Home on Ad Hoc

Using AI to improve government data quality and decision-making

Tue, 01 Sep 2026 04:00:00 -0500

Artificial intelligence (AI) continues to create new opportunities for government agencies to solve practical challenges, improve efficiency, and make better use of the data they already have. When applied thoughtfully, AI can help teams automate repetitive tasks, identify patterns with large datasets, and uncover insights that would otherwise require significant manual effort.

Activate Framework: A skills kit for AI development in government

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 13:30:00 -0500

A question we’re constantly exploring at Ad Hoc is ‘how should teams adapt as technology and users’ expectations change?’ Right now, one of the biggest shifts is the rise of large language models (LLMs) and coding agents. These tools are quickly becoming part of how teams build and deliver digital services.

Today we’re open-sourcing Activate Framework, a starter kit that helps teams codify their preferred approaches to building products for government for use with tools like Anthropic Claude and GitHub Copilot. The Framework builds on Activate, our AI-enabled product-delivery approach that captures how we use AI to expand the impact of our teams working with government agencies.

Humans required: Why AI coding still requires human experts to work most effectively

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 09:00:00 -0500

As agencies explore and adopt AI-assisted coding tools, there’s a growing body of research on how to use them most effectively. The findings are beginning to converge on a view that cuts against a prevailing assumption in how these tools get deployed.

From PDF to platform: Using LLMs to transform authoritative copyright guidance into a digital-first experience

Tue, 24 Feb 2026 17:00:00 -0600

Over the last 15 years, government has made meaningful progress modernizing its services. Agencies and their digital service teams have moved critical processes online. Cloud computing, accessibility, and user-centered design are now baseline expectations.

How government platforms make AI coding assistants more effective

Thu, 05 Feb 2026 11:00:00 -0600

AI coding assistants are transforming how developers work, generating everything from boilerplate code to complex business logic in seconds. But these tools are only as effective as the context they have. For government teams, this creates both a challenge and an opportunity: the unique requirements of federal software delivery (compliance documentation, security controls, platform-specific conventions) have the potential to slow AI-assisted coding efforts to a crawl.

The Addies: An annual celebration of excellence across Ad Hoc

Wed, 17 Dec 2025 11:06:00 -0600

Each December, our team celebrates The Addies, an awards ceremony we created to recognize our colleagues who have gone above and beyond to serve our customers, support each other, and make Ad Hoc a special place to work. As a remote-first company, we rely heavily on virtual meet-ups to stay connected, and The Addies is a meaningful and fun yearly event that helps us do that. It’s one of the ways we intentionally build shared experiences across our team.

Designing for delegation

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 09:30:00 -0500

How agentic digital services could transform interactions with government

Agentic digital services represent a new interaction paradigm that current design patterns are not well-suited to accommodate. Government agencies should act now to prepare for delegation-based service interactions, not by betting on specific AI technologies, which are changing rapidly, but by developing design patterns and institutional capabilities that any delegation system will ultimately require.

Transforming a complex website into a consistent, efficient resource with AI-powered tools and Drupal

Fri, 05 Sep 2025 09:00:00 -0500

Large government agencies often face the challenge of maintaining sprawling websites that have evolved over decades, resulting in outdated formats, fragmented content, and inconsistent experiences for the public. One agency we’ve partnered with faced this exact challenge: tens of thousands of pages, hundreds of content authors, and outdated technical architecture that made site-wide improvements slow and expensive.

The modern agency toolkit

Thu, 21 Aug 2025 08:00:00 -0500

The U.S. General Services Administration recently launched USAi.gov, a platform intended to provide federal agencies with secure, no-cost access to leading artificial intelligence capabilities. This new service is designed to support the White House’s “America’s AI Action Plan” and represents a significant step in the government’s strategy to accelerate AI adoption while adhering to required security standards.

At Ad Hoc, we see this launch as a pivotal moment for government technology. For more than a decade, we’ve partnered with agencies to modernize digital services and improve customer experience. USAi.gov now offers a shared foundation that agencies can use — often in partnership with teams like Ad Hoc — to experiment with AI in ways that align with their missions and compliance requirements.

Transforming communications through an enterprise event bus

Tue, 05 Aug 2025 09:00:00 -0500

Large federal agencies often face a common challenge: maintaining sprawling, interconnected information systems. Over time, organically grown architectures can lead to tightly coupled systems, siloed data, and communication challenges that hinder innovation and responsiveness to customer needs.

Platforms and AI: A new approach to government software delivery

Wed, 30 Jul 2025 09:00:00 -0500

For decades, government agencies have faced a familiar trade-off when delivering digital services: build custom solutions that meet their exact needs but require significant time and resources, or purchase Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) solutions that promise faster deployment but often come with hidden complexity and expensive customization. Today, a new approach is emerging that fundamentally changes this equation — the marriage of platform-based development with AI-assisted code generation.

Introducing the Ad Hoc Website Modernization Field Guide

Thu, 15 May 2025 00:00:00 +0000

State governments across the country are under pressure to deliver digital services that are faster, simpler, and easier to use. But many of the websites powering those services were built before mobile usage was dominant, before accessibility was mandated, and before most residents expected to interact with government services online the same way they do with banks or retailers.

Unlocking new possibilities for public digital services with AWS

Wed, 08 Jan 2025 07:00:00 -0600

Ad Hoc is proud to announce our partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), a collaboration that strengthens our ability to deliver secure, scalable, and user-centered digital services for government agencies. This partnership combines AWS’s industry-leading cloud technologies with Ad Hoc’s expertise in modernizing public sector services to create impactful, future-ready solutions.

Ad Hoc’s partnership with AWS builds on over a decade of experience delivering cloud-enabled government services. By combining AWS’s robust infrastructure with our expertise in human-centered design and digital transformation, we empower agencies to deploy secure, scalable solutions faster. This collaboration ensures agencies can adapt to evolving demands while delivering seamless, impactful services.

Ad Hoc awarded a place on OASIS+

Mon, 06 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The General Services Administration (GSA) has awarded Ad Hoc a place on their OASIS+ (One Acquisition Solution for Integrated Services Plus) contract. OASIS+ is a suite of governmentwide, multi-award contracts designed to help federal agencies meet their complex service needs.

