The formation of a government design team presents additional challenges due to the nature of the government organization with a distributed workforce, regulations and other factors that could limit the team’s performance, 18F‘s Kate Garklavs said.Garklavs wrote in an entry posted Friday that Mollie Bates and Natalia Fitzgerald, designers with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, point to four tactics that can help build a high-performing government design team.
Bates and Fitzgerald note that diversity in terms of the team members’ skills and specializations is one of the factors to consider, as well as the overall team culture.
The team should be built on the values of iteration, communication, collaboration and transparency and follow core design standards to foster work efficiency and focus on the mission, they add.
Garklavs wrote that the design team should also aim to maximize the organization’s reach through new work opportunities and the practice of “design diplomacy.”
