This article is written by Alexis Wichowski, deputy chief technology officer for innovation for the City of New York.

The challenge

The sudden arrival of Covid-19 in New York City created an urgent need for massive quantities of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) for emergency workers. Multiple City agencies leapt into action by sourcing PPE through donations, purchases, and manufacturing partners.

The issue was that each agency was tracking acquisitions across multiple independently maintained spreadsheets. While thorough, this decentralized approach made it impossible to easily get a birds-eye view of the City’s PPE status. Also, other than emailing and opening each spreadsheet, there was no way to aggregate total counts across the many documents, let alone compare yesterday’s counts to today’s or begin to attempt to predict tomorrow’s.

It was clear that a tech-enabled solution was exactly what we needed

At least 13 agencies across the City had a significant stake in the PPE sourcing project. One challenge was that the New York City's CTO — traditionally involved in things like launching innovation challenges and pilot testing new tech — needed to connect with the right people at the various stakeholder agencies, fast.

We did, however, know tech and agile development practices. And it was clear that a tech-enabled solution — a digital dashboard that ingested the various data sources — was exactly what the City needed. So we got to work.

The solution

Both to engage the necessary city partners and to build the tech-enabled solution, we started with a decidedly low-tech approach: we started making phone calls — one person, one agency, and one volunteer organization at a time. Here are the four steps we took from there.

1. Connect

To start, we needed partners — people within stakeholder agencies who both had access to key data and were open to hearing us pitch our idea for a solution. We made some of these connections through referrals from colleagues who were willing to make introductions. But we made at least as many through cold calls — simply looking up who was working at an agency in a data-related position and reaching out to them. More often than not, our requests got passed along to the right person.

In fast-moving crisis response work, timing is key

We also needed more technologists than we had on staff and specifically, agile practitioners familiar with the concepts of MVP (Minimum Viable Products). So here, too, we asked for help. We partnered with vetted expert tech volunteers from the US Digital Response (USDR), a collective created specifically to help governments around the country respond to Covid-19. Within just a few days of concerted outreach, we were in business with the agency partnerships and technologists needed to make this project a success.

2. Frontload buy-in

In fast-moving crisis response work, timing is key. We knew that we needed to get agencies to agree to share their data for the dashboard to be useful. We also knew that with 13 agencies, we were not going to get a clear single Product Owner. Nonetheless, to begin the process of getting buy-in, we asked key agencies if they’d be willing to let us take a look at what they had. Once one agency agreed, we were able to take that to the next agency, and so on and so on until we had all the agencies sending data our way.

It was also pivotal that the dashboard was still just an idea, not a finished product. We build allies through a user-centred design approach, namely, one where the needs of our diverse stakeholders were directly reflected in the prioritized features in the product. This early buy-in created excitement and a sense of co-ownership that made the build-out possible.

3. “Demo don’t memo”

As they say in the digital government movement: “Demos not memos.” Avoid writing briefs, and instead, show the working product. Within 48 hours of the product kickoff, our designers shared screen captures of the prototype using dummy data; this basic mockup was something that agency partners could share with executive sponsors.

The highly focused nature of the Covid pandemic helped ensure that everyone saw the value of the dashboard immediately

We knew once we were getting requests from agency heads to be invited to a demo we were in business. A picture is worth a thousand memos, indeed.

4. Continually cultivate champions

Once we provided a demo for the first round of decision-makers, we could have stopped. But other people at other agencies had gotten word of the dashboard and wanted to see it for themselves (we couldn’t simply send around a link for security purposes).

So we decided, if someone wanted a demo, they got a demo. We conducted 8 demos to 13 agencies, sometimes to a group of 20 or more decision-makers, other times to just a handful of curious officials. We figured the more people across government got excited about the dashboard, the more likely it would both remain updated and maintained and thus continue to be useful to the City. The only way we could have improved this process would have been to avoid doing one-off demos, and instead, have all stakeholders — no matter how senior— join a weekly Show & Tell where they could see the evolution of the product. However, the nature of the Covid-19 crisis made it challenging to adhere to this agile practice and model what it means to Default to Open.

With four steps — asking for help, frontloading buy-in, “demo don’t memo,” and continually cultivating allies — the NYC CTO team was able to not only corral multiple data sets but create new alliances across agencies as well. The highly focused nature of the Covid-19 pandemic helped ensure that everyone saw the value of the dashboard immediately, but it’s the people at the agencies — the relationships built, one call at a time — who made the product work. — Alexis Wichowski

Alexis Wichowski is Deputy Chief Technology Officer for Innovation for the City of New York.

(Picture credit: Death to the stock photo)