Being on this contract gives Ad Hoc even more opportunities over the next 10 years to partner with agencies and help them deliver human-centered digital solutions that improve the essential services people rely on every day.

Ad Hoc wins prime spot on VA SPRUCE vehicle as part of Peregrine Digital Services JV

Wed, 02 Oct 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This 5-year vehicle with a ceiling of $2.4 billion is one way the VA will continue providing leading digital experiences to Veterans, their families, and their caregivers. Ad Hoc and our partners at IronArch Technology are thrilled by the opportunity to be a part of this contract vehicle and to continue our support of customers at the VA.

Using generative AI to transform policy into code

Wed, 25 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, Ad Hoc took part in BenCon 2024 — an annual two-day conference hosted by the Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation at Georgetown University focused on charting the course to excellence in digital benefits delivery.

The cornerstone of this year’s conference was a series of live demonstrations highlighting the use of artificial intelligence (AI) tools and platforms to improve the delivery of public benefits. The Policy2Code Prototyping Challenge was a months-long effort by 14 different teams from across the country (and one international team) to identify innovative new ways to use generative AI to improve public benefit delivery. Ad Hoc was honored earlier this year to be one of the teams selected to participate in this important program.

Ad Hoc donates laptops to Ukrainian refugees in Poland

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This summer, Ad Hoc donated 30 laptops to Ukrainian refugee children living in Wiśniew, Poland as part of a charity program to help children and families connect with other refugees.

Ad Hoc worked with Adam Robinson, a friend of the company and founder of Govplace, and Global Volunteers to get the laptops to Poland. Adam and his family packed up all 30 laptops and brought them on the journey to Wiśniew, a town of 6,000 people east of Warsaw, as part of a volunteer trip organized through Global Volunteers. Adam and the other volunteers organized a week-long summer camp for a group of Ukrainian refugees aged 8 to 14 as a way to have fun in the summer and provide the kids with training on using the laptops.

Introducing a government design system for native mobile

Tue, 13 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

As we continue to explore what government design can and should be for native mobile apps, we’ll need a design system to scale this work.

With that in mind, we’ve created a version of the US Web Design System tailored to native mobile app development. We’re calling it the US Mobile Design System (USMDS). To be clear, this work is both unofficial and experimental. This is not owned or endorsed by the government, and will require a great deal of testing, iteration, and improvement to turn this into a mature resource.

Good government gone mobile: 5 apps that showcase the opportunity of mobile in government

Thu, 25 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In today’s digital age, native mobile applications have become essential tools for governments to provide services and information to the public.

A well-designed native mobile application can transform how governments interact with people, making services more accessible, efficient, and user-friendly. By leveraging specific features of mobile devices, government mobile apps can provide a better customer experience and foster greater public engagement.

Mobile apps, choice, and customer experience

Tue, 09 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

We believe that effective service delivery is about meeting users where they are and providing efficient service delivery across multiple channels.

That might include an in-person meeting to help someone face-to-face, a call center, postal mail, or a web-based digital service. Over a person’s lifetime, they will likely use a combination of all of these (and more) methods when interacting with a government agency. This kind of omni-channel service delivery is not a novel concept — the private sector has been doing this for years, and the federal government has its own tradition of omni-channel delivery from faxes to in-person offices across the country to an increasing number of online options.

It’s time to revisit mobile apps as a part of your government CX strategy

Mon, 08 Jul 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s time to update our view of native mobile apps to reflect today’s reality for government agencies.

For years, the guidance for government agencies has not changed from recommending responsive, mobile-optimized websites for people using government services on a mobile device, and discouraging agencies from developing native mobile apps. While this guidance is based on best practices from several years ago, technology and mobile usage have changed dramatically in the last several years.

Open data and AI readiness

Mon, 24 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In March of 2024, The Office of Management and Budget issued a new set of requirements for federal agencies governing their use of artificial intelligence.

Widely viewed as the most consequential policy directive underpinning how agencies use AI, OMB memo M-24-10 includes a host of new requirements for agencies on how they use AI tools, how they manage potential risks, and how they track and report their AI use.

Applying native mobile capabilities to government service delivery

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 00:00:00 +0000

At a keynote speech in 2007, Steve Jobs made the case that third-party software development on the iPhone should be accomplished by using the best of what we already have: the Web.

Apple’s vision was that web apps were the solution, built using HTML, CSS, Javascript, and deployed using the Safari web browser.

Selecting the best partners: Key evaluation criteria for government agencies

Wed, 01 May 2024 00:00:00 +0000

For government agencies, choosing the right partner is critical to ensuring successful outcomes and efficient, responsible use of taxpayer dollars.

To aid in this process, agencies should focus on specific evaluation criteria that can help identify the partner who is the most qualified and capable for the job. This blog post identifies key factors agencies should consider during the evaluation process and how to set that partner up for success immediately following the contract award.

Ad Hoc wins place on the HHS Software Integration and Frontend Technology BPA

Fri, 26 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Office of Grants (OG) has named Ad Hoc one of six awardees on their Software Integration and Frontend Technology (SWIFT) multiple-award blanket purchase agreement (BPA). We are incredibly pleased to be selected for this BPA, as it will allow us to continue supporting HHS in delivering excellent customer experiences and high-quality digital products to the people who interact with the Office of Grants and their systems.

The HHS OG delivers a broad range of digital services related to federal grantmaking. This includes writing and publishing grant opportunities, hosting grant opportunities for search and discovery, and receiving, processing, and reviewing grant applications.

Two clear signs that you might be underinvesting in your platform

Thu, 11 Apr 2024 00:00:00 +0000

It’s been several months since the release of the Ad Hoc Platform Smells Playbook, a guide to help government agencies detect, diagnose, and correct common issues with their software delivery platforms.

In the intervening months, we’ve used the information in this guide to help our customers understand issues with their platforms when they arise.

How emerging-large companies can help agencies like GSA best achieve their goals

Tue, 26 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Today, government agencies can choose from a variety of vendors to support them in achieving their mission and improving how they serve the public.

With so many options, it’s critical to develop a comprehensive evaluation process to help you select the right partner who can assist you in fulfilling your objectives and improving your digital services. We believe that emerging-large technology companies like Ad Hoc offer the right balance of expert skills, deep knowledge, and capacity for individualized attention that can help you transform your services.

