The City of Austin's approach is broader than the traditional "digital services" model, investing in the capacities of service design, content strategy, and policy co-creation to solve for the broader challenges of why government services struggle to perform.

The Office of Design & Delivery has launched and is growing in its ability to improve outcomes across City of Austin departments and initiatives. The Office looks forward to the opportunity to advise other local and regional governments on how to build on their learnings, sharing learnings through conferences with the US Conference of Mayors, Route Fifty, and Code for America. One of thefounders, Ben Guhin Delphine, was recently hired to model on these efforts for Brown University and the State of Rhode Island.

Collaborators included City departments, such as the Office of Communications & Technology Management, Development Services, Resource Recovery, Emergency Medical Services, Public Health, and Police Oversight.

Community partners have included the Austin Justice Coalition, VAMOS Austin, Austin Tech Alliance, Ending Community Homelessness Coalition, Austin Downtown Alliance, Texas Campaign for the Environment, and other organizations recommended by Council Members and community partners.

Among the Office's key users, stakeholders, and beneficiaries are civil servants across the City of Austin. Our model integrates their perspectives and expertise among the most important aspects for success in any project or initiative, designing conversations and workshops as opportunities for co-creation and co-design.

Austin's residents are our primary beneficiary, and we have formalized processes, policies, and position descriptions to support continued research and testing directly with residents.

In the first 18 months, the Office of Design & Delivery has launched several high-impact services with benefit for residents as well as government stakeholders, including new opportunities for residents to submit complaints in English and Spanish about interactions with Police Officers, opportunities for residents experiencing homelessness to get trash collection from the City of Austin, and an accessible, mobile-friendly platform for digital services at alpha.austin.gov

https://www.kxan.com/news/local/austin/filing-complaints-thanking-austin-officers-now-easier-than-ever/1880931397
http://www.fox7austin.com/news/local-news/city-launches-pilot-program-that-aims-to-bring-homeless-austinites-weekly-trash-service
https://alpha.austin.gov/

The work of establishing this office faced challenges in the bureaucratic hurdles against creativity and curiosity in the public sector. Many managers and executives felt certain about "how things work" in government and dismissed the idea that we could hire experts in service design, product management, and web development to work for the city and deliver the next era of city services.

To overcome these disagreements, organisers continually pushed in a spirit of prototyping and testing, demonstrating through iterations that better recruiting and hiring in local government is possible with the right approaches and expertise. Three years ago, people were telling the City that this was impossible. Now it is the clear path forward.

To be successful, the Office recommend support from leadership toward new approaches to staffing, budgeting, and delivery. The bureaucratic hurdles here are real, and span a need for support across HR, budget, communications, and technical infrastructure.

The cost of a new staffing program is also significant – in the US, this corresponds to about $2M annually in salaries and benefits, which might not be possible for smaller governments, though we're interested in testing out regional coalitions to pool funding for this purpose.

The Office of Design & Delivery is currently working with Brown University and the State of Rhode Island on opportunities to replicate the success of this innovation, and have spoken with several other governments about how to learn from its success.

Through the New America Foundation, Code for America, and other partners, we've shared our position descriptions, hiring processes, and project management materials to support similar efforts across state and local governments, and launched our first Civic Futures Summit in 2019 to share practices across the region, partnering with design and technology leaders from New York City and Washington, D.C.

The best work in the complex world of public sector innovation comes through the efforts of multi-disciplinary teams. Over the past three years, we've continued to be tempted by the idea of hiring a single talented individual to work on an important effort, and are always reminded that this was a mistake. Working in public policy requires diverse perspectives and skillsets, and our efforts thrive when building on our model of design, technology, and policy shared across teams.

Another learning is that working inside of government – vs in the private sector – can allow you to be be honest about what works and doesn't. This is a true joy in how you can lead and motivate your teams in a spirit of transparency and continuous improvement.