Introduction: Start from where you are
Built to Deliver is a practical guide for leaders committed to improving their organizations’ service delivery at scale. It is designed to help organizations adapt and apply lessons and approaches from our research in the companion case study, Built for the Veteran, How the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) Built a Product Organization — and Rebuilt Institutional Trust (January 1, 2015–January 1, 2025.)
VA is one of the largest, most complex service organizations in the federal government. It covers healthcare, benefits, claims, appeals, records management, memorial services, call centers, websites, mobile tools, and field offices, all serving the same population across their whole lives. Over the decade our research covered, VA achieved durable transformation at the full-agency level, sustained across three presidential administrations, multiple CIOs, a pandemic, and one of the largest benefits expansions in a generation. The actionable lessons from the case study have been turned into practical applications here for government leaders at every level and length of tenure to create change at any agency.
This is a blueprint for organizing teams around user needs, aligning business and technology ownership, making outcome-based investment decisions, and building delivery systems that endure change to build lasting institutional capacity and trust. Leaders are encouraged to tailor these principles to their own agency’s unique structure, culture, and goals. The playbook is flexible by design, offering approaches that can be customized to fit different starting points, existing processes, and organizational challenges. We encourage you to:
- Start from where you are
Each block includes key questions and indicators you can use to identify your starting points. The goal is not to use them as a grade for your organization, but an honest assessment to help it improve over time. - Use the building blocks to shape direction, not sequence
It’s not necessary to complete one building block before moving to the next. Some of the blocks may be well established while others are new. The greatest value for your organization comes from understanding where you are and aligning your approach to address any gaps. - Take a harness-engineering approach
Harness engineering means attaching guardrails to shape movement, not walls to stop it. Use the 10 building blocks to help your organization build trust and capability without needing a perfect plan, a large-scale launch, or permission to start over.
Ultimately, the playbook is designed to help organizations select and adapt the ideas that will have the greatest impact in the context of their specific organization.
Our intent is to build on this body of work through a community of practice, with your help. If applying this playbook in your organization helps identify what’s working and drives future successes, important conversations, questions, or new findings, our hope is that you will share them with us and your peers. The current home for this continued collaboration is https://substack.com/@trusttheprocess2. We hope you will join us to share and learn.