Ad Hoc named a USA Today 2024 Top Workplace

Wed, 20 Mar 2024 00:00:00 +0000

USA Today has named Ad Hoc as one of their Top Workplaces USA for 2024.

This is the first year that USA Today has participated in the Top Workplaces program, so we feel especially proud to be included in their inaugural list of honorees.

Parking signs and possible futures for LLMs in government

Tue, 27 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

If you’ve been following the rise of large language models (LLMs) over the past year or so, you’ve probably seen many posts on social media like this one.

In this tweet, the author shares a picture of a sight not uncommon in big cities with complex transportation networks – a tall sign with densely packed rules for parking at a specific location stacked one on top of the other. The author feeds a photo of this sign into an LLM (In this case, ChatGPT 4) and asks it to clearly and succinctly determine if parking is allowed at this location at a specific time.

Scaling accessibility compliance at VA.gov through community and culture

Wed, 21 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

At Ad Hoc, we believe adopting an accessibility compliance mindset leads to better digital services – even at the largest government agencies. In 2022, we began work with prime Coforma to apply that mindset at scale to VA.gov at the Department of Veterans Affairs through efforts that included community building, standardizing success metrics, and fostering an inclusive culture.

The authors want to specifically call out and uplift the efforts of Angela Fowler, Jeana Clark, Tiffany Pender, and Brian DeConinck in making the work, and consequentially this article, possible. While we may have written the words below, the work belongs to all of us as a team.

Prioritizing Louisiana users to create a better agriculture and forestry website

Wed, 29 Nov 2023 18:00:00 -0600

As an organization grows and becomes more complex, it’s easy for its website to overflow with content and become difficult to navigate. This can create challenges for the people who visit the site for information or to perform a task. Because this resource is often the first point of contact between an organization and its customers, it’s vital for the site to be as user-friendly as possible.

By redesigning with a focus on the needs of the people who will use it, we can provide a site that is structured, intuitive, and easy for people to understand. Doing so increases their satisfaction with the site, engagement with your organization, and trust in your services.

How to meet the newest WCAG 2.2 requirements

Thu, 16 Nov 2023 09:00:00 -0600

New guidance was recently published to help make websites more usable to a wider range of people.

Plain language for the win: Improving customer experiences with clearer communication

Wed, 08 Nov 2023 03:00:00 -0600

If you’ve ever visited a website or used an app that had unclear instructions or information, you understand the frustration of a bad customer experience. It can leave a negative impression about the company and decrease the trust you have in their services.

Now think about the times when the service you needed to use provided clear, detailed instructions, and you were able to complete your task efficiently and with few to no issues. You probably finished the process feeling satisfied, empowered, and grateful for the positive experience.

Funding: The essential ingredient to successful digital modernization

Mon, 30 Oct 2023 04:00:00 -0500

Several weeks ago, the U.S. Department of Labor completed a process which provided hundreds of millions of dollars in grants to state governments to support the modernization of their Unemployment Insurance systems.

Ad Hoc joins IronArch Technology to launch Peregrine Digital Services, a new joint venture built to help the government better serve people

Tue, 24 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Today, I’m thrilled to announce that Ad Hoc has joined with IronArch Technologies to create a new joint venture company named Peregrine Digital Services LLC.

Engineering smaller burdens

Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The current Administration has made improving the experience people have using government websites and digital services one of its signature initiatives.

One area that holds enormous promise for helping realize this goal is improving the performance of government websites and digital services. Engineering decisions that go into building the front and back end of digital services can have significant implications for people’s experience and the time it takes them to use a service.

Ad Hoc achieves CMMI-DEV Level 3

Thu, 03 Aug 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc is proud to announce that we’ve been appraised at level 3 of the CMMI Institute’s Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) - Development.

The Ad Hoc Incident Response Playbook: Helping you prepare for service emergencies

Wed, 26 Jul 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Imagine for a moment your team has built a digital service that thousands — or even millions — of people depend on. You’ve spent countless hours to ensure it runs smoothly and allows customers to seamlessly access the information they need. But one day the service unexpectedly shuts down, nobody can log in to their accounts, and help requests and frustrated messages come flooding in. What do you do?

How AI and LLMs will change government websites

Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:00:00 +0000

One of the first jobs I had in government technology was to lead a team that was charged with completely overhauling the website of the State of Delaware.

What AI and Large Language Models can bring to government

Wed, 05 Jul 2023 04:00:00 -0500

As artificial intelligence (AI) tools begin to transform technology in general, they too are making their mark in government.

Become a champion for Section 508 compliance by using annotations

Wed, 28 Jun 2023 09:00:00 -0500

Designers can live in the visual world of user interface (UI) design without often considering what’s under the hood.

Ad Hoc named a Washington Post 2023 Top Workplace

Fri, 16 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The Washington Post has named Ad Hoc as one of their Top Workplaces for 2023 in the Washington, D.C. area.

Announcing the Platform Smells Playbook: Diagnose and fix common problems with your technology platform

Tue, 13 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

At Ad Hoc, we believe that shared technology platforms are often a critical part of government digital modernization efforts. We’ve helped agencies design, build, and manage platforms supporting some of their most important and vital digital services at the Department of Veterans Affairs, the Centers for Medicaid & Medicare Services, and others.

Introducing Ad Hoc’s Groundwork Delivery Platform

Mon, 12 Jun 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Government agencies are increasingly looking to innovate in ways that can help them quickly deliver high-quality, secure digital services to the public. But they often face challenges in building and deploying their user-facing applications efficiently.

Creating a platform for employee-internal apps with GCP

Wed, 31 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

At Ad Hoc, we’re big fans of making the right thing the easy thing for developers. That applies to our internal apps as much as it applies to customer-facing projects.

Ad Hoc co-founders named finalists for Entrepreneur of the Year award

Mon, 15 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Recently, Ad Hoc’s co-founders, CEO Greg Gershman and CTO Paul Smith, were named among the Mid-Atlantic finalists for EY’s 37th annual Entrepreneur of the Year awards.

Introducing the Research Thinking Field Guide

Mon, 08 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Fundamentally, research is about helping people make better decisions, and it should be an integral part of how any team develops products and services. For government agencies, research is even more important because they’re developing products and services to help the public. But too often, this process is overlooked or considered a simple “check the box” step to gather information.

