Feds are “growing good in government” this new fiscal year by partnering with industry and academia to build the feedback loops of the future.
The Growing Good in Government Initiative (G3I) – spearheaded by the Marketing and Regulatory Programs (MRP) Mission Area at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) – aims to help Feds improve how they influence the strategic direction and the business practices of government by leveraging data and emerging technology.
Jason Traquair, MRP Mission Area senior program manager at USDA, said during an ATARC event Tuesday that the initiative is already boasting over 65 “energized and amazing” volunteers who have signed up to dedicate four to eight hours per week over the next fiscal year to this project.
“The G3I is a network of motivated Program and Project Management (P/PM) Professionals from across the federal government who volunteer their time to support the advancement of innovative ideas,” the description to the G3I’s job opening – which closed on Sept. 1 – read. “Join us to participate in our exciting efforts to establish new and improved feedback loops in our system, which are used to continuously enhance our ability to adapt to change, further employee learning and development, increase quality, improve customer satisfaction, and optimize resources.”
The initiative has four priority areas: integrated value network; project management data and analytics architecture; project management knowledge network; and benefits realization management.
The integrated value network team leverages data to map crucial interdependencies within Federal organizations. It “helps in understanding the diverse needs of the organization, assessing what resources are available, and what strategies could be employed to achieve those goals.”
“Value integration breaks silos by giving people credit for the positive viral effects of the products,” Basil White, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) senior policy analyst and leader of G3I’s integrated value network team said. “So, you can mention those effects in your ad copy, you could transform the unintended value you’re providing into intended value that you provide on purpose, and then you can use that value to justify changes and regulations and laws to create more value.”
For example, White explained that he was able map the data between parking flow at VA hospitals and access to care and found that more parking spaces reduce veteran suicide.
The project management data and analytics architecture team is working to build out platforms that are going to use data insight from programs and projects to ensure it aligns with agency mission.
“We’re starting to build more and more infrastructure in that data lake format, where we can take a lot of our data and start building it out in a way that would help us start analyzing it in different ways where we can start figuring out not only what happened, but what’s going to happen and why it’s going to happen,” Rich Baca, MRP assistant chief data officer at USDA and G3I team lead, said. “And that’ll start giving us a lot more insights that align to the benefits of the earned value network.”
The project management knowledge network team is dedicated to evolving the training and culture within the Federal government.
The Associate Director of Professional Development at the Interior Department’s Interior Acquisition Institute, LaTanya Anderson, said during ATARC’s event that her G3I team will “highlight where those silos are, where we’re replicating efforts, where we’re wasting money, and where we can collaborate as agencies, not just in delivering training, but also creating training and who we have in our training courses and be able to get ahead and prepare for ever ready workforce.”
She continued, “We have a lot of efforts coming down in innovation from AI to cloud computing, digitization, so we need to collaborate and coordinate our resources and make sure that we’re getting the best return on our investment.”
The final priority, benefits realization management, focuses on ensuring that programs and projects in a Federal agency deliver their expected benefits through the deliberate identification, planning and measuring, executing and monitoring, and reviewing and evaluating to ultimately deliver the benefits sustainably.
“We have energized an amazing group of volunteers,” USDA’s Traquair said. “We’re over 65 volunteers – literally people who are going to give four to eight hours a week for the entire fiscal year for each one of these priorities. So we’ve broken them up – we have really strong teams that we’re going to go into next fiscal year.”
He concluded, “We’d really encourage more participation, especially from industry and academia, on each one of our working groups.”
