Government’s newfound agility
Governments are becoming agile across a range of areas including policymaking, regulation, technology development, procurement, and broader organizational agility.
William D. Eggers
Paul Bien
Shannon Lundquist
Maximilian Lennart Nagel
Traditionally, and stereotypically, the public sector tends to move slowly. Numerous checks and balances, oversight, and caution are built into many systems. Personnel policies prioritize job security, meaning that agencies may struggle to hire and fire like private companies, which often results in companies being agile and nimble.
That’s not to say that governments can’t speed things up if necessary: When unprecedented events demand immediate action—the Pearl Harbor bombing, the 9/11 attacks, the COVID-19 pandemic—public sector leaders are able to come forward to quickly form working coalitions and programs. But often, after things get done, the agencies return to business as usual.
That slow pace is untenable. Crises today hardly pass before the next crisis arrives. Black swans that demand swift government intervention are no longer uncommon, with risks—arising from geopolitical conflicts, health emergencies, natural disasters, energy crises, fragile supply chains, and fractious trade relationships—ever more complex and uncertain. Agencies can likely no longer operate on deliberately paced timelines anymore, staying within organizational boundaries.
Government leaders have recognized a new imperative: the need for a responsive, adaptive, and flexible model. Agile government can be that model.1
Agile is hardly a new business concept, and its philosophy of flexibility and feedback-based iteration has moved far beyond its origins in software development.2 Over the last several years, government agencies worldwide have taken note, using agile approaches in procurement, regulation, policymaking, workforce deployment, funding, and even constructing physical infrastructure to achieve 10x change.3 It’s a small step to broadly applying agile thinking to government’s focus on mission delivery.
Breaking trade-offs
Agile is happening: Around the world, governments are abandoning traditional processes and using more flexible, iterative approaches to service delivery and decision-making. But in adopting agility, agency leaders face unique challenges and trade-offs. The urgency of agile decision-making inevitably clashes with the necessity for thorough and deliberative processes; rigid accountability systems that aim to ensure transparency and adherence to rules can hinder flexibility. But that doesn’t mean accountability failures need be the price of agility.
Embracing a “two-gear government” model fosters agility by simultaneously optimizing existing services and operations while innovating for the future.4 This dual-focus approach can enable agencies to swiftly respond to evolving challenges and reimagine their workflows and processes. And it asks governments to challenge traditional orthodoxies of how regulations are enacted, services are procured, funding is allocated, and the workforce is hired and deployed.
Convergence: The key to 10x improvement in agility
Agencies are striving for a significant 10x boost in agility and achieving that involves a multifaceted approach. This involves rethinking processes, adopting flexible talent models, and creating innovative regulatory frameworks. Investing in new technologies can help agencies build the capability and capacity to respond rapidly to changing circumstances such as a sudden increase in demand for public services, though tech alone is insufficient. For example, during the pandemic, when many agencies rolled out direct cash transfer programs, embracing digital technologies was only one factor in ensuring money was deposited in bank accounts. The programs would not have functioned without parallel changes in regulation, collaboration with private and public sector entities, eligibility criteria relaxation, and newly hired contract workers helping applicants file for claims.
Put simply, the path to a 10x improvement in agility involves a holistic approach. It's a coordinated effort where regulatory adjustments, collaboration, and workforce innovations complement technological advancements. Consider how combining different tools might have tangible impacts on the agility of agencies:
- Agile culture + network mindset + shared governance + foresight capabilities = Faster response to a crisis
- Data-sharing + feedback loops + soft laws + foresight capabilities and scenario analysis = Adaptive regulation
Trend in action
Making 10x agility improvements requires combining the power of multiple tools—tools that are being applied in a variety of government domains and functions, including organizational agility, agile software development, agile procurement, and agile regulation and policymaking.
