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<aside> 💡 See other units in the syllabus
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This is a detailed breakdown of how David Eaves, a Lecturer at the University College London's Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (UCL IIPP), teaches the contents of Unit 8 of the open access syllabus developed by Teaching Public Service in the Digital Age. See how parts two and three are taught.
This page is part of a series of twenty-five classes that David developed originally for the Harvard Kennedy School's master and executive education programs, where he taught for eight years, and are now taught at UCL's master and applied learning programs.
We believe presenting diverse ways to teach the syllabus will help others adopt and teach the material in various contexts. See here how Konstanz University's Prof Ines Mergel teaches the same unit.
This page was developed for university faculty who teach public administrators or master's levels students in public policy and public administration. This material may also be suitable for teaching to upper year undergraduates.
In this courses previous units, students have been introduced to practices and administrative approaches that are both made possible by, and needed, in a digital era. However, persuading a large bureaucracy to adopt these new practices and approaches - to change its modus operandi - requires overcoming technical, political and administrative risks.
In this class, David explores these risks by examining California’s decision to adopt both an agile and modular approach as it seeks to update a mission critical "legacy" system. The objective of the class is multifaceted. It seeks to show how key leaders sought to inject digital era practices into the state bureaucracy. It explores the issue of procurement, a core element of public administration and a frequent barrier to successful digital transformation. It also seeks to illustrate how the technically correct solution may not be preferable. And pushes students to think about both the conditions that need to be in place to effectively push for change as well as how governments can circumvent and manage risks as they seek to adopt digital era capabilities.
<aside> 📖 Context for this case (adapted from the case abstract): In October 2015, two senior California officials: Marybel Batjer, Secretary for Government Operations, and Michael Wilkening, Undersecretary for the Health and Human Services Agency, seized on an idea that had the potential to turn the state’s long dysfunctional technology procurement process on its head.
After years of planning, ****California was about to request bids for a new child welfare management system to replace a twenty-year-old technology that served millions of California’s children. The request for bids called for a “waterfall” approach to software development, where all aspects of the project would follow a pre-ordained sequence and likely cost the state nearly half a billion dollars.
Just weeks before ****the request was to be released Batjer and Wilkening proposed an alternative “architecture” that would break up the “monolith” proposal into its component parts. Rather than build and replace one giant system with another, why not replace the system in parts—or in modules? Second, for each of these modules, teams of programmers and social workers could work together to build a prototype and iterate till the final product satisfied the needs of the state—in a process known as “agile” development.
But could California’s bureaucracy, with its stringent procurement rules, pivot to a modular approach? And could Batjer and Wilkening convince state staff and county partners to experiment with agile development, a methodology never attempted in California government before?
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<aside> 📖 By the end of this class students should be able to:
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<aside> 💡 This class has a specific focus on:
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