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Hypotheses

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Michelle Hertzfeld edited this page Feb 22, 2016 · 15 revisions

Hypotheses

  • We believe that: clarity into what projects 18f is currently working on, the status of those projects, and the impact of the organization
    Will: provide people a better understanding of the “business” of 18f, be empowered with information about project opportunities when speaking with their colleagues and supervisors and have to expend less effort to get answers to questions about 18f’s operations
    We will know we are right when:

    • people will stop dropping into #dashboard to report a poor experience
    • we stop getting calls from journalists confused about where to find information about what kinds of projects we're working, stories include projects we are actually working on that we would want them to highlight
    • project-intake team has better quality requests (scoped more to things we do because the site/dashboard does a better job of intro'ing people to the work we do)
    • we hear from staff that they are confident in Dashboard information
    • people share dashboard links on social media
    • candidates talk about how the dashboard helps them understand 18F projects and what they learn is accurate

  • We believe that: providing a way for journalists to sort our projects by interest/beat, last update, recent releases, other metadata???
    Will: allow journalists to quickly skim our website to find which projects are applicable to their interest/beat
    We will know we are right when: we get fewer queries from journalists that are really basic (so what is 18F working on? etc), and see more stories written about what we're doing.

  • We believe that: providing a way for people interested in working for 18F to sort our projects by interest, what kinds of projects, what subject areas, what kind of work might I be doing?
    Will: allow potential new hires to understand our work better and hopefully attract people who are good fits for the org, and screen out people who would not be good fits
    We will know we are right when: new hires say that what they understood about 18F before they applied turned about to be true

  • We believe that: many of the tools we build
    Will: be really useful for people who work at a variety of organizations
    We will know that we are right when: forks increase, people report that they are using our work (they email us, social media mentions increase, we ask them)

  • We believe that: surfacing our reusable tools, writing about them more, and identifying the parts of our work that are reusable
    Will: develop more business opportunities, increase open source contribution, and create more awareness of our work
    We will know that we are right: when forks increase, people report that they are using our work (they email us, social media mentions increase, we ask them)

  • We believe that: providing a way for other government offices who want to work with 18F to help them understand what we're working on
    Will: provide way to scope the work that we do and don't (these are the kinds of projects you should approach 18F with)
    We will know we are right when: intake and inquiries email address field fewer requests for help on things we don't actually do

  • We believe that: providing a way for other government offices who want to work with 18F examples of other agencies being successful
    Will: help agencies socialize working with 18F and/or using methods we've used
    We will know we are right when: intake and our inquiries email address field fewer requests for help on things we don't actually do; we see fewer people asking the same kinds of questions on the listservs (ie, 'how do I do X?,' but actually we have a guide on X)

  • We believe that: humanizing the work that we do
    Will: make it clear that there are people who deeply care about this stuff that are behind all of it, which in turn will help make what 18F more widely understood and hopefully supported
    We will know we are right when: user research reveals we're on the right path

  • We believe that: surfacing team values, such as our commitment to diversity/inclusion; open source; agile; user-centered design; data-driven decision making (the things that we don't really compromise on when we take on new projects)
    Will: give us a single, canonical source for how we talk about our values
    We will know we are right when: we can answer questions about our values more readily; in the long term, we start seeing our work and our organization better-represented in the press and outside our own team; questions about 18F will change from basic to more nuanced because the basics will be clear; see a change in behavior around blogging (if we already have basic ideas surfaced really high on the site, people can focus on different things on the blog)

  • We believe that: providing project and product managers accurate and easy access to reporting their project status in a public way
    Will: ensure that these teammates no longer have parse through duplicate and/or non-standardized records; instead this information would be standardized across our work
    We will know we are right when: PMs send their dashboard page to current and prospective agency partners

Still needs review from the team

  • We believe that: integrating dashboard product updates with tools PMs already use (trello, waffle, github, slack)
    Will: make it easier to keep a central dashboard up to date
    We will know we are right when: information on the dashboard is current

  • We believe that: using the dashboard as the place for monthly updates to partners (as per our IAA process)
    Will: make it easier to keep a central dashboard up to date, and further encourage the habit of going to the dashboard for all project information
    We will know we are right when: information on the dashboard is current and partners report easily funding relevant and useful information there

Note: more specific features that might solve these needs are in this summary. Maybe these also need to be turned into hypotheses.

Code health

  • We believe that: surfacing metrics on %age of passing builds; %age of testing coverage; existence of linting; automated code quality diagnostics score; dependency status (systems that track if your dependencies are current, and secure)
    Will: enable us to identify the pain points we should address first, or the projects most in need of assistance
    We will know we are right when: we see product leads and 18F folks using the surfaced data to track project health

  • We believe that: partnering with project leads
    Will: enable us to identify the pain points we should address first, or the projects most in need of assistance
    We will know we are right when: we get actionable feedback

  • We believe that: resolving issues identified by our metrics
    Will: ensure code quality; improve the team’s ability to deliver features quickly and at high-quality; ensure sustainable development velocity
    We will know we are right when: the team expresses confidence in making changes to code

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