18F Partnership Playbook
This guide will help you, as an agency, understand what it’s like to work with the 18F team. You’ll learn what to expect and get a sense of the challenges you may face when working with a digital service team, which will likely be a significantly different experience than working with a contractor. Many of the principles below build on specific plays in the U.S. Digital Services Playbook, which some 18F staffers assisted in authoring.
The principles we use in working together are:
- We build in the open.
- We work with an empowered agency leader.
- We focus on understanding the problem first.
- We work in an agile way.
- We use user-centered research and design methods.
- We may revisit the project at a high level if there is a major change in project goals.
- We transfer projects back to your team for ongoing support.
- We deploy projects using best practice methods and technology.
We’ll explain what each principle will mean to you as our partner. We also provide a set of prompting questions in the “How do you know if you’re ready” sections, which you can use with stakeholders to assess potential conflict points that may need to be resolved before we partner.