GX Notes 2024-04-07

A roundup of Government Experience (GX) and digital government services links and notes from the past week

Photo by Daria Nepriakhina 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

Here’s a roundup of links, comments, and other items we found over the past week or so that may be interesting to digital Government Experience (GX) practitioners out there. If you have any recommendations for more articles we should see, hit us up in the comments.

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[1] How to manage up as an engineer or a manager

Great post by Gregor Ojstersek for everyone that needs to “manage up.” And I assure you, you need to know this stuff in all fields. A sample:

What managing up is:

✅ Efficiently communicating and collaborating with your manager.

✅ Proactively finding out the problems that your manager is facing and putting in the effort in trying to resolve them.

✅ Being transparent, giving feedback and asking for help when you need it.

[2] Considering alternate development models

Our own Eric Nutt posted a piece this week on the “2-6-4-1” model proposed by software development leader John Cutler here on Substack. This blended approach might help other digital service teams consider their options for work organization.

One of the challenges we face, taking a Product Ownership approach, is that the work is never done. So how do you organize the work? We’re in the first year of our own 8-week cycle model, mimicking the Shape Up work by 37signals.

Clearly, we’re all still learning! If you’re trying out something similar with your team, let us know!

[3] Goodbye, Ontario Digital Service

I wrote up what I learned about the collapse of the Ontario Digital Service (ODS) from news and Reddit reports. This event flies in the face of digital service team development just about everywhere. So it bears some review.

[4] Perspective on AI in government

For the digital government types out there, this piece by Will Hampton is a must-read if you do not yet have any policies or guidelines for AI in your organization. I know we don’t in my shop, but we’re already trending toward some of the recommendations in this piece.

For example, I believe we will avoid writing policies, but we will push for guidelines, training, and some sort of governance model that remains active indefinitely. And I’m pushing to hire at least 1 new role in 2025 to help pull it all together.

[5] Pivot: AI and the future of work

Speaking of AI (and those two letters are going to wear out on my keyboard soon), the Pivot podcast spent about 20 minutes on the technology and its prospective impact on all work this past week. Probably worth a listen for almost anyone.

[6] Soft skills for hard people

We might steal big swaths of this piece — Developing Essential Soft Skills for Engineers and Leaders — to improve our job descriptions. Our jobs are setup in a 1 > 2 > 3 progression, to guide development of skills and behaviors over time. We have mapped stuff out to show the difference between levels, so folks know where to apply themselves. And this piece gives us more to map out.

Here’s the top-level outline, but the article has definitions and real resources for each area so you (or your team) can learn more:

• Personal Skills

  • Self-Awareness

  • Self-Motivation

  • Resilience

• Interpersonal Skills

  • Empathy/Compassion

  • Negotiation

  • Conflict Resolution

  • Influence

• Communication Skills

  • Verbal Communication

  • Written Communication

  • Non-Verbal Communication

• Organizational Skills

  • Time Management

  • Decision Making

  • Adaptability

  • Problem-Solving

• Leadership Skills

  • Leadership

  • Change Management

  • Strategic Planning

  • Mentoring

[7] Manage yourself

This piece is absolutely vital career advice for everyone, in all fields. It may be the most important advice that can be given.

How to Self-Manage Even if You Have a Manager (Your Future Self Will Thank You)

Keep in mind companies don’t guide careers any longer — that disappeared decades ago. And there are plenty of weak bosses out there.

Self-management skills, as described here, are great for you, your career, and your employer. If you can build these skills, everything else comes easier.

[8] OMB releases AI guidance (you can steal)

Thankfully, we’re not a federal agency, because many of them are going to have to rapidly produce new policies in line with OMB’s AI guidance released on March 28. Most of them only have until December 1 to get a lot of stuff done.

For us, as noted above, we don’t yet have formal AI policies. But developing guidelines is in our (near) future. This article (and related links) will be a good place to start to think about and draft some ideas, such as:

Release expanded annual inventories of their AI use cases, including identifying use cases that impact rights or safety and how the agency is addressing the relevant risks.

[9] How to get into government digital service

Chris Kuang at the U.S. Digital Corps shared an updated edition of his guide for folks looking to get into civic tech roles: Breaking into civic tech.

Bonus Link: Sign up for Rebecca Heywood’s amazing #PublicSectorJobBoard newsletter on LinkedIn for job opportunities in digital government from across the country.