HowTo

Collaboration is at the heart of the Smart Chicago Collaborative and is essential to achieving the goals of the civic technology movement. The hard problems that need to be solved can not be solved in isolation.

There is an art to collaboration. Being in a collaboration means that you’ve agreed that your partner or partnering organization is already highly capable at what they do. It means that you’ve agreed upon a common goal and a plan of action to achieve that goal. Being in a collaboration means that you’ve opened up the lines of communication for the duration of the project.

Working collaboratively isn’t always easy – particularly when the project involves multiple partners or complex problems. Things can get exponentially more complex each time you add a moving part.  Here’s some thoughts on how I’ve approached collaborative project management in my consulting practice and in my work at Smart Chicago.

Building a plan

One of the most difficult things about project management the natural tension between sticking to a plan and the need to be able to adjust the plan if something doesn’t go according to plan. This is important because things never go perfectly according to plan. The planning process is important for working on collaborative projects because you’re going to have multiple parties running activities that are independent of each other in order to accomplish the goals of the project. If there’s not a well defined plan, the project could steer off course. Here’s our workflow for planning projects.

Step One: Gut Checks –  Define the goal, ensure the activity matches the goal, and ensure the goal is in line with your organization’s mission statement

The first part of taking on a project is establishing the goal and ensuring it the activity being proposed will get the results you want. You’re essentially asking the question, “At the end of the day, what do we want to be the result from this project?”

This is a different than saying, “We want to run a hackathon.” If the goal is to have an app that gets resident feedback, then you don’t need a hackathon. There are already existing products that do that. If the intended results are, “We want to engage the civic tech community around environmental data we just released”, then a hackathon would accomplish this. It’s perfectly OK to have one idea about how to get something done and then change tactics once you review it. Once you determine that the goal will achieve the objective you can move on.  

The other thing that you will need to check for is that the project goals are in line with your organization’s mission. Would getting these results also help your organization achieve its mission?  Is your organization’s mission to help with FOIA requests? Does taking the time to write, print, and distribute a newsletter help you achieve this? Is your organization in the business of creating technology tools to help store data? Does running a event help with this? If the answer to the question is no, then it may be advisable to say no to a project. It isn’t always easy to say no, but performing this ‘gut check’ before you begin is a good way to ensure the resources of your organization are being spent wisely.

Once you perform these ‘gut checks’ and everything checks out, you’ll be ready to begin constructing the plan.

Step Two: Work backwards from the goal and make a list of everything you’ll need

Think about the activity that you’re setting out to do. For example, you want to host a hackathon helping an environmental agency engage with the developer community about new environmental data. What does that look like?

At the end of the event, you’d have people presenting on prototype projects to all event participants after a day exploring the data sets. (Needs: Venue, microphones, projectors)

You would then work backwards through the day and mark down items that come up. For example, before the presentations the hackathon would have teams working with the data and coming up with prototypes. (Needs: Wifi, power strips, things to write down brainstorming notes on, lunch, breakfast.) They’d also need an orientation into the data and the problem set. (Speakers for the morning, links to different data sets)

You would continue to work backwards until you get to your current point in time. For our hackathon example, this means going over getting people to come to the event. (Needs: RSVP page, blog posts, invites, social media outreach).

Working backwards helps ensure that you don’t forget anything in the planning process. At the end of the exercise, you’d have a list of items that you would need to have ready as well as a draft of a possible timeline.

Step Three: Take inventory of resources and identify gaps

The next thing you want to do is to ensure you have the right resources to achieve the goal of the project. This often means taking stock of the resources all the organizations have at their disposal and matching them with the needs of the project. This is often the very reason to work on projects collaboratively. It allows two organizations with different strengths and resources to combine them into achieving a goal.  There might be times when you check the list of needs and resources and discover that you’re lacking in an area. At that point, you have the option of hiring a vendor or reaching out to an organization with resources you’re looking for and partnering up.

For our hackathon example, I have lots of experience running hackathons. However, Smart Chicago doesn’t have any subject matter expertise working on environmental issues.  This would be a gap to fill.

As you work through matching needs with available resources, you’ll also notice a list of items that nobody can really provide – but can be easily purchased or ordered through a vendor. (For our hackathon example, this is food and flip charts.) This help with our next step.

Step Four: Determining a budget and harmonizing the plan with the budget

Once you determine the project needs and what resources you have on hand, it becomes easier to establish a budget. Depending on your project, you can price out some things pretty easily. (For our hackathon example, it’s a simple process to start calling up different catering companies and getting estimates for food.)

If your project involves hiring a developer, designer, consultant or other freelance position, then additional steps may be involved. You may need to put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) that include the deliverables you need and how soon you need it. We’ll get into the details of writing good RFPs in a later chapter. For right now, understand that it may take some time for vendors to put together responses to an RFP depending on what you’re requesting.

