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Government has a reputation for being slow, but when things like coronavirus hit, there’s nothing like an organization full of dedicated public servants.
Let me talk a little about how my corner of @sfgov is responding.
Let me talk a little about how my corner of @sfgov is responding.
A few weeks ago @londonbreed announced Workers and Families First, a $10m program to supplement the sick leave businesses can provide their employees. A couple days later, @sfoewd came to Digital Services and asked us to help implement the program.
We scrambled a team, and less than a week later had a MVP application flow for businesses desperate to support their employees. Even though time was tight we designed and ran a quick user research effort that taught us a bunch of stuff.
Two weeks ago today we went live. Our partner agencies were willing to launch with a very manual flow, and we got our first application minutes after launch. We’ve been iterating back-office process ever since.
We didn’t have much time to rest on our laurels, though, ‘cause next thing we knew, our partners at @sfdbi let us know that in order to enable essential construction, it was time to implement Electronic Plan Review.
Since time immemorial, when you needed @sfdbi to review your construction plans you had to bring in a giant roll of paper drawings. The huge rolls were literally carted around DBI and @sfplanning and took up a huge amount of storage and were tracked on spreadsheets
Obviously when all the employees are sheltering in place and paper is a potential infection vector asking people to bring in paper plans isn’t the solution. And so needed construction was languishing without review.
Fortunately, we’ve been doing a bunch of work with DBI, so we sped up the plans and six days after launching WFF we launched SF’s first ever online plan review. Again, this was possible because our partners were willing to launch with a manual process and iterate.
We were feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves until the next morning we got the call that the city was rolling out CityTestSF to test frontline workers for COVID-19 and not only did we need a web signup process, but there were signs to make and process to design.
So again we leapt into action, and less than 100 hours later the program tested its first city employee. 48 hours after that we opened up online signups and today that cohort started rolling through the process.
So in the last 14 days we’ve launched three services, mostly iteratively. At the same time, we’ve been keeping http://sf.gov up to date with the latest information about COVID-19, social distancing, and shelter in place directives.
Also, you may have seen these signs that one of our folks designed.
Not to mention, you wouldn’t believe how fast people have been able to procure the things we need to launch these services.
Not to mention, you wouldn’t believe how fast people have been able to procure the things we need to launch these services.
It’s been exhausting and terrifying and exhilarating and I haven’t ridden my bike in like a week and I’m extremely proud to be a part of this team and this city.
I know I’m gonna leave people out but huge (socially-distanced) thumbs up to our team, including @carriebish @skinnylatte @shawnbot @jane_gong @aynne @anitaycheng @persishowe @ling_garcia @natemahoney @laurenalisa and a bunch of folks not on Twitter.
And of course we couldn't have done any of this without the trust and dedication of folks in our partner agencies, including (in addition to the ones I’ve already mentioned) the Port, HR, the Permit Center Team and a bunch more.