Why new software and new people aren’t enough to transform your customer experience

Wed, 03 May 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Customer experience is not just a thing that you solve with software or hiring a person – a total organizational change is required.

Using performance testing to build resilient systems for all

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 14:00:00 -0500

A well-maintained, 10-year-old car will work fine to get you from A to B. A well-maintained bike will probably last even longer than the car. A 45-year-old landline phone can still receive and place calls. But what happens if you try to access a web page using a 3-year-old smartphone? How about a 5 or even a 10-year-old one?

Eleanor Desai named WashingtonExec 2023 Chief Officer Awards finalist

Thu, 06 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +0000

One of Ad Hoc’s core values is to cultivate great teams.

Making your platform useful to developers

Wed, 05 Apr 2023 09:00:00 +0000

The stuff I design, if I'm successful, nobody will ever notice. Things will just work, and will be self-managing.

Achieving greater impact for Veterans with the Veterans Experience Center

Wed, 15 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Veterans have always played a critical role in how we research and help design products for the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and the Veteran community. So to make an even larger impact, we’ve created the Veterans Experience Center: a place where Veterans can make their voices heard and help improve how Ad Hoc and the VA serve Veterans, their families, and their caregivers.

Very long lines: The true cost of technical debt

Wed, 08 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Technical debt is real debt. It will eventually be paid by someone.

Using human-centered design to improve customer experience: an AFCEA discussion

Wed, 01 Mar 2023 09:00:00 +0000

On January 18, 2023, leaders and executives within the public healthcare ecosystem convened at the annual AFCEA Bethesda Health IT Summit.

Giving data a soul: Using human-centered design to create powerful data visualizations

Wed, 15 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Data visualizations are a crucial tool to help us make sense of the massive amounts of data out there, but how many times have you seen a data visualization that

Build an innovation culture by using data to learn, not to evaluate performance

Wed, 08 Feb 2023 09:00:00 +0000

At its best, data is a tool for learning and innovation. It can help agencies understand markets better, increase efficiency, and improve decision-making. Unfortunately, getting value from data isn’t just about using it – it’s about how it’s used. If applied incorrectly, data can inhibit productive learning that promotes improvement. So to encourage innovation, agencies should use data to learn, not evaluate.

Engineering chaos: a guide to building a game day

Tue, 31 Jan 2023 09:00:00 +0000

One of the critical aspects of supporting large scale infrastructure is the ability to respond to potentially harmful issues that can arise throughout a project’s lifecycle. This includes responding to errors in your own application but also to those within the entire ecosystem.

A cloud migration is like a kitchen remodel

Wed, 25 Jan 2023 09:00:00 +0000

Organizations considering a migration to the cloud may not immediately think that television shows like “Help! I Wrecked My House,” or “Rescue my Renovation” are relevant to the work that they are doing. But it just so happens that things like renovating a kitchen or putting an addition on your house can hold valuable lessons for moving systems to the cloud.

Pushup: a new tool for creating dynamic web apps

Wed, 11 Jan 2023 09:00:00 +0000

To build and maintain server-side web applications faster and easier, we’ve created a new tool: Pushup. We designed Pushup for the Go programming language as a page-oriented, server-side web framework, similar to applications developed in PHP, Ruby on Rails, and Django for Python. Check out the repo and our video demo to get started. In the meantime, here’s the breakdown.

One year since the President’s executive order on customer experience, and much remains to be done

Thu, 15 Dec 2022 03:00:00 -0600

A year ago, the Biden administration released the Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government, commonly referred to as the CX EO. This document crystallized the administration’s commitment to improving and modernizing government service delivery, and called out specific initiatives for a number of departments. A year later, we asked experts from across our team at Ad Hoc to reflect on what has been accomplished in the industry and what remains to be done.

Why defining your product is an essential question in government digital services

Fri, 09 Dec 2022 09:00:00 +0000

One of the most important questions in government digital services is “what is our product?”

Teamwork makes the dream work: Managing effective product analytics projects

Wed, 09 Nov 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Working with data is complicated. From collection to processing, modeling, and visualization, there’s a long life cycle that data must go through before getting into the hands of the person who will learn from it. Further complicating matters is that technical expertise and problem solving are required at each step. However, one of the biggest challenges to making data actionable comes at the very end of the life cycle: the handoff between generating insights and putting them into action. The reality is that converting data into insights isn’t just a technical problem – it’s a process problem.

Platforms: More value, more quickly, more securely

Thu, 27 Oct 2022 04:00:00 -0500

In previous posts, we’ve talked about the many benefits of platforms and how adopting a platform approach can support agencies as they deliver digital services. This post will focus on how platforms enable agencies to move faster and address some of the specific challenges facing product teams as they build digital services.

A look under the hood of the new student loan debt relief application

Fri, 21 Oct 2022 09:00:00 +0000

The Department of Education launched its online application for student loan debt relief over the weekend.

How to use product operations to scale the impact of government digital services

Wed, 19 Oct 2022 04:00:00 -0500

Product organizations in government have a unique goal – raise people’s expectations for government through successful digital services.

How to build a data team when you’re not sure where to start

Tue, 27 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

At Ad Hoc, we believe that data plays a key role in helping us build more satisfying and user-friendly digital experiences. And there’s certainly no lack of data in government! Whether it’s website traffic, customer surveys, grant application or healthcare enrollment databases, or any other form of information – there is a staggering amount of data in the public sector.

Accelerating the ATO process with a platform approach

Tue, 20 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In our previous posts on building and managing technology platforms, we’ve focused on the experience of the developers who use them.

Successful platforms are built with developer enablement in mind. They provide a clear separation of responsibility between the team working on a software solution and the team managing the platform it runs on. This enables software teams to focus their efforts on meeting the needs of real users, rather than splitting their time across tasks that may be incidental to delivering a finished digital solution.

Building trust with users for long-term platform success

Wed, 14 Sep 2022 09:00:00 +0000

A platform can take many forms: developer enablement, shared services, operational infrastructure, or something else entirely. But no matter the form, it’s a product with users, and we want to make sure it stays healthy, growing, secure, and stable in both the short and long term.