A final thing you should account for when making a budget is taking into account the cost of your own time. Even if you’re volunteering, you should account for the hours you spend working on the project.

As the costs of the project begin to shape up, you’ll get a sense of if your organization has the resources to pull off the project or if the organization needs to obtain outside funding through grants or sponsorship. Alternatively, your organization may have been awarded a grant to fund a project – and you have to ensure that your project plans fits into the budget.   

Step Five: Writing out Scope of Works and Memo of Understanding (MOU)

At this point, you should have a pretty good idea of what you want to do, what it’s going to cost, who is doing what, and a general timeframe. Now it’s time to get those thoughts down on paper. The most common ways to do this for collaborative projects are Scopes of Works and Memos of Understanding (MOUs).

Scope of Work

A Scope of Work is a document that’s written in the planning stages of a project. They’re often written in the context of one person or organization hiring another. If there’s more than one partner that’ll be doing the work, there’ll be more than one scope of work. Scopes of Work lay out what work is to be done, how quickly it’s to be done, what report backs need to be done in connection with the work and (in the case of a vendor/client relationship) what the estimated compensation will be. Good scopes of work are flexible enough to allow the person or group doing the work to best decide how it gets done, but strict enough to say what the result will be. (Good example, I need a website that helps people find public computing locations. Bad Example: I want a website written in Python that let’s people find public computing locations by searching a Google Fusion table.)

Scopes of work can either be written by the client or the vendor as a response to an request from a client. It doesn’t matter so much who starts the process, but rather that both parties agree on the final scope of work. Even if both parties have a pretty good understanding of what needs to be done, going through the process helps to make sure everything is crystal clear.  It also helps set limits on the work to be done in case the project turns out to be much more complex than first realized.

Once the scope of work is finalized, they can often be turned into contracts that organizations can use to pay vendors or consultants.

Memo of Understanding

A Memo of Understanding (MOU) is similar to a scope of work on that it sets up what work is to be done, who is doing it, the expected timeframe, and what report backs are needed. The main difference between a Scope of Work and a Memo of Understanding is that a MOU Is used between two parties when no money is being exchanged.

The MOU is important because it sets up exactly who is doing what at the very beginning. If there’s ever a disagreement on who is supposed to be doing what, both parties can refer to the MOU.

MOUs and Scopes of Work are essential to collaboration because they establish a clear understanding of the project. Once these are signed and agreed upon – or turned into contracts if needed – you can then start on the project.

Step Six: Iterative Process: Checking in on progress and making adjustments

One of the drawbacks to technology projects is that they take a lot of time and effort to create. Given the costs of hiring developers, technology projects can also get expensive very quickly if projects are not managed correctly. Additionally, if project managers wait until something has been delivered it and it comes out wrong, it can take a significant amount of time to correct.

An iterative process favors a short cycles of work, check-in, and adjustments. During the check-ins, the expectation is not to have made progress in leaps and bounds – but rather to have made smaller updates. Because the progress is in small increments, it’s much easier to make adjustments than it after a team has spent several weeks working on a product.

It also means that you can catch blockers early so that they can be resolved quickly. Does the team need more resources? An extra team member to get it done? Is one of the vendors not up to the task and need replacing?

There will be some cases when the blocker is large enough that the time and effort it would take to resolve it outweighs the cost of doing something else entirely. For example, your team is working on an app to analyze a dataset that was received from a Freedom of Information Act Request. It turns out that the data is far more dirty than first anticipated with missing data, misspelled entries, and obvious typographical errors. The amount of time that would be needed to clean it up far exceeds the timeline first established. The question that you would face as a project manager is do you continue the course and accept a longer timeline?  Do you narrow the scope of the project and drop the data that is the most difficult to clean up? Or do you add additional resources to help with cleaning up the data? There’s no specific right answer, but these are the kinds of challenges that may pop up as managing collaborative projects. (For reference, when Smart Chicago was faced with a similar problem we narrowed the scope.)  

In addition to discovering blockers early on, working iteratively also allows for testing of products in front of real users. When the team has something that’s somewhat close to the final product, they can have the project undergo user testing to ensure it’s going to work for the user like it’s supposed to. If it doesn’t, then rather being a failed project, the team runs through another iterative cycle and makes improvements before launching.

Check-ins with partners

You should also schedule regular check-ins with partner organizations. This lets everyone know where everyone is at, what the current blockers are, and if there’s any adjustments that need to be made to the plan. By keeping everyone well informed, it also helps work more collaboratively. Surprises are great for birthday parties, but not when managing collaborative projects.

