The Future of Government Operations
Co-authored with Lindy Quick and Saajan Panikar. Originally published in the DevOps Enterprise Journal, Volume 5, Issue 1, Spring 2023.
“It’s impossible for governments to be Agile.”
“Agile and Government don’t go together.”
These statements are pervasive. They rest on a belief that government must be slow, bureaucratic, and hierarchical. But the reality is that the limitations to government agility are largely self-imposed. In order to respond to the ever-changing technological demands and threats in the government landscape, there is a need for a systematic approach to agile within government. That’s what the Government Operations and Vision (GovOps) Framework is designed to provide.
Unlike other frameworks built for the private sector and profit-driven environments, GovOps focuses on the unique challenges of adopting Lean-Agile and DevOps practices in a non-profit driven environment shaped by the structures and constraints of government organizations.
Three Structural Barriers to Government Agility
Speed to React
Governments are consistently criticized for being slow to respond. One common argument is that because governments operate with larger budgets affecting greater numbers of people, they must move carefully and deliberately. But this logic undermines itself: acting slowly to avoid waste often produces waste. In an agile operating model, the opposite is true. Faster feedback cycles and the ability to incorporate that feedback into decision-making are the goal.
Organizational Culture and Hierarchy
The chain of command culture is particularly strong in military and defense branches. While it works on a battlefield, it isn’t as effective in software development, hardware manufacturing, or day-to-day operational decisions. In other government environments, hierarchical structures lead to slow decision-making and longer lead times, making it difficult to respond quickly to changes in the technological landscape.
Long procurement lead times compound this. Traditional procurement processes can take months or even years to complete. Suppliers are required to produce detailed project plans that don’t align with agile methodologies. Multi-year contracts and ITIL frameworks further entrench rigidity. ITIL is the most widely adopted IT Service Management framework in the world and has been around since the late 1980s. The pace at which it adapts is not the pace at which the technology landscape moves.
Strategy Changing with Leadership Changes
This may be the most underappreciated challenge. A study by Johns Hopkins in 2018 found that 33% of Americans can’t name their Governor and nearly 80% don’t know how often they’re elected. Only 65% of city councilors serve 4-year terms nationwide, and only 45% of Mayors. Leadership changes in government can be frequent, and each change can bring entirely different priorities and strategies. Harvard Business School professor John Gabarro found, after a multi-year longitudinal study, that it takes a new leader approximately 2.5 years to fully take charge of and understand a new organization. If leaders change more frequently than that, no transformation has time to take hold.
The consequence is that any government organization can be just one election away from starting over.
Lack of Alignment to Mission and Strategy
Government is not one-size-fits-all. At the local level, “mission” may not resonate the same way it does in a defense agency. At the state level, “strategy” carries different meaning than at the federal level. Regardless of what we call it, alignment to it is the critical element and is most often overlooked. The consequences of working without clear direction include chaotic organizational structures, disengaged employees, mismatched budgeting, overextension, and reputational loss. For government organizations, the consequences are even more severe: they can lose sight of who their actual customer is, which represents a fundamental disconnect between the organization and its reason for existence.
The GovOps Framework: Five Pillars
GovOps provides a framework and roadmap to prioritize mission outcomes ahead of the barriers to rapid adoption, alignment, and execution. It is organized around five pillars.
Pillar 1: Mission and Service
The Mission/Service Pillar is the foundation of GovOps. It defines the purpose and goals of the organization and sets the standard for all decision-making and value delivery. Understanding who you serve is not enough. Understanding why your governmental organization exists and the service it is intended to provide is what enables efficient and meaningful delivery.
GovOps uses a Mission Identification Workshop to provide a structured approach to identifying which constituencies your organization serves, the services and processes most critical to them, and the organizational structures that would best streamline your flow. Government agencies that go through this process are empowered to redesign traditional value streams into more targeted Mission Streams.
Alignment to mission and strategy is also positively associated with employee motivation and productivity. When people understand the purpose behind their work, they perform better and stay more engaged.
Pillar 2: Contracts
Contracts are the backbone of government operations and one of the most significant barriers to agility. Traditional contracting approaches are rigid, slow, and frequently misaligned with the dynamic needs of modern projects. The GovOps Contracts Pillar emphasizes mission-aligned, agile approaches to contracting.
