Discover How to Pursue Innovation in the Public Sector or Government
With the New Year upon us, it’s an opportune time to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the departments we lead. If you’re committed to innovation in 2023, the following provides a framework for how to get more done.
By building an innovation program strategy specified to your mission and situation, you position your agency to achieve its goals more swiftly. Beyond the short- and medium-term objectives that innovation enables your agency to achieve, imagine the long-term impact of shaping your workforce with innovation.
Challenges Ahead
Department leaders like yourself often state that obstacles stand in the way of innovation. This includes things like:
- Workers’ preference to do things how they’ve always been done.
- Restrictions from legal or departmental requirements.
- A lack of cohesion in vision.
Six areas of focus make up the framework that BMNT uses to help transform agencies into innovative organizations, despite overarching issues.
Clarity of Vision
While vision and a coherent story are the foundations for complex projects, each step of these projects must be done to solve the tasks that lead to mission impact.
Build an innovation pipeline composed of tools, funding, brainpower, and more. This ensures project execution happens swiftly and sequentially.
With a pipeline, each person knows his or her role and the importance of that role in completing the overall project. Stakeholders also gain access to the necessary tools and resources.
Just as you see the vision from a broad perspective, your agency personnel must be able to understand their roles in the project too. Each cog moves the machine in a workflow that leads to mission impact.
What steps can you take to build your innovation pipeline? In order to move forward, focus on putting everything in the right place.
Need more details about building an innovation pipeline? Check out BMNT’s book Creating Innovation Navigators, or click to schedule a call with BMNT.
Alignment
You can see and name the problem, and you’ve identified an opportunity to solve it via your innovation pipeline. Now it’s time to align your resources.
Who or what are the people, authorities, funding sources, and agency supports that can be of service? How can you take stock of all the aspects of a functioning agency?
Set aside time to assess these components and to identify problems to solve, permissions to request, and more.
Communications
Create a list of relevant stakeholders (key players who will make your project successful) and best practice for communicating with each one. Use this information to make a stakeholder map.
Consider which channels are the most appropriate means of communication for each project aspect. Are the current ones the most effective?
Tools
Sometimes the status quo, such as the waterfall approach to project management, holds back progress and causes problems with delivery, efficacy, and overall success.
Ask yourself these questions:
- Which methodologies could accelerate your pace? Which could allow you to iterate and to make progress in chunks?
- How can you ensure each task is completed to exacting standards?
- Which existing approaches hold back progress?
- Who can offer support as you innovate the very way you get things done?
Research agile, lean, scrum, and other methodologies that historically have accelerated mission impact in the tech space. How might these approaches to project management impact your agency’s ability to achieve mission impact?
Need help understanding these methodologies and how they relate to your public service work? Book a call with BMNT’s leadership to learn about the Innovation Navigators course. This course walks you through the approaches and how to fit them to your specifications.
Measurement
Ask yourself these questions:
- How will you measure progress and support?
- Where will you document the progress?
- What are the goals and objectives? How will they get tracked?
- What constitutes success?
- What constitutes progress?
- Where will it be posted?
- How will it be shared?
Allocate time to assess these measurement-related questions.
Worth the Commitment
At BMNT, we have decades of experience supporting government and public sector agencies. When it comes to building an innovation culture and strategy, we are here to support you.
Our Innovation Navigators program is a 3.5-day in-person event that walks you through this process with the help of an expert facilitator.
To speak with a BMNT leadership member, connect with our team. We walk you through this process and assist you in setting up a program for your agency at your convenience.