Organizational agility
An agile organization functions like a fluid network in which funding, staffing, policies, and processes flow and adapt as needed. Such organizations are driven by a fast, flexible, and collaborative operating model capable of learning and adapting to changing needs and environments.5 Before June 2023, few may have described the state government of Pennsylvania as an agile organization, but its work to reopen a collapsed bridge in only 12 days argues for that characterization.6
When a truck carrying 8,500 gallons of flammable liquid overturned outside of Philadelphia, the resulting fire melted an overpass bridge on Interstate 95, a major regional route.7 The site crossed an 86-inch sewer line that could not bear the weight of a traditional dirt infill, and officials feared repairs would take months.8 But engineers quickly decided not to rebuild the six-lane bridge from scratch, opting instead to use a glass aggregate filler to build up the foundation underlying a temporary overpass. Thus began a public-private effort that allowed the construction of a fully functioning temporary bridge through a flexible and collaborative governance process, flexible funding mechanisms, and an agile workforce.9
Agile resourcing. The Pennsylvania Department of Transportation shifted equipment from a nearby project to begin demolition. Using local knowledge, builders identified a foam glass aggregate plant that produced lightweight filler. Union workers labored around the clock. When rain threatened to delay construction, the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing, LLC loaned a jet dryer from Pocono Raceway, 95 miles north.10
Breaking down barriers to improve outcomes. Governor Josh Shapiro authorized the transfer of US$7 million in available funds to the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, providing a flexible financial foundation to address evolving needs. The US Department of Transportation released an additional US$3 million to get the repairs started, buying time to pull together full funding.11 State agencies were also granted the authority to employ emergency procurement procedures, streamlining the acquisition of essential supplies and services. A focused effort on breaking down barriers produced results. “We fast-tracked the permitting process to avoid delays while maintaining safety standards,” Shapiro said, “relying on our experience with past permitting processes as well as the expertise of engineers and other professionals.”12
Regulatory agility. Shapiro cut permitting and procurement red tape that would have delayed the critical project.13 The flexibility extended to the suspension of regulatory statutes and procedural formalities, allowing state agencies to swiftly implement emergency assignments.
Developing a culture of agile leadership. Agile leaders adapt their approaches as needed, focusing on results. Rather than hoard authority, good leaders give responsibility. “No one had to check with headquarters to keep the project moving,” Shapiro said. “The construction site was headquarters.”14
Agile funding and agile software development
In February 2001, at a Utah ski resort,15 17 software developers, programmers, scientists, and authors came together to find common ground on an alternative to “documentation driven” software development practices and emerged with “a manifesto for agile software development.”16 In the more than two decades since, companies have applied agile principles to a wide range of processes, and agencies have followed suit. But government faces unique challenges in adopting an agile approach, particularly in budgeting and funding processes.
The traditional annual funding process favors large-scale, omnibus projects evaluated upon completion, very much in contrast to agile’s focus on continuous and incremental testing of value delivered through minimum viable products, with resources realigned and reallocated based on outcomes and changing needs.
The federal government launched the Technology Modernization Fund (TMF) in 2018, aiming to change the way the government funds IT modernization projects. As in agile software development, funding is tied to the completion of milestones.17
The TMF emphasizes an iterative approach to system development. The fund structure allows agencies to implement multi-year projects in an agile manner and de-risk projects from the vagaries of fiscal-year funding models that require annual approval of each multi-year project. The TMF also helps enable agencies to request funding to adapt to the fast pace of changing technology needs, and outcome-based funding allows agencies to review and course-correct technology development throughout each project, mitigating the risk of costly failures.18
In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, the fund’s broad mandate and flexible model allowed it to pivot resources to new types of projects.19 An additional US$1 billion of federal funding helped strengthen cyberdefense in the wake of high-profile ransomware attacks and modernize technology during the pandemic.20 The TMF has invested in 47 IT projects so far, 36 of which were through the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, aimed at addressing urgent IT modernization needs.21
The TMF has also allocated funds to agencies that hold sensitive data related to foreign aid, health care, and US employment. It allocated US$18 million to the US Department of Health and Human Services to protect public health information against increasing cyberattacks on critical infrastructure. Similarly, the fund granted US$15.2 million to the US Department of Labor to protect its digital assets from cyber threats.22
In December 2021, Guy Cavallo, US Office of Personnel Management’s chief information officer, highlighted the importance of the TMF funding for addressing pressing needs. “I can’t wait to go back to the Hill and ask for additional appropriations in FY2024 if I need to do something now,” he explained, noting that “the TMF funding allows an agency to take on a modernization task now, versus if they go through traditional appropriations, you’re gonna have to wait a couple of appropriation cycles before that money even shows up.”
Cavallo added: “If we have to do it with our own funding, this could take me three or four years. Let’s apply for [TMF] funding now and get this knocked out in the next 18 months.”23
TMF funding also was allocated to the US General Services Administration (GSA), which faced the challenge of modernizing 88 database applications whose outdated technology and user interfaces didn’t easily integrate with other systems. Reliance on annual fiscal funding would have forced the GSA to take a piecemeal approach to tackling the transformational project.24 The TMF awarded US$7.8 million to the GSA in 2018, and the agency elected to implement agile methodology to modernize its applications. This also allowed the GSA to leverage existing multi-year contracts without worrying about contract renewals.