When defining a contract, it is the customer’s responsibility to define the program mission. But in a government context, vendors and suppliers take on a shared responsibility to serve the constituency of the governmental organization. As such, they must have a voice in articulating how they will support that mission. Historically, government vendors have been allowed to divorce themselves from the constituents being served. That must change.
Agile contracts acknowledge that scope changes are inevitable. They are structured to minimize damage to both parties when timeframes or costs are adjusted. Practical forms include Capped Time and Materials contracts, which put an upper limit on additional spend; Open Time and Materials with quarterly or PI-level exit opportunities; and Target Cost contracts, where savings and overruns are shared between both parties.
Pillar 3: Vendor Management
Most organizations invest more energy in Vendor Agreement than Vendor Alignment. When a vendor is contracted, the focus falls on SLAs, costs, and deliverables. These metrics should be guardrails, not goals. As contracts mature, vendors habitually focus on deliverables, creating gaps in opportunity and decreasing alignment with mission.
The GovOps approach treats vendors as key stakeholders: participants in architectural sessions and feature refinement, not just contractors fulfilling specifications. Clear articulation of mission values and objectives is the first step in creating vendor-mission alignment. The US Department of State’s Vendor Management Plan, for example, requires vendors to detail how they will meet contractual requirements but imposes no requirement to align vendor actions to the Department’s core mission. That gap creates exactly the kind of fragmentation that impedes outcomes.
The goal of GovOps vendor management is to create a sense of identity across the entire vendor ecosystem: we’re all on the same team, and our purpose is to improve the lives of our constituents.
Pillar 4: Peer Engagement
Daniel Pink’s research shows that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are the three primary motivators of knowledge workers. Peer Engagement gives government employees the ability to develop mastery through new skills and purpose through growth and mentoring.
Government organizations are highly siloed and hierarchical. Knowledge workers may not be aware of or empowered to connect with peers in different parts of the organization who share common experiences. The Peer Engagement Pillar encourages and promotes cross-learning within and between organizations through peer connections, communities of practice, and structured personal development.
In GovOps, professional development is not optional. It is a required job duty. Attracting and retaining younger talent, particularly given that the Federal workforce skews heavily over 50, requires creating environments where growth is expected and supported.
Pillar 5: Feedback
Feedback is not only constituent feedback. Feedback comes from processes, technology systems, team retrospectives, and real-time data. Without it, organizations cannot identify areas for improvement or make decisions that drive their mission forward.
GovOps integrates feedback into continuous operational rhythm through three actions: fostering a culture of feedback-driven decisions so that early information informs iterative improvement; seeking short-term wins within large initiatives to build momentum and demonstrate progress; and accelerating feedback with technology through CI/CD pipelines, DevOps lifecycle tools, agile lifecycle management platforms, and collaboration infrastructure.
Many large government initiatives have long lead times and take months or years to deliver. GovOps approaches these large initiatives by moving from short-term win to short-term win until the long-term benefit is realized. That cadence is how trust gets built, how momentum is maintained, and how teams stay connected to the mission through every stage of delivery.
The Benefits of GovOps
The five pillars enable four concrete organizational outcomes:
Visibility improves collaboration, increases transparency, enhances decision-making, and gives leaders and teams the real-time information they need to stay aligned with mission.
Predictability helps manage budgets, communicate realistic timelines to stakeholders, and deliver on commitments, which is especially critical when taxpayer funds are at stake.
Efficiency reduces costs, improves delivery speed, increases citizen satisfaction, and helps government organizations do more with what they have rather than simply asking for more.
Strategy Agility enables organizations to quickly adapt to changing priorities while maintaining alignment with their core mission, regardless of changes in leadership or external circumstances.
The Evidence Is Already There
The UK Government Digital Service used Agile methods to deliver over 50 digital transformation projects, including the creation of GOV.UK. The US Treasury Department used Agile to develop government-wide financial standards and a website tracking nearly $4 trillion in spending across 100 federal agencies. The United Arab Emirates realized a 700% increase in projects completed year over year after adopting an Agile Government Accelerator Program.
The demand for Government Agility has never been greater. It is our responsibility as leaders in this space to transform Government into a consistently agile, adaptable, responsive entity. GovOps provides the foundation: Mission and Service as the core, with Contracts, Vendor Management, Peer Engagement, and Feedback as the structures that make that mission delivery possible.
Imagine what we could accomplish if every Government Agency began to move with purpose and vision. That is not a hypothetical future. It is an achievable one, and we’ve seen it happen.