Overview
California Alpha was an experimental project conducted by the State of California from December 2019 to March 2020. The 90-day project brought together a team of internal and external digital experts to build a working prototype of how the state could re-think service delivery, culture and work.
The challenge
The state was making progress on digital transformation efforts, but there were still shortcomings in delivery and culture. There was little focus or emphasis on direct human-centered design practices or modern development practices, causing digital innovation stasis throughout the state.
The opportunity
As part of a new CA.gov mandate from Gov. Gavin Newsom, the state tested a low-risk pilot that adopted user-centered design, agile development and open culture in a short-term project with a small-but-nimble team of digital service experts. The learnings from this project would be used to expand digital service innovation across other state agencies.
Context
In December of 2019, a small team assembled for a 90-day experimental project to help the State of California rethink government digital service delivery.
Its members – picked from government and private sector – had never collectively worked together. Their mission was to create – in three months – a culture and product that embodied a new way of delivering services to Californians, one that focused on designing for user needs and challenged the status quo of digital delivery in state government.
Setting an Alpha foundation
During the 2015-2019 Gov. Jerry Brown administration, the California Government Operations Agency (GovOps) team spent time scaling up the digital capacity and infrastructure at the Department of Technology (CDT).
From 2016-2019, GovOps worked with CDT to challenge the status quo and establish a new, stronger digital service foundation:
- Redesigned CA.gov
- Updated the state’s Web Standards Policy
- Restructured and created the Digital Services Network
- Created the Domain Name Request System (closing hundreds of unused domains)
- Piloted, procured, and established the open data program and policy (led to the creation of CalData and a series of civic hacking events)
- Created the first Office of Digital Innovation (ODI)
Early digital service champions
GovOps Secretary Marybel Batjer, Deputy Secretaries Stuart Drown and Lynda Gledhill, and then California Health and Human Services Undersecretary Mike Wilkening were the few senior political appointees at the time who understood and actively championed the value of better service delivery.
This understanding was inspired by the early work led by Code for America and the failed launch of healthcare.gov, which led to the creation of the U.S. Digital Service. Stuart, Marybel, and Mike attended non-traditional government technology events like the Code for America Summit, and took the time to learn the intricacies of service delivery.
A new CA.gov mandate
The same team then worked on the redesign of the CA.gov homepage. While the CA.gov redesigned better integrated links of services, it failed to be truly user-centric. It did little user research, and it didn’t challenge departments in their service delivery approaches.
When Governor Newsom was elected in the fall of 2018, Mike was appointed Senior Advisor for Innovation and Digital Services. He resurfaced interest in the redesign of CA.gov, having learned about similar efforts in the UK, Mexico, Argentina, Peru, and others.
Working with GovOps, they hired a vendor to do an assessment of CA.gov. The findings led to the recommendation of doing an Alpha of CA.gov – a proof of concept led by a multidisciplinary team that would explore new norms and use design thinking to redefine what the site should be, one more focused on meeting the needs of Californians.
This Alpha team would be the start of a new Office of Digital Innovation, including moving functions out of the original ODI within CDT and into a program within GovOps.
This foundational work was the precursor that created the conditions for the Alpha team to experiment with a new way of approaching service delivery.
Going Alpha
Alpha started with empowering a product owner. As the Digital Services Playbook says, “There must be a single product owner who has the authority and responsibility to assign tasks and work elements; make business, product, and technical decisions; and be accountable for the success or failure of the overall service.”
As Assistant Secretary for Digital Engagement at the Government Operations Agency, Angie Quirarte had the experience and understanding of the state’s digital service landscape and knew the policy and technical opportunities and limitations of what was previously done.
Newsom’s Senior Advisor for Digital Services Mike Wilkening and Undersecretary of GovOps Julie Lee asked Angie to lead the project. Angie quickly outlined a four-point plan:
- Build the right team
- Design a collaborative workspace
- Set new working norms
- Work in the open
Mike and Julie trusted Angie’s vision and empowered her to move forward.
There were initial concerns about the radical transparency of working and communicating in the open, but they leaned into the core idea that an Alpha is for experimenting and learning.
This approach would not only help the team work faster and with more intention, but also engage stakeholders and the public in a more authentic way, and generally make the project more collaborative and participatory.
Building the right team
With the green light, Angie knew that the team had to model an innovative spirit, one that respected the work, but was open to embracing new approaches that challenged their status quo.
Her first move was to find a partner who knew the California bureaucracy and could get things done. She asked Kimberly Glenn from CDT to be the first member of the Alpha team, serving as its team success and delivery manager. Kimberly’s deep knowledge of CDT and how to navigate internal processes was critical to ensuring Alpha could be impactful from the start.
They assembled a multidisciplinary team, intentionally recruiting for roles not typically found in government projects, like user research and content and product design.