Connect the dots across your agency with product portfolio management

Tue, 30 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Planning a roadmap for a single product is pretty straightforward. There’s one strategy – a common vision, a set of goals, and key results. There’s often one product leader who works closely with their engineering and UX counterparts to ensure everything is tracked and issues are resolved as they appear. It works because the teams are smaller and in close communication.

Using a product approach to build and modernize APIs

Tue, 23 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

On August 11, Ad Hoc participated in the 7th annual Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) Convergence 2022 virtual conference.

Ad Hoc’s Gabrielle Soliz, Senior Project Manager, and Dana Ward, Program Manager, presented insights they’ve learned from Ad Hoc’s support of the Blue Button 2.0 and Medicare Payment System Modernization (MPSM) programs at CMS. Watch their talk below to see how Ad Hoc has brought product management methods to our work developing APIs to improve the user experience, connectivity, and resilience of CMS systems.

Using a continuous ATO for better compliance and real-time data

Tue, 16 Aug 2022 04:00:00 -0500

As we wrote in our blog post announcing the Ad Hoc ATO Field Guide, the process for getting an Authorization to Operate (ATO) for federal web applications “is often seen as difficult and complex. Developers who haven’t worked in the government space can be intimidated by the requirements, sometimes seeing the ATO process as a roadblock to rapid innovation.”

While this may be accurate, we believe there’s a solution that could ease these difficulties, save a significant amount of time for the teams involved, and still maintain system security.

A remote-first guide to remote culture

Tue, 09 Aug 2022 04:00:00 -0500

When I started working at Ad Hoc in 2018, I had come from an in-person corporate job and was worried about transitioning to working from home and feeling lonely in a remote-first company. But I was soon excitedly telling people about my new job, noting that “even though it’s remote, I never feel alone!”

Four years ago, we had about 150 employees. Today, we have more than 600. As many organizations have learned over the last couple of years, it isn’t easy to retain a sense of connectedness. Many headlines report on the challenges of working remotely, ranging from productive interactions to lack of mentoring. And although a recent Pew study reported that a high percentage of American workers want to be remote, much of this preference has to do with work/life balance rather than the experience of the work.

Developers are humans too: Why API documentation needs HCD

Tue, 02 Aug 2022 09:00:00 +0000

At Ad Hoc, our researchers work on programs up and down the tech stack, from front-end applications to database design and infrastructure. This means our researchers often work closely with end-user developers who share insights into common problems with API documentation.

For one, API documentation can be full of jargon and difficult to understand. It can also be a lengthy read, missing key information, and hard to find in the first place. Even if a developer reads documentation from start to finish, these problems mean they might not find the information they need.

A quick study in the benefits of a cohesive cross-functional team

Tue, 26 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000

As a novice cook who relies on following recipes, one of the most frustrating situations is discovering I don’t have an ingredient while in the middle of cooking a dish. I can either stop what I’m doing and run to the store, substitute it with something else, or leave it out all together. At this point, whatever choice I make could impact the timing and/or taste of the dish, which could be a recipe for disaster.

A cross-functional team is like having that fully stocked pantry that provides assurance you’ll be able to cook any dish you want without the fear of having to run to the store for a missing ingredient or settle for an alternative. This type of team composition not only has advantages during development, but it also offers the ability to expand the types of projects a team can take on.

Using design systems for digital success within the federal space

Mon, 18 Jul 2022 04:00:00 -0500

Federal agencies can face unique challenges when creating website experiences for users. Each agency has its own focus, but a common goal is to provide efficient, consistent, user-friendly digital experiences for those who depend on their services.

By using a standardized design system like the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS), agencies can help alleviate struggles for those who develop and maintain their site and provide a positive experience for those who visit it. Developed specifically for the federal government using human-centered practices, USWDS has accessibility compliance, compliance guidelines, and a mobile-friendly design built in from the start.

Gaining reliable insights with incorrigible data

Tue, 12 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000

We often talk about data engineering like it’s plumbing – using words like pipeline and flow – and it’s a useful analogy that works well in most contexts. Sometimes, though, especially in public service analytics, doing so can lead to misleading intuitions about how to approach problems that can occur when trying to manage large quantities of uncontrolled data.

There are real and important engineering challenges in getting large amounts of water to flow through pipes efficiently and reliably, but the focus is usually on the pipes more than on the liquid flowing through them. Likewise, a data pipeline usually includes some methods for detecting and rejecting the data equivalent of sand and gravel trying to flow from the source; if there is a problem with the data, then the solution is to address the problem at the source.

The case for null in design systems

Tue, 05 Jul 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Humans tend to have an aversion to empty spaces. Consider awkward silences during a conversation or too much negative space on a website. Our discomfort tends to push us to fill a void, which isn’t always the best solution. But sometimes the absence of content is exactly what’s right, which is something we see in our work building design systems for federal agencies.

Horror vacui and empty spaces

Let’s take a moment for a brief art history lesson to help understand this discomfort.

The carrots and sticks of platform governance

Thu, 30 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In our first post on platform governance, we established the importance of finding a sweet spot that avoids giving teams too much autonomy or weighing them down with strict compliance hurdles. This is what we often refer to as the “carrot and stick approach” to governance, which should make building the right thing the easiest thing. Finding the right balance is easier said than done, of course. This is why we recommend taking an iterative approach to governance implementation to find a balance between the levels of written, automated, and manual enforcement that meet business and user needs without introducing unnecessary restrictions.

Making the right thing the easiest thing: human-centered governance for platform adoption

Mon, 27 Jun 2022 04:00:00 -0500

There are many benefits to establishing common platforms in large organizational ecosystems. As we’ve discussed previously, platforms are a powerful way to enable the reuse of services and separation of technical responsibilities within an organization. This power plays out in how platforms can be used to scale usability, security, and user-centered practices across an organization’s customer experience (CX). This is where platform governance comes in — and it’s just as important a component to plan for and scale as the technology that underpins it.

Ad Hoc acquires Cascades Technologies, LLC

Tue, 14 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Today, Ad Hoc closed a deal to acquire Cascades Technologies, LLC, a federal IT company with decades of experience providing critical IT services to a broad range of federal agencies.

With this acquisition, Ad Hoc adds new capabilities, a significant number of team members, and new agencies where we can help the government use technology to improve how it serves people.

