Why adopting Agile to break down the silos between government agencies will turbocharge productivity

The last 18 months have been labelled by Mckinsey as “the quickening,” as both public and private sector organisations have been required to accelerate transformation by as much as ten years. To meet and exceed the expectations of today’s tech-savvy citizens, governments departments and agencies must work differently.

Working in department silos across any industry has proven to be counter-productive to achieving goals. This rings especially true for government agencies, where the Australian Digital Council has highlighted there is an urgent need to improve collaboration between jurisdictions. 

One of the best approaches to breaking down silos is by adopting agile ways of working. Agile emphasises cross-functional collaboration and an iterative test-and-learn approach to delivering products and services. 
 

Improved productivity

Public sector organisations face ever-increasing pressure to deliver more high-quality outcomes to citizens and stakeholders, amid a multitude of budgetary and political challenges. Shrinking budgets and increased workload also means teams are under-resourced and overworked. As a result, employees become disengaged and disillusioned.
 
In adopting Agile, leaders can empower employees by delegating decision making authority to teams and giving them the tools and space they need to move fast. This provides increased visibility over workloads and progress. Project management software, such as Smartsheet, can provide users with visibility across all the information and data required to effectively collaborate on recurring processes and projects of all sizes. The ability for employees to securely manoeuvre between these work streams helps drive alignment and agility. 

Delivering value to citizens and stakeholders

In today’s fast-moving environment, Agile ways of working will allow public sector organisations to maximise the use of their resources and to attract and retain talent to effectively deliver value to citizens and stakeholders.
 
Public sector organisations often work on projects with a long time horizon, increasing the ambiguity of the projects and making it difficult for detailed planning from the onset. Planning and working in shorter iterations will help teams to improve their focus on immediate deliverables. It also avoids stretching team members unnecessarily with unrealistic dates yet still manages to get the product to the community quickly.

Faster delivery of improved outcomes

Balancing risk, value and speed is an especially delicate challenge for public sector organisations. Often, government policies or initiatives are playing catch up to market developments due to multi-layered approval processes and red tape. Sometimes, policies miss the mark due to a lack of community collaboration.
 
To better serve the community, government agencies need to leverage the valuable knowledge that exists across different departments. One way to achieve this would be to leverage Agile methodology which calls for near-constant communication between stakeholders to create a truly adaptive and responsive way of working. Smartsheet supports this by removing silos, so that internal and external team members can access critical data whenever they need. 
 
Smartsheet can also keep processes moving forward by empowering anyone to set up automations so they can automatically request approvals from stakeholders and record their feedback. Approval requests can be completely customised and sent individually, or with multiple steps, as part of a more complex workflow.
 
Government agencies today are almost universally under pressure to deliver more and better services to their stakeholders with limited budgets and resources. Adopting an agile way of working in technology and digital can help public-sector leaders break down inter-departmental silos to better cope with these pressures while improving citizen experience and service delivery, leading to a renewed sense of trust and confidence.

 

With Smartsheet – the enterprise platform for dynamic work – you can make the move to more efficient project management today with our 30-day free trial that comes with access to many pre-structured and customisable templates. Streamline your projects by following these best practices to increase consistency, from project initiation to completion.