To execute the project, the agency put up a cross-functional team of 20 members from diverse business lines rather than relying on a dedicated IT team.25 The cross-functional team had to not only modernize legacy systems but also actually flip years of orthodoxies about business processes, replacing those long-established processes with agile and iterative ways of working by introducing a mindset of collaboration and continuous development.26
The team’s cross-functional nature brought collaboration to the fore. Team members from the US Office of Technology provided project management support and interfaced with the US Office of Management and Budget and the TMF board to keep them apprised of the project. The rest of the team focused on the software development and user experience, working in tandem on two-week sprint cycles and tracking work activities using a project management tool. To take stock of ongoing sprints, sub-teams met weekly to coordinate activities and assess dependencies; the development team met biweekly to coordinate with teams providing core IT services.27
The modernization helped GSA achieve not only agility in its technology systems but also an agile way of working. The team took the next step and created a playbook for all agencies on how to move database applications to propagate agile methodologies and establish repeatable processes to modernize legacy applications.28
Agile procurement
Traditional government procurement processes can be onerous: providing detailed specifications, releasing a request for proposal, selecting a vendor, and waiting patiently for the vendor to deliver a solution. “It takes around three years to create requirements and another two to purchase solutions,” explained Alex Benay, Canada’s former CIO.29 Agile procurement aims to boost speed and efficiency by working iteratively with vendors on prototypes. The process eschews detailed prescriptive requirements to make room for innovation by including flexibility on how outcomes are achieved.
The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) launched the Procurement Innovation Lab in 2015 to experiment and test innovative, faster procurement approaches, embracing agile methodology and risk-taking. The lab has awarded more than 125 procurement projects and has started training procurement officers in other federal agencies.30
The lab helped the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) double the speed of a procurement contract by cutting the days to award a contract from 180 days to 94 days.31
The FDA sought help to design, develop, and maintain applications. In phase one, it asked 19 interested vendors to submit a five-page prior experience write-up. After review of the write-ups, four vendors were selected to proceed to phase two—all this was completed within a week’s time. In the second phase, two weeks after the first, vendors provided one-hour oral presentations to discuss technical solutions and pricing. Shortlisting at stage 1 helped the FDA reduce the number of proposals requiring comprehensive evaluation from 19 to four. After the award, the team also conducted debriefs with unsuccessful bidders, resulting in zero protests.32
In its ninth year, the lab aims to promote innovative procurement practices across the federal government; to date, it has conducted more than 80 boot camps to train over 5,000 DHS and governmentwide procurement officials. In fiscal year 2021, the lab also rolled out a series of 10-minute micro training sessions on specific procurement innovation topics.33
Similar innovations in procurement are taking place at the local government level. To select a high-ticket contract life cycle management system, the Dunedin City Council in New Zealand streamlined procurement, using a lean agile process to cut the timeline from three months to only three days.34 The council quickly shortlisted three vendors and organized a “big room” event, at which the council presented challenges and allowed vendors to talk through their solutions. The vendor presentations allowed the council members to assess the various approaches to solving challenges and the capabilities and features of the vendors’ proposed systems.35 The council selected the winning vendor at the end of day two.36
Agile regulation and policymaking
With complexity and unpredictability increasingly part of the decision-making process, policymakers need new tools and novel regulatory approaches to explore scenarios and weigh policy options. Foresight and scenario analysis enables policymakers to understand emerging trends and identify future risks, allowing them to consider new policies to help mitigate these risks.
The United Kingdom Department for Work and Pensions, responsible for the nation’s welfare, pension, and child care policy, uses a policy simulation model (PSM) to understand the costs of policy options and the impact of policy changes on claimants’ income and poverty. The tool integrates a wide range of policy data, administrative data, and tax rules with assumptions such as weekly hours worked and minimum wages. The PSM’s findings helped department leaders decide to move to a universal credit system, replacing six existing benefit programs. The model considered projected economic and demographic shifts and compared the benefits of introducing the universal credit system on work incentives and poverty.37 The PSM model was used to make tweaks in the universal credit to lower the taper rate—that is, the rate at which benefits are reduced as earnings rise.38
Ireland has also developed a simulation tool for policymaking, using data from patents, knowledge flows, and national economic data to model how investors and corporations might react to various government policies. With regional economic data and sector information, officials can simulate policies’ effect before rolling them out in the real world.39
Such foresight or simulation can never be 100% accurate, but greater agility can compensate for less accurate foresight: Lessons learned from prototypes, pilots, sandbox exercises, and staged rollouts can be used to fine-tune policies before they are adopted at scale. Such agile approaches to regulation rely on trial and error and the codesign of regulation and standards. The result: They have faster feedback loops, enabling them to respond to innovations and disruptions more swiftly.40
Zombie ideas
Zombie ideas are ingrained policy ideas or practices that can impede adaptability, causing agencies to follow traditional methods that hinder agility. The rapidly changing environment demands a paradigm shift in favor of agile governance. Governments can work to navigate challenges and ensure resilience and responsiveness. However, agility alone does not protect organizations and policymakers from entrenched and orthodox beliefs. Simply speeding up processes or implementing agile frameworks risks perpetuating outdated paradigms and undermining genuine innovation and responsiveness.41
As a result, embracing agility generally requires a dual commitment: implementing agile methodologies while also questioning and challenging underlying ideologies and assumptions. True agility goes beyond speeding up processes, constantly challenging orthodoxies, and zombie ideas.