The building blocks of platforms

Mon, 13 Jun 2022 09:00:00 +0000

In our work with government agencies, we routinely encounter interest in internal platforms: partially-completed attempts at developer platforms, disparate piles of applications that could benefit from a platform, and customers who know they need a platform but don’t know where to start.

The complexity and variability of platforms can make them difficult to talk about. The term platform is used in so many contexts that people often talk past each other when working to define the scope and strategy of any one particular platform. This confusion is so predictable that it’s become a trope: in any platform conversation, someone will eventually ask, “so what do you mean by a platform, anyways?”

Building a mentorship program for product managers

Wed, 25 May 2022 09:00:00 +0000

As Ad Hoc has grown, our team of product managers has too.

Introducing the Ad Hoc Product Field Guide

Mon, 25 Apr 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Transforming how government agencies approach digital services will take more than new technologies. It will take a working model shift that prioritizes feedback, change, and the outcomes that services enable for people.

At Ad Hoc, we believe this shift to a product-based approach is a critical step towards creating modern government agencies. Without it, agencies are destined to repeat the risks and failures that have become common in government technology.

Product Reviews: Building a culture of feedback loops in government

Mon, 18 Apr 2022 01:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc product managers are at the forefront of product strategy, product thinking, and product execution within government. They leverage their judgment and strong partnerships with stakeholders, policy experts, and digital service counterparts to achieve outcomes for Veterans, seniors, and others who use government digital services.

But time, energy, and space don’t always exist for the repetition and practice that are key to product managers’ growth. So, how do we help product managers strengthen their product skills and develop a shared understanding of high-quality product sense?

Setting the right benchmarks for site speed in government

Tue, 12 Apr 2022 11:06:00 -0500

At Ad Hoc, we believe the government has a duty to prioritize user-friendly products and accessibility compliance in service delivery. In practice, that means the goals and benchmarks used in the private sector often won’t apply to public digital services.

Bringing service design to the VA digital services platform

Wed, 16 Mar 2022 01:00:00 +0000

To best support the public, government digital services teams need the right tools and resources to do their jobs.

At the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), Ad Hoc supports the Veteran Services Platform (VSP) program, which is a centralized suite of tools, standards, and frameworks that government and vendor teams across the VA use to build services for Veterans. To meet the needs of internal customers, Ad Hoc’s platform service design team, in collaboration with our prime contractor Oddball, takes a service design approach to continuously gather feedback from those internal customers and use that information to improve their interactions and experiences with the VSP program.

Developing a focus style for a themable design system

Tue, 08 Feb 2022 09:00:00 -0600

Focus styles are visual indicators used to style elements, usually links and form elements, that have been focused by the user, either by “tabbing” using the keyboard or by clicking.

Creating a flagship mobile app to meet Veterans’ needs

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 09:00:00 +0000

This summer, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) launched a new flagship mobile app built with the support of Ad Hoc to provide Veterans convenient, seamless, and secure access to their healthcare and benefits information. We were honored to support the VA’s work, along with our prime contractor Liberty IT Solutions and subcontractor Digital Foundry, to ensure that the app meets Veterans’ specific needs and gives them an exceptional mobile experience

In early 2020, our team began a discovery sprint to assess the value of developing a mobile app on behalf of the Office of the CTO at the VA. Our work would prove very timely – it began at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic that would impact the lives of so many Veterans and their ability to access in-person VA services.

Examining the covidtests.gov architecture

Tue, 18 Jan 2022 09:00:00 +0000

A day early, the Biden Administration has quietly launched the new website that allows households to order four COVID-19 rapid antigen tests.

Tour the U.S. with Ad Hoc!

Mon, 10 Jan 2022 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc’s remote life culture creates a unique opportunity for our team to learn about and share the cool places and activities in our respective communities. As of today, we have team members in 45 states plus DC. Recently, we asked people to share some must-see sights and unique activities from their state to create an Ad Hoc guide to (most of) the U.S. If you’re looking to try something new, whether in your home state or another, check out our list for some bookmark-worthy adventures!

Alabama

U.S. Space & Rocket Center
The largest space museum in the world! With the biggest collection of rockets and space memorabilia, history and space enthusiasts will definitely enjoy a visit here.

Crafting our leadership teams for fast, effective information flow

Tue, 04 Jan 2022 09:00:00 +0000

When I arrived at Ad Hoc a few months ago as the new VP of Engineering, one of my first responsibilities was to roll out new leadership levels within our fast-growing Engineering team that help us scale effectively.

We recently wrote about one of these leadership additions, practice managers, and how important it is to be intentional about change when it comes to organizational design. Since then, we’ve also introduced new Engineering Directors to the organization.

Ad Hoc joins team on USDA Forest Service BPA to support modernization

Thu, 02 Dec 2021 09:00:00 +0000

A team led by Creative Systems and Consulting and including Ad Hoc and TechTrend has been awarded a three year task order on the DAITSS Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA) for USDA Forest Service Natural Resource Manager (NRM) Directorate IT Support Services for NRM modernization. We’re thrilled to be part of this team, which is Ad Hoc’s first opportunity to support the Forest Service and its modernization initiatives.

The Forest Service CIO is focused on modernizing their 70+ software applications that manage agency data and connect with both internal and external users. The USDA Forest Service Natural Resource Manager maintains 40+ IT applications that more than 9,000 employees use to execute the Forest Service’s mission and collect data that improves decision making, transparency, and reporting.

The right benchmarks

Tue, 30 Nov 2021 14:33:00 -0600

Our vision at Ad Hoc is to close the gap between consumer expectations and government. As more of our daily lives move online, it’s crucial that everyone can access and use online government services, but it’s also important to clarify the distinctions between consumer expectations and emulating what popular commercial websites are doing so that agencies can focus on enabling the best outcomes.

Using CX to align goals for improved service delivery

Mon, 22 Nov 2021 03:00:00 -0600

At Ad Hoc, we bring modern tools and practices to the government so that it can better serve people. We also help agencies mature as digital service providers by building the skills and capabilities they need to transform how they work and deliver services.

At the core of this work is a focus on designing for people’s needs and the customer experience (CX). We believe CX can play an important role in government modernization. But we also believe that it should serve as more of an active “sense and respond” function that helps agencies reduce friction to service delivery, rather than just a passive reporting role.

