with other efforts or another kind of effort may be more effective.
Many participants spoke of a general unwillingness by product managers to assume decision-making authority for the product, even when given explicit authority from leadership to do so. Education around this role may help overcome some of this hesitancy.
“As we are getting people to take on this product owner role, it’s started a bunch of hesitation and uncertainty among staff. First thing I say is, ‘you're responsible for this — running a team of contractors to work on this.’ A lot of people haven’t had that experience, that leadership experience. […] We had to do a lot of customized training and a lot of people still came out of it not feeling they can transition in the role of leading people, leading an agile project, being comfortable not having things further out, not having a delivery date — doesn’t have to be set until after you get some work going.”
This seems to be a corollary to the third barrier identified by the transformation research report.
Many working in the digital space are unfamiliar with practices such as agile and human-centered design, or have a shallow understanding of them. One participant said that it’s often harder to train a person with a shallow understanding of these concepts than a person with zero understanding.
“The worst thing is when people learn the wrong things about the things we want them to learn, then they don’t want to use those things because ‘I don’t think it works.’ You could say, if you read it the wrong way, user-centered design suggests that you’re wasting time traveling, doing things, when it’s ‘hey I’ve done this for 20 years, I already know what the user wants.’ We have to educate around that.”
While the research team didn’t consider this one of the top barriers to transformation, they also listed this as an additional barrier in the transformation research report.
Much of training and educational resources available to government employees contains bad or outdated information.
People told us that much of the training and educational resources available from government agencies contain bad or outdated information, and it can be difficult to sift through the bad materials to find the good stuff. TTS can address this problem by creating a well-curated and opinionated resource of educational materials and guidance to other reliable sources.
Many of the people we spoke with cited that leadership is aware of the larger change that is needed, but lack the guidance on how to create an environment where this change can occur. Some of the signals are:
- a tendency to overload employees,
- unwillingness to give teams the autonomy they need to make decisions and fail,
- inability to articulate value that the team is aiming to create, and
- sticking to commitments once they are made.
Training for leadership on how to effectively support digital transformation may help them better enable their teams.
“At the end of the day, in government, while we want to live in a world where failure is possible, I haven't identified a place where failure is actually possible. I don’t know how to let people fail in ways that are meaningful.”
Many of the educators and innovators told us that general cultural resistance to change was the most difficult barrier to overcome. They believed this resistance came from fear, strong risk aversion, lack of trust between coworkers, or just general cultural inertia. It’s unclear if education alone can change organizational culture, but it is something to keep in mind when developing an educational program.
“We did a survey, asked people ‘Why aren’t you innovating?’ 70 percent of our people said, ‘fear and cultural resistance.’”
“I don’t think the average bureaucrat feels empowered to do anything. Everything requires a committee and a meeting of 30 people, and 30 people can’t make a decision to save their lives.”
Federal hiring processes make it hard to justify hiring more people and hard to find the right people for a position. Writing position descriptions to fit a role that is not traditionally hired by the government takes time, as does the following process of hiring through USAJobs.
In addition, the budget for each agency and group dictates how many new hires are open for any department or organization each year. Because of all this, it is slightly easier to move people around internally and train them for new roles than it is to hire new ones. This suggests there is high demand for training for these new roles.
Reporting requirements and budget cycles are often structured to fit a waterfall system as opposed to an agile one, which forces agile teams to shoehorn their process into that structure. In this scenario, education is unlikely to be the most effective intervention – policy changes or other forms of culture change may be more impactful.
“If project is a certain size, you have to report it to [agency]. But [agency] doesn’t have an agile reporting system. They have to report in a waterfall way with set deadlines and deliverables. So then you’re really working in agile-fall.”
Working within and interpreting laws and policies is a daily part of federal government work. Some of theses impede the daily work of projects trying to use new methods. Many innovators agree to interpretations of these laws or policies with their leadership, but if leadership changes, projects depending on these interpretations can stall or be canceled. While education around how to negotiate with lawyers and policy makers may help some in this respect, it likely needs to be paired with other interventions to be effective.
Constraints built into agency security and technology policies cause issues for projects trying to use test environments, production systems, design software, and so on. Many agencies also have limited resources to be able to provide teams with the tools they need. Training in devops and security may help in this regard, but there may be more effective strategies to address this problem.
This corroborates the barrier of ‘extreme technical debt’ identified in the transformation research report.
- Project Home
- Executive summary
- Overview
- What we found
- Effective government education considers context, people, and format.
- Educational topics that we heard are needed the most.
- Barriers and challenges to digital transformation. < You are here!
- What makes education stick?
- What would we like to do if we had three more months?
- Methodology supplement