Half the team was sourced from government. Chad Bratton, Artem Khomishen, Carter Medlin – from CDT – brought deep institutional knowledge of networks, security, CA.gov, and the state’s domain program. JP Petruccione and Oriel Gomez – from GovOps – supported comms and delivery.
The other half (Luke Fretwell, Aaron Hans, Hilary Hoeber, Rebecca Huval) was brought in from the private sector, creating a hybrid team that blended government experience with new perspectives.
Behind them, there were many others at CDT and CalHHS not formally named on the team, but played a critical role in the success of the Alpha (and later the COVD-19 pandemic digital response efforts).
Design a collaborative workspace
For Alpha to succeed, it needed an open, collaborative, and external workspace. Angie and Kim wanted the onsite office space to be agency-neutral but accessible, keeping them close to the heart of government (Sacramento), while giving the team a space that cultivated innovation.
A storefront location a block from Capitol Park was chosen. It was a bare, open space with large windows, perfect for molding a collaboration hub. They furnished it with borrowed items from the surplus warehouse and painted the walls with dry erase paint to maximize ideation. The room was constantly filled with post-it notes. There was even a “gratitude wall” dedicated to Alpha partners and supporters.
The most important aspect of the space was that it was dedicated to this experiment. It was held away from standard government buildings and purposely not located in existing teams where bias and distractions could be introduced. Yet, it was close enough where stakeholders, decision makers, and even the public could walk by and see what this team was actively trying to achieve.
This set-up also allowed the team to experiment with working remotely and hybrid. Most of the team worked onsite, enabling real-time coordination. But it also seeded practices in distributed, asynchronous work because, despite the demanding mission, not everyone was locked in the space from 9-5. The flexibility allowed for people to optimize their productivity based on personal preferences.
Ultimately, the Alpha space became the central operations for California’s COVID-19 Digital Response and other subsequent data and digital response efforts. The exercise in workspace flexibility better prepared team members for working (and coaching others) on effectively distributed service delivery during the pandemic.
Setting new working norms
This new culture was guided by a set of principles the team adopted and put into practice in how they collaborated and in the product development.
The team made intentional choices about their digital tools, adopting Slack for asynchronous communications, Google Workspace for content and documentation collaboration, and GitHub for managing operations and delivery.
The team documented everything—not just what they did, but how they did it—in a public GitHub repository called the Alpha Handbook, through Done/Doings updates, and each release had its story and notes, allowing technologists and the public to learn and collaborate along the way.
Design
Human-centered design practices helped us put people first and re-imagine digital government services.
While there were resource limitations to conducting formal user testing, the team was able to incorporate some practices into the product, from guerrilla user testing in the park to the creation of feedback forms and conducting interviews. The team also bought low-priced, Android phones and used them as part of the testing process for all new feature development.
There are other, more recent use cases around user research for governments, but being able to embrace the in-the-moment user testing approach with people in the park was to model that it can be done, even when you don’t have a full operation to support formal user research.
The team also developed a set of principles to align on design vision and decision-making. Being able to discuss and align on how the team designed created a shared understanding of what they needed to focus on. The Alpha Design Principles prioritized outcomes over optics, such as:
- Start with user needs
- Optimize performance
- Make it accessible and inclusive
- Do the hard work to make things simple- understand context
Before shipping a feature, each release was checked for accessibility, readability, and user testing.
Development
The team zeroed in on development practices that nourished rapid iteration and were able to incorporate the latest user feedback, make code changes and ship safely to production in minutes.
They did this with:
- End-to-end tests built into the deploy pipeline to catch regressions.
- Accessibility tests running against code commits to catch the issues automated tests can quickly find in codebases that make sites unusable for some people.
- Cheap, fast, easy to scale cloud architecture based on Node.js Lambda APIs, static site generators, light web components for client side interactivity.
Agile
The team also embraced agile ceremonies, including:
- Starting every morning with a short stand-up, where each team member talked about what they were working on, and where they were blocked.
- Hosting regular, blameless retrospectives where they dedicated time to reflect on the latest release.
- Product demos where they walked through working prototypes and problem-solved with sponsors and partners.
Open
The commitment to working in the open and collaboration was the team’s cultural anchor. This commitment was reinforced by Luke, who had previously worked with Angie on other open efforts around open data and open source.
This included:
- Public GitHub repository with issues, project board
- Regular “Done/Doing” posts
- Release notes
Communications
Capturing the narrative was so important that they had a dedicated communications lead (JP) to share the Alpha story in an authentic, non-traditional way.
Team members were encouraged to share their experiences on social media. The press was invited to cover the journey from beginning to end, giving the genuine, unprecedented (for government) background and transparency into the inner workings of the project.
The context, transparency and honesty about the objective and work created a different kind of rapport with the media and the public, but also the team and its culture.
The Alpha team wrapped up its experiment in March 2020. They did this with a show-and-tell of the final product, but also perspectives from each team member, highlighting the lessons learned in the process.
