Publication Human-Centered Design

Helping Government Agencies Understand and Invest in Their Capacity for Digital Delivery

The Digital Service Network worked closely with stakeholders from the Texas Education Academy (TEA) to develop resources for a structured approach in helping identify and better understand core challenges in government digital delivery.

Government teams face complex challenges as they work to digitally deliver public services, programs, and benefits. Such challenges include outdated technologies, a workforce with a wide range of technical expertise, competing policy and programmatic priorities, resistance to new ways of working, and more.

In this context, and in the Digital Service Network’s (DSN) role as a convener of government digital service teams and practitioners, we have had many people in government ask for tools and strategies that can help:

Assess gaps in their current approaches to and capacity for useful, intuitive, interoperable, and secure digital delivery from conception to deployment and maintenance; and
Collaboratively develop and advocate for recommendations their organizations can implement to begin closing those gaps.

In response to this need, the DSN team developed two resources:.

Digital Delivery Assessment Interview Template: This interview template includes questions designed to help teams conduct exploratory, semi-structured interviews with government stakeholders involved in program delivery to gather information that can help them evaluate the status quo of digital delivery in their organization.
Digital Delivery Problem Identification & Definition Workshop Guide: This workshop guide offers teams an opportunity to jointly work toward understanding core problems impacting digital delivery in their organization. The guide is structured in two parts: (1) a Miro template and (2) a Facilitation Guide.

Together, these resources offer a structured approach for helping identify and better understand core challenges in government digital delivery. These resources can be used together or separately depending on your needs and capacity.

For those looking to learn about individual colleagues’ points of view, the interview template is a great place to start. As a next step, bringing individuals together for the workshop offers a way to build on the interview learnings and create space for collaborative discussions to align on a problem-focused perspective to bring toward setting priorities. If constraints on time or capacity are a concern, or if one approach feels more politically viable, either resource can be used independently to help you learn more about the digital delivery status quo in your organization.

How we developed these resources

The DSN worked closely with stakeholders from Texas Education Agency (TEA) over a period of six months in late 2023 and early 2024 to develop, pilot, and refine these two resources. This work included a number of discovery meetings with TEA leadership and staff to develop and iterate on core research questions, interview approaches, workshop design, and more.

How to use the resources

Digital Delivery Assessment Interview Template: Use the Digital Delivery Assessment Interview Template to conduct semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders across your organization. The information you gather from these interviews can help you answer the following research questions within the context of your organization:

How might the status quo of the design and delivery of digital products and services be characterized in terms of best practices for government digital delivery?
What are the key challenges and pain points that your organization faces when undertaking digital delivery-related initiatives? What are the root causes of these challenges?
How do these challenges and pain points impact your organization’s ability to meet its strategic priorities?
What kinds of intervention(s) might best equip your organization to effectively, responsibly, and sustainably “level up” its current approach to and capacity for digital delivery in order to accomplish its strategic priorities and produce better outcomes for your constituents?

Problem Identification & Definition Workshop [Facilitation Guide & Miro Template]: Run this workshop to help your team step back and jointly investigate questions, beliefs and assumptions about digital delivery in your organization to support clear, thoughtful decision making. The workshop guide includes questions and prompts that support collaborative sharing, learning about, and defining problems within the context of your organization. This workshop can aid your team’s reflection on the following questions:

How well do you know the problems your team is facing in digital delivery? There is significant value in granting time and space to establishing a shared understanding of problems before trying to solve them. Workshop questions prompt participants to share their perspectives and experiences of problems impacting digital delivery and begin to identify themes.
How can we be curious together about the problems we’re facing? Workshop exercises encourage participants to share explicitly about their expectations, problems in action, blindspots, and opportunities for collaboration with regard to digital delivery in their organization.

Get in touch

If you use either of these resources to inform your organization’s approach to and decision making about digital service delivery, we’d love to hear from you! Either of these resources are excellent preparation for building a theory of change for digital service delivery in your organization.

We can also offer support and technical assistance to those looking to structure an evidence-based approach to evaluating the status quo of their organization’s approach to digital service delivery.

Get in touch at digitalservicenetwork@georgetown.edu.