Research as Diplomacy: The marriage of research and product

Wed, 10 Nov 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Performing research is sometimes met with pushback from stakeholders. Be it the perception that time taken for research is crucial and not worth “wasting,” or stakeholders that feel they already fully understand the problem, most Ad Hoc teams have met with resistance to performing research at one time or another.

However, products designed without understanding the problem space and the ecosystem they interact with can end up doing more harm than good and can put stakeholders in difficult situations (squandered budgets, detrimental unintended consequences, increased security risks). Reframing the research step and using it to bring stakeholders’ concerns to the forefront instead of pushing past them can turn research skeptics into research advocates. We call this approach Research as Diplomacy.

Learning to grow as an organization without losing who you are

Thu, 21 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000

There are many different ways to organize people and teams — none of which are perfect.

How Ad Hoc supports working parents and caregivers

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc was founded as a fully remote company in 2014, and ever since, we’ve celebrated and encouraged our team members to create a healthy balance between their home and work lives. Ad Hoc’s #remotelife culture gives our team members the flexibility to adjust their work to meet the needs of their lives. Sometimes, this involves their pets making noise in the background of a Zoom call, having to step away to sign for a delivery, or even making dinner for their kiddos while listening to our weekly All Hands call (our team members are expert multitaskers!). Recently, we’ve added a number of company-sponsored activities for the kids of Ad Hoc team members.

Improving government services, by design

Wed, 13 Oct 2021 04:00:00 -0500

Recently, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) released updated customer experience (CX) and service delivery guidelines (Circular A-11, section 280). The new guidance identifies CX as a priority, and it includes expectations that federal services measure both the user experience and the effort associated with their services to try to limit the overall burden placed on people seeking those services.

Among the list of required elements in Circular A-11, section 280 that a federal agency is expected to include in their CX management is service design. The guidance describes service design as

6 concrete tips on how to keep good people while managing remotely

Mon, 13 Sep 2021 09:00:00 +0000

As the team I manage has grown in size and the pandemic has tested everyone’s stamina, I’ve been contemplating what it means to manage well. People are quitting their jobs in record numbers across many industries right now. How can we keep folks interested and engaged in their work, specifically in a remote environment?

There are plenty of blog posts out there detailing what makes people “happy” or “fulfilled” overall in life (Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is oft-referenced). Some folks have even attempted to map this hierarchy of needs onto a remote work environment. But how, practically, does one manage folks so that you’re covering their needs at the right times?

When to manage focus in an accessible way

Thu, 09 Sep 2021 09:00:00 +0000

If you’ve ever read through a long article and lost your place on the page, you know how frustrating it can be to find your place again while trying to remember what you were reading about. A similar experience happens on the web if you don’t properly manage focus for people who rely on the keyboard or screen readers to navigate websites.

Focus determines where keyboard events go on a page at any given moment. Managing focus is when you need to programmatically move a user’s focus elsewhere on the page in response to something that happened. Google’s Web Fundamentals has an introduction on the topic if you’d like to dive deeper. Think of it like passing a baton in a relay race. The baton represents the focus you need to pass to the next phase of the race, or in your case, the next step in the experience you’ve shaped.

Ad Hoc continues to support CMS Hospital Quality Reporting

Tue, 07 Sep 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Recently, Ad Hoc and our prime contract partner, Bellese Technologies, won a contract from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) to support the Hospital Quality Reporting (HQR) 2.0 task order. We’re excited to be able to continue our work with CMS and deliver our expertise to the modernization of HQR systems.

Threat modeling: a journey of hypothetical nuances

Wed, 04 Aug 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Security is usually a highly pragmatic area of concern. You make a specific technical error; you get hacked. You use a specific risk list, like OWASP Top 10, to prevent a specific security vulnerability. That sort of thing.

However, threat modeling is more subtle. Security personnel need to work with hypotheticals and deal well with nuance to understand what the real assets of your system are, and what are the most likely threats to those assets. Often, you’ll need to do this before any part of your system has been designed, let alone programmed.

Embarrassingly automatable as the first step of legacy modernization

Tue, 20 Jul 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Recently, I saw a video presentation from the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development (DWD). It’s well worth watching, maybe if you’re a tech masochist, but especially if you care about the smooth functioning of government services.

In it, DWD employees explain the IT systems that support Wisconsin’s unemployment insurance program. The demonstration, which walks through a typical unemployment claim process, is painful to see. What employees have to deal with just to get their regular jobs done every day is so repetitive and prone to error, it’s hard to convey how bad it is without seeing it yourself. Their tasks are tedious and take a long time to complete, in part due to the many manual steps, but also because of the slow processing of the underlying mainframe-based system, which was first built some 50 years ago. So it can add days or weeks to the receipt of an unemployment benefit, which compounds when demand is high like during COVID.

Ad Hoc achieves three ISO certifications

Thu, 24 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc is proud to announce that we’re now certified for three internationally recognized standards in quality management, information technology service management, and information security management.

Ad Hoc’s decision to work towards being certified demonstrates our commitment to providing our customers with high-quality, consistent products and services and our ongoing investment in growth, reliability, innovation, and continuous process improvement.

Creating a COVID-19 dashboard to help the VA prioritize their response

Thu, 17 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000

When the COVID-19 pandemic became more serious in early 2020, the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) faced the challenge of responding quickly and effectively to help protect the people they serve, including Veterans, their family members, and caregivers.

Part of that response included using digital tools to allow Veterans to get the help they needed and avoid unnecessary overcrowding and COVID spread in VA medical centers.

A path to transforming the nation’s unemployment insurance systems

Fri, 11 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000

When digital services fail, like what we saw with the nation’s unemployment insurance (UI) systems during the COVID-19 pandemic, there are real human and social costs that undermine the public’s trust in government. These failures can also serve as catalysts for modernization, similar to what we saw in the wake of the HealthCare.gov rescue and the rise of digital service teams like the U.S. Digital Service, 18F, and Ad Hoc.

With new political leadership and initiatives like the Technology Modernization Fund, the time is ripe to rethink how the nation’s unemployment systems, many of which still rely on manual and paper-based processes, can be improved through new technology and approaches. This effort should include the use of modular and reusable solutions, an idea included in a proposed bill from Senator Ron Wyden, that states can adopt to address common challenges, such as identity verification, eligibility determination, claims tracking, and document management.