As Alpha finished its work, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and members of the team – with its lessons learned – immediately moved into crisis mode, leading the state’s response and recovery efforts. The team’s work would ultimately influence key digital initiatives beyond COVID-19.
The potential for Alpha’s success to be processed and adopted statewide was interrupted by the immediate needs of the moment.
Post Alpha
Despite the abrupt transition away from Alpha, the project has influenced a number of state digital delivery initiatives:
- During COVID19 response, the team maintained Alpha principles and modeled them in the work by launching the Digital Crisis Standard.
- Pandemic Unemployment Assistance: The California Employment Development Department used the Alpha prototype to build the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program during COVID-19.
- Statewide training: Scaled content and product design through training for state employees in the Innovation Hub.
- IT Master Services Agreement: Updated IT Master Services Agreement for Digital Service Consulting (and renamed Technology, Digital, and Data Consulting) to include roles like product management, content Design and more.
- Engaged California: Newest user-centric campaign that continues to refine how government engages with the public and identifies user needs to inform policy priorities.
- New CA.gov (and new California Design System): Heavily inspired by the Alpha prototype.
- ScanGov: Aaron and Luke are building a government digital experience platform (inspiration).
Principles
California Alpha principles:
- Default to open
- Assign one leader and hold that person accountable
- Bring in experienced teams
- Emphasize collaboration across teams
- Structure budgets and contracts to support delivery
- Choose a modern technology stack
- Understand what people need
- Use data to drive decisions
- Address the whole experience, from start to finish
- Make it simple and intuitive
- Build the service using agile and iterative practices
- Deploy in a flexible hosting environment
- Automate testing and deployments
- Manage security and privacy through reusable processes
- Iterate and refine principles as you learn by doing
Team
California Alpha was comprised the following team members:
- Product owner: Set vision and defined and prioritized product features. (Angie Quirarte)
- Team success/delivery manager: Managed operations and removed obstacles. (Kimberly Glenn)
- User researcher: Studied how people use products to inform design decisions. (Hilary Hoeber)
- Product designer: Created overall look, feel, and user experience design. (Luke Fretwell)
- Interaction designer: Designed how users interact with web elements. (Artem Khomishen)
- Content designer: Wrote and designed all text users see in the product. (Rebecca Huval)
- Tech lead: Guided technical team and made key programming decisions. (Aaron Hans)
- Technical architect: Planned underlying technology structure and system design approach. (Chad Bratton)
- Full-stack developer: Coded both user-facing features and behind-the-scenes server functionality. (Carter Medlin)
- Communications: Managed messaging and announcements. (JP Petrucione)
- Executive fellow: Supported product owner and team. (Oriel Gomez)
Artifacts
Operations
Work
Communications
- Re-imagining CA.gov
- Introducing the Alpha Team
- Alpha.CA.gov product release 1
- Lessons learned translating Alpha.ca.gov release 1
- Alpha.CA.gov product release 2
- Why Alpha is prioritizing APIs
- Alpha.CA.gov product release 3
- Done/doing
COVID-19
Sample Alpha practices adopted by COVID-19 response team:
- Done/Doing (Week of May 11, 2020)
- Prioritizing User Needs in a Crisis
- Team Care in a Crisis
- Plain Language and the Digital Crisis Standard
Listen
A GovFresh Podcast series on California Alpha:
- California Alpha (Part 1): Setting an Alpha foundation
- California Alpha (Part 2): Going Alpha
Press
- California’s Alpha Team Takes on Real-Time .Gov Redesign (Government Technology)
- State Website Redesign Could Influence Other Departments, Processes (Industry Insider)
- State Website Sprint Marks First Release, Lessons Learned (Industry Insider)
- State Website Sprint Wraps First Phase (Industry Insider)
- The Time Has Come for Alpha 2.0 (Industry Insider)
Acknowledgements
Contributions/feedback: Crosby Burns, Aaron Hans
Thank you to the following who inspired this work:
Fellow Team Alpha members: Chad Bratton, Kimberly Glenn, Oriel Gomez, Aaron Hans, Rebecca Huval, Hilary Hoeber, Artem Khomishen, Carter Medlin, JP Petrucione
Others: Marybel Batjer, Stuart Drown, Mike Wilkening, Julie Lee, Lynda Gledhill, Yolanda Richardson, Tamara Srzentic, Chaeny Emanavin, Michael Valle, Jon Kirkham, Greg Gearheart, Krista Canellakis, Justin Cohan-Shapiro, Ryan Ko, Emma Gawen, James Stewart, Mikey Dickerson, Tom Loosemore, Jen Tress, Carrie Bishop, Elizabeth Steffensen, Cheryl Katsen, Corey Mahoney, Elisabeth Noriega, Shivani Bose-Varela, Joy Bonaguro, Amy Tong and many many more.
