The state of MN has embarked on a journey to transform how government is run and how services and solutions are traditionally developed. Historically government has developed large solutions to large public needs using project management often taking years to develop and deploy. Too often these large system deployments fail to meet citizen, user, and business partner expectations. As technology has evolved, advanced and matured over the last 30 years, citizens now expect government service to match the user friendly and value rich applications they have become familiar with from private companies like Amazon, Uber, Netflix and thousands of others.

To keep pace with technical advancements and citizen expectations, governments are embracing techniques utilized by private companies like customer-centricity, product management, and agile human-centered design, development and delivery. Governments have unique challenges to overcome including centuries of culture norms and organizational structures, decades of decentralized technology development and deployments, political pressures, revolving leadership terms, frequent changing and new legislative mandates, time bound funding sources, and a shortage of staff with the experience and skills required to build and migrate to this future mode of operating.

The state of MN and it’s 23 executive agencies have begun investing in Customer-Experience, Product, and Agile coaches, user researchers, product and agile tools, and Centers of Enablement (COEs) to help spread awareness, provide training, develop playbooks and toolkits, documentation and demonstrate successful migrations to product and agile via small, focused pilots. By focusing on a few pilots, co-developing digital playbooks utilizing practioners from across the state agencies, developing learning paths, creating a statewide experience metric dashboard, and promoting trying, applying, learning, and sharing, MN state is taking advantage and trying to avoid past organizational transformation failures while amplifying and focusing on repeating proven success patterns.

During this presentation, the Product & Agile Center of Enablement (PACE) coaches will share details about the work completed, work in progress, challenges and tactics being employed to overcome, and present a look ahead as to what can be expected in the near, and long-term future for the state of MN Project to Product transformation.

60 Minutes. Target audience is anyone in government trying to understand how to improve user experience, transition to product and agile, and increase overall value delivered to the public.