Government agencies — looking for a few good Harvard students?
I’m teaching my Tech and Innovation in Government class again in Spring 2019, and I’m looking for a few government agencies who want to participate (application here).
Here is my recap on the class from spring 2018:
In past years, I’ve partnered with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, the U.S. Department of Treasury, the Census Bureau, the Commonwealth of Massachussetts, NYC, and the City of Boston (including DoIT, Boston Fire Department, Boston Police Department, and Boston Public Schools).
I want to invite these government agencies to partner again! I also want to invite other federal, state, and local agencies to explore being a part of the class.
Each government agency selected will work with a team of five students, based in the Harvard Kennedy School, but including other students from across Harvard — past classes have also included students from the College, Business, Design, Engineering, and Law schools.
As the class website says:
“Tech and Innovation in Government” is a Harvard Kennedy School field course where students conduct original user research to solve real problems in government.”
In other words, students work alongside government clients (the students get academic credit, not pay) and work on real problems — not ones made up for a class assignment.
While the issues the students work on often have a digital or technology element to them, students work on all kinds of problems and develop and test a wide range of solutions — for example, the project with the Boston Fire Department started with a focus on the very high rate of cancer among retired firefighters.
What do the students learn?
- User-research and design thinking. Too much of government is removed from the lived experience of beneficiaries, citizens, and front-line government workers. In this class, students go out into the field, ask open ended questions, observe behavior, and use the best practices of user research. That means the student team will come into your government agency, and spend real time with people you serve.
- Synthesis of user research. Dozens of in-person interviews and observations are real data. But to make that data useful, teams need to turn that data into representative groups of people (personas), stories of how people experience a government service end-to-end (journey maps), or how different groups relate to each other (stakeholder maps). Students synthesize their research into presentations that bring new light to the problem statment that your agency has articulated.
- Brainstorming, prototyping and user-testing. Building on their user insights, student team brainstorm ideas about solutions and interventions that might meet the user needs they identify. Starting with paper prototypes and moving to digital ones, students get a chance to take their ideas and test them with real people — quickly learning what works and what doesn’t.
- Teamwork. Inevitably students rate the team dynamic as one of the most challenging but also one the most rewarding experiences they’ve had at school. I’m a big believer in small interdisciplinary teams. Your student team will have a range of experiences and backgrounds.
- Story-telling and communications. The best designers, engineers, and product managers can figure what to build and can build it. But if they can’t tell a simple and compelling story about it, it’s harder for them to get people excited about their recommendations, especially beyond an early prototype. I require students to blog several times during the class, about their project. As someone who has written many blog posts inside and outside government, it’s harder than it looks. It’s hard to make it immediately interesting and hook a reader, make it widely accessible to the average reader, and completely devoid of jargon. Of course, the students work closely with you to make sure they aren’t making non-public information available.
- Hacking the bureaucracy with empathy. Ultimately, I want the students to learn more than just digital product management in government. I want them to unleash their inner change-agent, bureaucracy hacker, and public-sector entrepreneur (hat tip to my HBS colleague Mitch Weiss for advancing this idea). I want them to understand how bureaucracies really work (hint: understand and build trust with the people that work in them!) and learn to be effective in catalyzing change — even as a small external team of students. That means that you, the government client, needs to see the students as partners, and trust them.
For my class, I like working with government agencies that are ok with ambiguity, and those that have an interest in understanding the underlying problem from the perspective of end-users and line employees (i.e. you dig human-centered design, even if you don’t know much about it).
Another way to say this: bring us your problems, not your proposed solutions. If you want a team of students to build you a specific app or a predictive alogrithm that you are determined to build — this probably isn’t the right class to partner with. But if you are willing to let a talented student team explore a problem space, and work with you to explore a range of solutions—then let’s talk.
Importantly, the people at the heart of the problem — whether they are external citizens, customers, beneficiaries, etc. or internal employees — need be local to the Boston area, since it is hard for the students to regularly travel during the semester.
I expect government agencies that we work with to devote real time and energy to the class, make their agency accessible to the students, and include senior executives directly in the class, including coming to the second class and also the final class (i.e. Demo Day). The students get a lot out of the class, and your agency will too.
Sound interesting? If you are a government official and want to explore further, drop me a line at nick_sinai at hks.harvard.edu or fill out this application. Looking forward to the spring!