Step Seven: Once it’s done

Once you’ve completed the activity that you had planned out before, it’s time to let people know about what you did. Whether it’s a new app launch, successful hackathon event, or a new guide on how to run civic technology projects – you should tell people about what you did. You can do this through blog posts, social media, or email campaigns.

It’s important to tell people about the project so that people can learn from your actions. The more people learn about your actions, the more it advances the field.

One of the quirks of both working in technology and the civic sectors is that both sectors tend to use a lot of jargon and abbreviations that makes perfect sense in context, but can baffle outsiders.

As an organization that believes in collaboration, we end up doing spending a lot of time translating and explaining the jargon. Christopher Whitaker’s Civic Hacking 101 is specifically designed to do exactly this.

Our partner, Code for America, has developed a tool for Slack called Glossbot. Glossbot is a simple web app designed to be used as a Slack integration.  Code for America uses this to define the jargon it comes across as they work so when they’re discussing their work everyone can be caught up on the definitions.  Of course, this information is also useful for other civic technologists who run across these terms as well.

We’ve take a data dump from the bot and edited it to exclude some California things and add some Chicago things. You can see the raw information here. If your team uses Slack, you can also deploy your own Glossbot by forking the code on Github. If you’re looking for something in particular, you can also search by hitting (Ctrl+F on Windows or Command+F on a Mac)

