The Office of 18F (18F), through the General Services Administration (GSA) / Technology Transformation Service (TTS), is a team of designers, engineers, product managers, and strategists. 18F is a civic consultancy for the government, inside the government, enabling agencies to rapidly deploy tools and services that are consistent with human-centered design, agile development, and related modern techniques.
The Requesting Agency, for purposes of this Statement of Work (SOW), is the Department of Justice (DOJ), Office of Information Policy. DOJ is charged with building a consolidated online Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request portal to meet statutory requirements contained in the FOIA Improvement Act of 2016. Overall, DOJ is looking to improve the FOIA process for requesters and agencies alike.
DOJ is engaging 18F to help define a vision for this portal as well as a roadmap for improving citizens’ ability to find existing documents, decrease the amount of time it takes to submit and obtain outcomes of a FOIA request, and track the statuses of these requests. 18F may use research findings of the existing open.foia.gov platform to inform or establish a baseline for this vision and roadmap. Specifically, 18F’s efforts will highlight what is important to prospective users who submit a FOIA request using a structured request form and explore the potential for adding a search functionality across all federal websites and released FOIA documents. Research on the search and interoperability issues done during this engagement will inform potential future phases of work.
18F takes an agile and human-centered approach to developing digital products and services. This means 18F works in short iterations (sprints), in which a scope of work is planned, executed, and demonstrated with stakeholders for the purposes of informing the next iteration. This approach relies on rapid experimentation and user feedback, ultimately ensuring that solutions are shaped by the needs of the people DOJ serves.
18F will use this approach in working collaboratively with DOJ on an eleven-week discovery effort (Discovery), where Discovery is a set period of time for 18F and DOJ to explore and define the problem space and create an actionable roadmap for addressing it. The goal with this Discovery will be to determine how DOJ could approach the first goal of creating a structured FOIA request form that includes the most accurate agency contact information, and to determine if and how searching for records and interoperability with other systems may be incorporated into the process of creating and sending this structured request. Additionally, 18F and DOJ will collaboratively explore how to create the structured FOIA request form in a way that guides the requester to the correct agency for making the request.
As part of this Discovery, 18F will undertake a combination of user research and prototyping activities to identify the characteristics of a Minimum Viable Product (MVP). User research involves techniques and methods (such as those described at https://methods.18f.gov/discover/) to help understand users’ motivations and inform what adjustments should be made to reach the desired outcomes. For DOJ this will include collecting information from key stakeholders and users to determine what features, functionality, and content organization should be addressed both on DOJ’s agency request form as well as in a cross-agency FOIA document search tool.
Prototyping is aimed at testing the hypotheses and assessing the viability of potential solutions, both technically and in terms of what DOJ as an organization can support. Prototypes can be of varying degrees of fidelity - they can be simple wireframes or coded web pages - and are never representative of the end-product. They are lightweight experiments aimed at exploring unknowns, such as potential approaches to technical integration, or how users may respond to certain aspects of a proposed interface, and are meant to advance our understanding of potential solutions. Using prototyping as a tool also clarifies complexity and mitigates risk for a follow-on implementation phase.
18F will also rely on the existing open.foia.gov platform to inform these Discovery activities, investigating what it currently offers and how users interact with it in order to potentially reach our desired outcomes sooner during Discovery. 18F may employ findings from research of open.foia.gov as a starting point for additional user research as well as a baseline for additional user testing, allowing 18F and DOJ to incorporate learnings from this existing system into new iterations or prototypes.
To support this approach, it is essential that 18F has the support of a dedicated and empowered Product Owner within DOJ who is responsible for representing the project and its deliverables to DOJ and providing 18F with consistent access to relevant users and stakeholders. The Product Owner should also serve as the “champion for the project,” by offering strategic advice and ensuring the active participation of key stakeholders for the duration of the project.
Additionally, it is essential that 18F has the support of a dedicated project team within DOJ who are responsible for pairing with the 18F team over the course of this work. This team will be actively involved in the project with the ability and capacity to manage this work in any follow-on engagement. This team should include: a project manager, a python and/or node developer, a UX designer/researcher, and a system security subject matter expert. The 18F project manager will work collaboratively with the DOJ project manager to address any issues related to overall project/sprint planning, deliverables, resources, budgets, technical solution, testing, etc. The UX designer/researcher and system security subject matter expert are preferred to be actively involved at the project’s onset whereas the python and/or node developer will be actively involved as close to the onset of the project as possible.
18F will collaborate with DOJ to:
- Conduct a kickoff workshop that aligns goals and expectations for the effort.
- Conduct expedited discovery activities (interviews, workshops, research into the technical feasibility of any solution) to explore and define the problem space, hypotheses and metrics, and to create an initial backlog with opportunity areas for prototyping.
- Develop prototypes to test hypotheses about technical feasibility and user needs, incorporating feedback into future sprints, and to assess the feasibility of specific approaches.
- Deliver a report of findings that articulates key learnings and which establishes parameters for an MVP in the form of a roadmap and groomed backlog of user stories and tasks, informed by actual users. The report will also include high-level recommendations for agency requirements for which governmentwide guidance may be necessary.
- Conduct research into interoperability and search, and incorporate findings into development/backlog/roadmap as indicated.
The following timeline is aimed at providing relative direction around the timing of key deliverables. It assumes an eleven-week timeline for discovery. All day estimates assume business days and do not include federal holidays.
- Kickoff meeting
- Ongoing communication, active learning, and continual partnerships are formed to prepare for a handoff to DOJ CIO and CTO liaisons in various technical and operational areas (e.g. infrastructure, security, development)
- Report of Findings (learnings from discovery and prototyping, interoperability and search research, rationale, and parameters for MVP definition in addition to high-level recommendations for agency requirements, as well as a sustainment plan inclusive of ongoing infrastructure management, security monitoring, operations and maintenance, and active development, including any necessary acquisition and contracting activities) to be presented in written form
- An outbrief with partner (summary of the findings and a discussion of vision, groomed backlog of user stories, and outline of actionable and technically implementable policies, and next steps)
- All research and software iteration artifacts, including designs, images, source codes, etc.
These deliverables will ensure that after eleven weeks, DOJ has a clear understanding of the problem space and their users needs. This includes not just what the problems are, but what solutions DOJ’s intended audience will accept and use, as well as the technical feasibility of any solution, and what solutions DOJ as an organization can support going forward. Success here is not a heavy-handed research and documentation effort but rather a targeted effort that provides a snapshot of the situation and clear guidance on future direction.
This clearly articulated recommendation for how DOJ should proceed will also guide a retrospective conversation between 18F and DOJ at the project’s conclusion. Specifically, this information will be used to help determine the necessity and feasibility of any additional phases of work, be they completed by 18F or another partner.