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Six Ways to Success

To: The Secretary of the West Dakota Department of Social Services
From: Bob Behn
Date: August 2000
Re: Contracting for IT

To get your program people from Child Support Enforcement and the IT people from Administrative Services to work together to create an overall framework for the new CSE computer system, you need to do six things:

1. Get the right people on the design team.

Bob Behn's Manager's ChoiceThis design team needs to include five different kinds of people with different knowledge and different skills:

  • Program people who understand how the program works now and have the flexibility to conceptualize how it might work differently (even very differently) in the future. After all, once the new technology is in place, it will be harder to overhaul the operational concept of the program.

  • Program people who understand information technology and can talk in IT.

  • IT people who understand how to get program people to describe their needs (and desires) in operational terms.

  • IT people who have some familiarity with the policy or program that the new system will support.

  • Lawyers and procurement people who are loyal to something more than ensuring that they are not blamed for any financial or procurement scandal-and who recognize that a programmatic scandal can be just as harmful to citizens and produce just as damaging headlines as can a financial or procurement exposé.

    2. Appoint a program leader and an IT leader to co-chair the design team.

    This isn’t an IT project. This isn’t a CSE project. This is a joint IT-CSE project. This means that the leadership of the design team has to understand both IT and CSE. Moreover, the leadership of the design team has to be respected by both its IT members and its CSE members (and by the other IT and CSE people who will subsequently work on the project).

    If you can find one person with knowledge of both IT and CSE-and who is respected by both the design team’s IT and CSE members-you are lucky. Put this person in charge of the design effort.

    But if, as is more likely, you can’t find one individual with all these qualities, appoint a pair of co-chairs-one from IT and one from CSE. Then, hold these co-leaders jointly accountable for the work of the team.

    You can’t force these two individuals to cooperate. But if you choose two leaders with track records of collaborating with people outside of their organizations and their fields of expertise, you have a head start. Then, if you tie their individual professional fates to the success of this project, you can link their professional fortunes to each other, and thus provide them with the strongest possible incentive to develop an effective working relationship.

    3. Create a real team.

    To launch this project, don’t just collect a group of people in a conference room. To create a real team, make membership on the “Design Team” formal and significant. Give the team a real charge: a very specific task to accomplish by a very specific deadline.1 Hold a formal “initiation” ceremony at which you confer on these individual’s their collective responsibility.

    Make your commitment visible. If the team needs some additional expertise, appoint someone (who is recommended by the co-chairs) and then put him or her through the formal initiation.

    4. Make an up-front commitment to 360-degree feedback.

    You need to create team loyalty. To ensure that all of the members of the team are loyal to the team-rather than to their home departments-develop a system of 360-degree feedback.2 Every six months, ask every individual on the team to evaluate every other individual’s contribution. (Each member of the team should also provide feedback on your contributions as overseer and guardian of the team.)

    5. Make the lawyers and procurement people full members of the team.

    Make sure that the lawyers and procurement people participate fully in the 360-degree feedback. Indeed, tell the people from legal and procurement that, at the completion of the project, you will ask the team’s leaders to evaluate their contribution.

    6. Don’t rely on low bid.

    If your goal is to create an IT disaster, awarding the contract solely on the basis of low bid is the best way to achieve this goal.3 But avoiding the low-bid problem is not the design team’s responsibility. It is yours. So start working today to ensure that when the design team has finished its work, you have gained all of the regulatory clearances and waivers necessary to ensure that you aren’t stuck with the low-bid vendor.

    Agree or disagree? If you think you have a better way to deal with this month's Manager's Choice dilemma, or would like to expand on Bob Behn's approach, share your thoughts with other readers here. Send your solution to mailbox@governing.com. Please include your name, location, government or business title or job description, and a daytime phone number (for verification purposes).

    To see responses posted by other readers, click here.

    This edition of Manager’s Choice was originally discussed “live” in Denver in May at Governing’s Managing Technology 2000 conference.

    NOTES:

    1. Jon R. Katzenbach and Douglas K. Smith, The Wisdom of Teams: Creating the High-Performance Organization (New York: Harper Business, 1993).

    2. Richard Lepsinger and Anntoinette D. Lucia, The Art and Science of 360o Feedback (Jossey-Bass, Pfeiffer, 1997); David Waldman and Leanne Atwater, The Power of 360o Feedback: How to Leverage Performance Evaluations for Top Productivity (Gulf Publishing, 1998); Mark R. Edwards and Ann J. Ewen, 360o Feedback: The Powerful New Model of Employee Assessment and Performance Improvement (AMACOM, 1996).

    3. Steven Kelman, Procurement and Public Management: The Fear of Discretion and the Quality of Government Performance (Washington, D.C.: The AEI Press, 1990).

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