Lean startup appraoch

[Rory Ford]

Hi,
I'm perhaps better known for my involvement running free community
events running for the Canberra Startup community and being an
advocate for lean startup principles (creating rapid prototypes that
test market assumptions, getting customer feedback and getting ideas
out quickly).

I came across an interesting article today from the US regarding
examples of taking a lean startup approach within he Palo Alto
(California) local government and the US federal healthcare.gov site.

http://www.govtech.com/pcio/Governments-Take-a-Lean-Startup-Approach.html

Some quotes that stand out to me are:

"The heart of the lean startup is to go to market with the most basic
viable product, get feedback, improve it,…we found the concept
resonates well in Palo Alto. This is not a passive community. Citizens
here like to have a say in what we do. We don’t want to study a
concept for 18 months while neighbor cities leapfrog ahead of us.”

And on the development of healthcare.gov: “The first version didn’t
have much functionality, but it was enough for the agency to start
getting feedback from citizens about how they would use it...After
all, if something gets built without anyone ever having seen it or
without ever getting any user feedback, then what’s the point? You can
build something no one wants and no one uses, and it becomes a
complete waste of money and time.”

I'm also interested in learning more about any Australian government
examples in applying a lean startup approach.

Regards,
Rory Ford
_______________________________________________________________________
Mobile: +61 423 168914 Skype:
roryford
LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/roryford Twitter:
@rory_ford

[Dylan Jay]

As much as we can we (pretaweb.com) try to work in this style with our
clients (mainly state government agencies). However the tender process
tends to work against us as it generally requires a fixed price and
requirements set in stone. Even given this we've done some of our
bigger jobs by breaking down the work into iterations and setting the
expectation that what would be delivered in an iteration (2 weeks)
would be determined at the beginning of each iteration rather than set
in stone based on the original tender. This is more like SCRUM rather
than the pure LEAN approaching you're referring to.
It's sad but I think the only way government departments can take a
more experimental approach is only by using internal resources due to
limitations in the tender process and unfortunately that limits the
quality of the resources they can draw on.

It's nice to see it happening in other governments however. Another
example is https://www.gov.uk/ (turning out to be quiet expensive for
them it seems). It would be great to see a recognition in government
that a lean approach can greatly reduce costs and increase the
likelihood of success.

>
> Regards,
> Rory Ford
> _______________________________________________________________________
> Mobile: +61 423 168914 Skype:
> roryford
> LinkedIn: http://au.linkedin.com/in/roryford Twitter:
> @rory_ford
>
>
>

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