My take
The case for shared and end-to-end policy infrastructure for adaptive policymaking
Pia Andrews, a serial public sector reformer with experience of working with governments in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand42
The term “policy infrastructure” is not a commonly used term in government discourse, but policymakers and those who implement policies rely on it almost every day. Policy infrastructure involves the data, tools, and platforms that assist governments in managing policies throughout their life cycle, from design to implementation and monitoring for continuous improvement.
The current approach to policy infrastructure is often fragmented and inconsistently applied, as different actors create, update, implement, and evaluate policies with different tools. The lack of shared or common policy infrastructure leads to different interpretations by different actors, causing significant gaps between policy design and delivery in the real-world and an inability to effectively and continuously optimize policy outcomes over time.
In the ideal shared and end-to-end policy infrastructure approach (figure 2), all the actors involved have the same modeling tools, policy twins, monitoring tools, and feedback loops. The shared infrastructure could also be open to the public, promoting transparency and allowing for alternative modeling and testing of policy options.
One intriguing aspect of policy infrastructure is the concept of policy twins. These digital representations of policies, including legislation as code, policy test suites and relevant data, could help bridge the gap between policy design and policy delivery with a shared reference implementation of policy. This could enable a more test-driven approach to policy, legislative and regulatory drafting, and help identify unintended impacts over the whole life of the policy. They also help delivery departments and regulators to monitor for how the policy rules are used in reality, and gather feedback to make necessary changes in policy implementation to continually maximize intended outcomes.
Policy infrastructure could be complemented with a modern and adaptive policy management model (figure 2), drawing inspiration from the techniques and methods used in product management and continuous integration and continuous delivery pipelines (a process that automates the software delivery process) to operationalize policy agility. In a policy journey map, each policy could have a policy manager responsible for the end-to-end outcome realization across all interventions, while each policy intervention might have a policy product owner responsible for its delivery. This can provide the ability to dial up or down individual interventions according to their efficacy and performance.
Policy infrastructure and adaptive policy management could ensure that interventions are effective, complementary, and can continuously adapt to maximize policy outcomes while mitigating unintended impacts. Governments can transform to achieve more adaptive and effective operating models and support systems to deliver policy outcomes by embracing a strategic and proactive approach to modernizing policy infrastructure and management.
What the 10x future holds
Embed foresight practices: Foresight helps improve agility by increasing lead times to adapt to changes. Scenario analysis and policy simulations can allow officials to peep into the future and consider potential impacts of policies before enacting them.
Leverage emerging technologies such as generative artificial intelligence: From using gen AI to generate documents and reports to having machine learning predict demand, AI can help reduce the time needed to create and process procurement requests. Similarly, gen AI can help transcribe legislative meetings and quickly develop summaries of existing policies to help avoid duplicative legislation.
Simulate with technology: A combination of AI and digital twin technology can allow governments to simulate proposed infrastructure projects and anticipate reaction. Simulation can also help agencies to iterate their approach to policymaking and service delivery and avoid costly failures.
Rise of innovative funding mechanisms: Incremental funding tied to outcomes and shared funding that enable agencies to collaborate between other agencies and levels of government can introduce more agility into government operations.
Steps you can take now
Creating avenues for experimentation: Create sandboxes, policy labs, and innovation spaces to develop and procure technology act as dedicated experimentation units for agency workforces.
Building a broader ecosystem: Form alliances and partnerships with external stakeholders to bring innovative practices into government operations and explore tapping into gig workers for flexible and agile hiring strategies.
Building flexibility into processes: Take greater advantage of soft laws, such as guidelines and codes of conduct, to provide more flexibility and respond faster to disruptive changes.
Inculcating a culture of agility: Foster an agile mindset within agencies, prioritizing outcomes for citizens and businesses over rigid processes. Establish faster feedback loops to enhance responsiveness and adaptability to changing circumstances.