This article is written by David Eaves, Lecturer in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, Emily Middleton, Partner at Public Digital, with Blanka Soulava and Tommaso Cariati, students at the Harvard Kennedy School.

The story of California’s digital response to Covid-19 is in some sense similar to other stories we have heard often in the last few months. Like other digital teams, they have worked long hours to build new apps from scratch and roll it out on a massive scale, which has pushed teams and individuals to the maximum of their capabilities. But their ability and emphasis on sticking to their guiding principles despite the challenges: user first, inclusion, accessibility and compassion, are an essential lesson for digital teams around the world.

On Wednesday, May 20th, Harvard Kennedy School and Public Digital hosted the 3rd Covid-themed convening. After learning from digital teams in Canada and Bangladesh in previous sessions, this time we heard from Angie Quirarte and Tamara Srzentic about the lessons learned by California's new digital services team, especially regarding the speed of delivery and trade-offs they faced.

The main takeaways were the importance of having an empowered multidisciplinary team, using agile, iterative ways of working that enable you to deliver products to millions of people quickly. Secondly, the importance of championing user needs, while balancing speed and accuracy.

What comes after emergency mode

In four days, the team built the state government's digital response, covid19.ca.gov. The agility and speed with which the team was able to make the site, integrate user feedback and update it with the latest information was a testament to their multidisciplinary team and agile ways of working.

Long hours and remote working were a big challenge. Amidst 16 to 20-hour days, they tried to keep a good spirit but to also not forget the norms of care for one another. The team now faces the challenge of shifting from emergency mode to a more sustainable way of functioning.

The team is still hard at work on the Covid-19 response. But it already offers valuable lessons for what well, even if only recently, set-up teams with the right culture can achieve in a short time frame in moments of crisis

When the California team faced trade-offs and made compromises, it learned the second main lesson: when compromising, stick to your principles and always have the end-user in mind.

For instance, accessibility and performance was their top priority. It started with reducing the reading level from 9th to 7th grade. And then they continued with translating into seven languages over 300 pages of the site, as well as each of the changes made on a daily basis. The team struggled with the slow pace of standard translation processes because the fast iteration led to quickly outdated content that was impossible to keep up with by the human translators. And in a time when millions of Californians were asked to stay home, they could not take for granted that the information they were rapidly publishing had to also be available on every device.

Therefore, the team decided to semi-automate the translation process and make sure that the material was accurate and reliable by having it checked by two different human translators before publishing.

Culture in crunch time

Legal and frequent policy updates presented another challenge. As is the nature of legal and policy language, this content was often written at a very high-comprehension level (as high as postgraduate level in many cases), making it very challenging to make accessible. The team took a practical but thoughtful approach to this challenge.

Recognising the need to update and ship rapidly, the team decided to double down on the iterative nature of their work. This meant that while the initial iterations put on the site were often at higher comprehension levels, the team continued to improve the content, reviewing and applying content design best practices to make it accessible.

The team is still hard at work on the Covid-19 response. But it already offers valuable lessons for what well, even if only recently, set-up teams with the right culture can achieve in a short time frame in moments of crisis.

Further reading

If you'd like to read more about balancing short-term tactics with longer-term priorities in times of crises, have a look at a recently published summary of key takeaways from our annual 2020 Digital Transformation convening:

For more context, you can also read a recently published full report on the 2019 Digital Transformation convening:

If you're interested in other Covid-19 lessons of digital teams, have a look at these articles published by us and Public Digital, on the topic:

— David Eaves, Emily Middleton, Blanka Soulava and Tommaso Cariati

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