This week’s interview is with Phelan Wryick from the Department of Justice.
Listen here: http://bit.ly/nCjaAh (60 minutes)
Summary: What’s new at the DoJ? http://www.crimesolutions.gov
Phelan Wyrick’s official title is Senior Advisor to the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Justice Programs ant eh U.S. Department of Justice. Perhaps a more informal title is the program manager for a recently released web site called “crimesolutions.gov”. The production of this web site has many valuable lessons for other federal IT professionals.
If you work for an agency that has hundreds of programs, then you know that is very difficult for you to understand the relative efficacy of each one; it is almost impossible for people in varying geographic districts to evaluate programs. In 2009 the Department of Justice was challenged with producing a web site that would give citizens guidelines for evaluating a group of programs. The department wanted a data-driven and evidence based approach that would give citizens ratings of 150 programs.
During the interview, Phelan gives guidelines for starting the effort, how to work with technology partners, and what to expect at launch. He emphasizes the importance of being flexible during development as well as the value of testing. The results was a simple three stage evaluation that gives a program “effective,” “promising,” or “no effects.” There are many lessons to be learned in the wording of those three categories. Listen to the options that Phelan gives for feedback to the evaluations.
