Presidential Innovation Fellow wins $250,000 award for application aimed at improving government services
Tune into the conversation around any office water cooler and you’re likely to hear a few opinions about how the U.S. government could be run more efficiently.
Julia Winn, A.B. ’12, is not just talking about it; she’s creating an app.
The Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences alumna is designing a web-based application that could help government workers streamline the development of new digital services and information technology products.
Winn, a computer science concentrator, received $250,000 in seed funding from the General Services Administration (GSA) for her project, Pre-award Product Planner. She was one of 13 individuals to receive awards in the first-ever GSA “Great Pitch” competition. Held in April, the competition, which attracted more than 100 applications, challenged government workers to devise new ideas to improve systems or services.
The Pre-award Product Planner helps government workers better estimate the cost, team size, and project time required to develop digital products, like web portals or mobile apps. The U.S. Digital Service, a White House agency, has created a playbook containing 13 elements that teams should consider when tackling a new project. Winn’s application breaks those elements down into a series of simple questions that are more likely to be understood by government employees who lack a strong computer science background, she explained.
The idea grew out of her work at the Department of Veteran’s Affairs (VA) during a Presidential Innovation Fellowship, a program that seeks to bring fresh perspectives to complex, multi-agency problems. Winn, one of 27 Presidential Innovation Fellows selected through a national application process, spent the past year working with the VA to improve online employment tools and identify ways to streamline the disability claims backlog.
When discussing the U.S. Digital Service Playbook, she often found that her colleagues had differing opinions about what the terms in the playbook meant, or didn’t understand them at all.
“There was clearly a miscommunication happening,” said Winn. “Just because the right information is out there doesn’t mean that the people who need it can understand it.”
So she set out to develop a tool that would help everyone get on the same page. Her application asks question like: “What platforms will your product run on?” and “Will your product need to access data from another system?” Users select from multiple-choice answers, and the application compiles a summary that lists the estimated cost, project days, team size, and person days involved in the product.
The idea is to give government employees a strong starting point they can use when creating cost estimates, writing contracts, or preparing requests for proposals.
“For me, it is exciting to develop an application that could help employees who have dedicated their lives to government service,” she said. “My hope is that this tool will empower them so they can continue to improve government products and services.”
She is using the GSA seed money to refine her digital tool by studying operations within different government units. Winn has also begun testing her prototype with government workers to determine if there are other elements she should include.
She is hopeful that her work could someday create more efficiency in some of the nation’s most important agencies.