Based on the most recent Cross-Agency Priority (CAP) Goals update released June 20, the Federal government is nearing completion of its Improving Customer Experience (CX) With Federal Services CAP Goal.
The CAP Goal, which is part of the President Trump’s March 2018 President’s Management Agenda, is intended to “provide a modern, streamlined, and responsive customer experience across government, comparable to leading private-sector organizations.” The leadership team tasked with advancing the CAP Goal includes leaders from the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), U.S. Digital Services, Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), and General Services Administration.
To measure progress towards the Goal, the leadership team broke down the process into three strategies: improve digital services, increase transparency to drive accountability, and apply proven practices to raise the standard of service of high impact service providers.
The CAP Goal update called attention to three key areas, each tied to one of the goal’s strategies, and identified both progress wins and setbacks:
- Identification of Customer Experience Challenges Across Agencies: “The CX CAP Goal Team has written a summary of their findings from the 25 HISP Self-Assessments and Deep Dive conversations that took place in Q1 and Q2.”
- Completed Governmentwide Customer Experience Journey Map Pilot: “The CX CAP Goal team is piloting using ‘journey mapping’ to document the perspective of individuals navigating Federal services irrespective of how the government is organized, which is necessary to identify some of the most critical bottlenecks and high-impact areas for improvement. A journey map of a Service member transitioning to civilian employment has been finalized, crossing [Department of Labor], [Department of Defense], VA, [Office of Personnel Management], and [Small Business Administration] programs. Recommendations are now being developed for priority areas for improvement pilots, and a research and synthesis report is being produced to support replication for other customer groups.
- Conclusion of the U.S. Forms System Project: The US Forms System (USFS) project intended to create an open-source tool that simplifies the process of creating accessible web forms and reduces the amount of custom design and coding required to build forms. In mid-2018, the VA switched to using the USFS repository and became the library’s first client. During the second half of 2018, the USFS team worked on making the library more general and less tied to the VA’s software and design environment. In doing so, the team began connecting with prospective library adopters but found it difficult for other agencies to successfully adopt USFS. Building a general solution while actively addressing custom feature requests became increasingly complex. While the original solution may have worked for the VA, the assumption that the same implementations work for other agencies could not be validated. As such, the program has been suspended, but USFS remains an open-source library for others to build upon and learn from.”
While the U.S. Forms System Project was canceled, more broadly speaking, the CX Cap Goal is nearing completion. Of the 29 key milestones identified for the goal, 23 have been completed, four are on track, one is on hold, and one has been canceled.