• 18f –  A group within the U.S. General Services Administration that builds digital services for government.
• ACCDB – A Microsoft Access database format.
• ADA – American with Disabilities Act; a set regulations regarding hiring practices, building codes, and other regulations aimed at reducing discrimination towards disabled people.
• AFDC –  Aid to Families with Dependent Children, a federal assistance program in effect from 1935 to 1996 created by the Social Security Act and administered by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services that provided financial assistance to children whose families had low or no income. Replaced by the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) program.
• AMD – Asynchronous Module Definition; a mechanism for defining JavaScript modules such that the module and its dependencies can be asynchronously loaded.
• ANT  -Actor-Network Theory, an approach to social theory and research, originating in the field of science studies, which treats objects as part of social networks.
• API – Application Programming Interface, an interface that exposes the data and functionality of an application to other applications.
• AWS  – Amazon Web Services. People can use AWS to host their website on Amazon’s cloud servers instead of their own physical ones. Smart Chicago also provides free hosting to Chicago civic apps.
• bikeshedding – Parkinson observed that a committee whose job is to approve plans for a nuclear power plant may spend the majority of its time on relatively unimportant but easy-to-grasp issues, such as what materials to use for the staff bikeshed, while neglecting the design of the power plant itself, which is far more important but also far more difficult to criticize constructively.
• BLUF – Bottom Line Up Front, a paragraph where conclusions and recommendations are placed at the beginning of the text, rather than the end, in order to facilitate rapid comprehension.
• Broadband – Commonly referred to as High Speed Internet; The FCC has recently updated its definition of broadband to 25 megabits per second (Mbps) for downloads and 3 Mbps for uploads.
• CBO – Community-Based Organization or the Congressional Budget Office
• CFPB Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an independent agency of the United States government responsible for consumer protection in the financial sector.
• City Analytics Dashboard – A CfA app that displays live activity on a web site via Google Analytics
• Clean – An app built by Code for America’s Health Lab to simplify and accelerate the process of applying for CalFresh.
• CMS – Content Management System used by websites which publish a lot of content. A good example of this is WordPress or Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services
• CRM – Customer Relationship Management used by organizations that have a large sales function or non-profits that deal with a lot of funders or grantees. Salesforce is an example.
• CUTgroup – Civic User Testing Group, a set of regular Chicago residents who get paid to test out civic apps. This program has been duplicated in other cities such as Oakland.
• Digital Services Census –  The Local Digital Services Census surveys the quality and usability of the 10 most searched-for city services, as identified from research by the Code for America Tech Team.
• DSL  – Domain-Specific Language
• EBT – Electronic Benefit Transfer, the system used in by states for the delivery, redemption, and reconciliation of issued public assistance benefits. EBT cards go by different names in different states.
• EHR – Electronic Health Record
• eRegs eRegulations, a web-based application that makes regulations easy to find, read and understand, developed by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
• ESL – English as a Second Language
• ETL –  Extract, Transform, Load. The process that developers and data scientists use to extract data from one system, transform it, and load it into a different system. Cities like Chicago use this to take data from their business systems and load it into the data portal automatically. For a complete guide on ETL, click here.
• FEC – Federal Election Commission, an independent regulatory agency which regulates campaign finance legislation.
• FPL – Federal Poverty Level
• FOIA – Freedom of Information Act Request; Legal method used to get information from governments. Can be time consuming.
• GDS –  Government Digital Service; An agency in the United Kingdom, the Government Digital Service is leading the digital transformation of government, making public services digital by default, and simpler, clearer and faster to use. The GDS provided the inspiration for the US’s 18F and USDS.
• GIS – Geographic Information Systems; Software used to display geographic data such as ArcGIS. This term used to reference software made by ESRI, but now can refer to everything from Google Maps, to OpenStreetMap, to CartoDB.
• GitHub – A web service used to host repositories of code and make it easier for developers to collaborate using open source.
• GovDelivery – A marketing and communications firm that works with federal, state and local governments on email marketing campaigns and mailing list management.
• Govtech Fund – A venture capital fund dedicated to government technology startups.
• GSA the U.S. General Services Administration, an independent agency of the United States government, established to help manage and support the basic functioning of federal agencies.
• HIMSS  – Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society
• HIPAA-  the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, U.S. legislation that ensures a person’s right to buy health insurance after losing a job, establishes standards for electronic medical records, protects the privacy of a patient’s health information, and gives patients the legal right to access their own health data.
• IPHI –  Institute for Public Health Innovation
• Javascript – Javascript is a programming language used by web browsers. It is not the same as Java which is a whole other language.
• LAF / Legal Aid Foundation – A non-profit organization that often does pro-bono work representing clients who can’t afford legal counsel. See LAF Chicago.
• LEP – Limited English Proficient
• MindMixer –  A platform allowing local governments to solicit ideas from their communities and support a process for implementing the best ones. A CfA 2012 Accelerator company.
• MOE – Maintenance Of Effort, often refers to requirements that a government must meet to continue participating in a federal program.
• Meaningful Use – Medicare and Medicaid EHR Incentive Programs provide financial incentives for the “meaningful use” of certified EHR technology. To receive an EHR incentive payment, providers have to show that they are “meaningfully using” their certified EHR technology by meeting certain measurement thresholds that range from recording patient information as structured data to exchanging summary care records.
• NDoCH – National Day of Civic Hacking
• NNIP –  The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) is a collaborative effort by the Urban Institute and local partners to further the development and use of neighborhood information systems in local policymaking and community building.
• NSTIC – National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace, a White House initiative to work collaboratively with the private sector, advocacy groups, public sector agencies, and other organizations to improve the privacy, security, and convenience of online transactions.
• Ohana API  – An API that provides any city or county with an open-source framework for opening up a dataset of community-based organizations, and keeping the information up to date. A 2013 San Mateo Fellows project.
• ONC –  Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. Part of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, purpose is to support the adoption of health information technology and the promotion of nationwide health information exchange to improve health care.
• Open Data – Open data refers to data often released by governments that adheres to the 8 Principles of Open Data.
• Open Source – Open source software is software that can be freely used, changed, and shared (in modified or unmodified form) by anyone. Open source software is made by many people, and distributed under licenses that comply with the Open Source Definition.
• OSTP – White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
• PIF – Presidential Innovation Fellows <https://18f.gsa.gov/pif/>
• R – R is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It’s used by data scientists to analyze data.
• Ruby – A dynamic, open source programming language with a focus on simplicity and productivity. Often used in conjunction with Ruby on Rails
• Ruby on Rails –  Ruby on Rails is an open-source web framework written in Ruby. It was created in Chicago from work that David Heinemeier Hansson was doing for Basecamp.
• SMS – Short Messaging Service, a text messaging service component of phone, Web, or mobile communication systems. It uses standardized communications protocols to allow fixed line or mobile phone devices to exchange short text messages.
• SNAP – the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. This program is sometimes known as food stamps or by the name of the card that people use to get benefits such as LINK or CalFresh.
• SSI – Supplemental Security Income, a Federal income supplement program funded by general tax revenues.
• Streetmix – An interactive street section builder that helps community members mockup the streets they’d like to live on and offer these mockups as future plans for city officials and planners. Built by 2013 fellows.
• Streetsblog – A transportation blog covering transportation and bike issues.
• TANF – Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, a federal program providing cash assistance to indigent families with dependent children through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Replaced the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program.
• Twilio – A web service used to give apps the ability to send and receive texts.
• USDA –  United States Department of Agriculture
• UI – User interface; the parts of the website or app that users use to get the information or results they want.
• UX – User Experience; Generally referring to designing website and applications to make the user experience simple and easy to use. Often means getting apps in front of real users.
• WIC – Women, Infants and Children Program, a federally-funded health and nutrition program that helps families by providing checks for buying healthy supplemental foods from WIC-authorized vendors, nutrition education, and help finding healthcare and other community services.
• WordPress – WordPress is a blogging platform that can be used as a content management system for websites. It’s ease of use makes it a popular platform.