The tech debt interest rate

Wed, 02 Jun 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Software development is a process of iterative discovery. Developers at the beginning of a project cannot know exactly what to write, because no design can tell them how user needs will evolve or how product owner requirements might change over the life of the product. Agile development philosophies embrace the unknowable by encouraging us to just get started, build something, and then continue to iterate as we learn.

Developers refer to the need to revisit previously written code as “technical debt,” a term coined by computer scientist Ward Cunningham in 1992. Like financial debt, technical debt has an interest rate and grows over time. Just as interest on financial debt adds to the amount of money that must be repaid on a loan, interest on technical debt adds to the amount of code that will need to be revised in the future.

Ad Hoc awarded contract to support GSA Fleet Platform Modernization

Thu, 27 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc, as part of a team led by prime contractor Karsun Solutions, has been awarded a contract to support a pivotal modernization project for the General Service Administration’s (GSA) Advanced Fleet Platform.

GSA Fleet provides quality vehicles and cost effective fleet management services to more than 75 federal agencies. GSA offers purchasing and leasing programs, short-term rentals, and ancillary services such as telematics, tracking vehicle speed and location, and tolling. With a modernization goal of creating an intuitive, agile, and integrated system that facilitates and streamlines all aspects of fleet management, GSA is dedicated to improving the fleet experience for its customers, suppliers, and employees.

Aligning human-centered design and Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

Tue, 25 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Co-authored by Stephanie Warren of Bellese and Tyreek Houston and Ian Lowrie of Ad Hoc.

With existing tools, the IRS could connect people with healthcare

Wed, 19 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000

In response to COVID-19, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) extended the tax submission deadline and created a special enrollment period to help people sign up for healthcare. These are both great examples of the government using effective digital services to respond to change, promote trust in government, and expand access to services.

What if HealthCare.gov’s Open Enrollment always overlapped with IRS’s tax submission window? This post explores how these agencies could work across their org charts, using the digital infrastructure and information they have today to help millions of tax filers find affordable or free healthcare, thereby reducing the number of uninsured people in America.

What engineering teams can gain by prioritizing learning

Mon, 10 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000

The collective knowledge of a team’s individual members is one of its most valuable assets. Whether solving individual problems or making high-level strategic decisions, that collective knowledge will enable better results. It should go without saying then that taking time to make the most of that collective knowledge is a worthy investment.

In one form, this means finding ways to better use existing knowledge. There’s a large body of research and articles out there around collaboration and collective decision-making, which is all very much worth understanding.

Building stakeholder relationships remotely

Tue, 04 May 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Throughout my government technology career, I’ve worked with all kinds of stakeholders on state, local, and federal projects. As both a civil servant inside the government and as a contractor, I’ve had the pleasure of working with stakeholders who range from being committed to the project’s success to checked-out and indifferent to the work of the team. Stakeholder challenges can stem from work culture differences, interpersonal dynamics, and previous experiences, to name a few.

Building a trusting and engaging partnership with stakeholders can be like building any relationship. What you put into it is what you get out of it. Engaging with your stakeholders from a place of compassion and caring can go a long way to help strengthen and grow working relationships.

Introducing the ATO Field Guide

Wed, 28 Apr 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Today, Ad Hoc is releasing an ATO Field Guide to inform the public, our customers, and our partners about how federal web applications are authorized to operate on behalf of the American people, and provide a basic introduction to federal risk management and information security concepts. The guide includes an overview of the ATO process, the laws and standards that have shaped its evolution, a glossary of key terms and acronyms, and links to further information and authoritative sources.

Since its founding in 2014, Ad Hoc has had the privilege of building and operating safe and secure digital services on behalf of the federal government. The opportunity to serve the public by bringing the technical expertise of the private sector to the challenges of government comes with a responsibility to help protect the nation’s information systems.

How I create small Go apps quickly

Mon, 29 Mar 2021 09:00:00 +0000

I often want to create a small web application to test out an idea or demonstrate some thing, and I’ve developed a small toolbox that helps me do so in Go.

I recently created the COVID Report prototype, a small application that connects to the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Blue Button API or the Department of Veterans Affairs Lighthouse APIs to look for vaccination records and display them to a user. The COVID Report prototype is open source and available on GitHub. With only about two weeks to build it from start to finish, it had to be built simply and efficiently, and Go was perfect for the task.

The Ad Hoc COVID Report prototype is now open source

Wed, 24 Mar 2021 06:00:00 +0000

In January, we wrote about a prototype application we developed that demonstrated the power of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ Blue Button API and the Department of Veterans Affairs Lighthouse API to help people verify their COVID-19 vaccination status.

Today, we’re happy to announce that we have open-sourced the code that powers the prototype. In the COVID Report repository, you will find sample Blue Button and Lighthouse clients, some examples of how to request and parse FHIR APIs, and a simple go web application.

CMS Blue Button Client

CMS Blue Button is a CMS web service that allows Medicare beneficiaries to share their data with third parties. To use it in a web application, you ask a user for their consent by providing them a link to Blue Button, where they can confirm to CMS that they want to share their data with your application.

What research can do: A maturity model for government agencies

Wed, 10 Mar 2021 09:00:00 +0000

At Ad Hoc, our goal is to help federal agencies provide digital services that best meet the needs of their users. Building products that are technologically robust is only one part of the complete picture.

Research is one of our core human-centered design competencies. We measure the maturity of our processes, internally and with our customers, by how deeply we integrate research in cross-functional processes that span product, engineering, and design. What does research look like in each phase of this maturity model? What can research do to enable better products in a holistic, human-centered, product-driven approach?

Lorem nope-sum: The benefits of using realistic content in UX research

Tue, 23 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

It’s common for UX researchers to use placeholder content when wireframing or prototyping to help save time. Placeholder content has many valuable uses, but it should not go in front of users. In our experience conducting UX research studies, placeholder content can trip up users and give you poorer results. When testing new designs with users, realistic content is key to convey the purpose and use of your designs.

Building a federal front door for vaccinations

Fri, 19 Feb 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Recently, a friend of mine shared how she was able to get COVID-19 vaccination appointments for her parents.

Ad Hoc wins contract to support Head Start data platform

Mon, 15 Feb 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc is proud to have been awarded a contract from the Office of Head Start to help them build a modern data system that will allow the program to better serve more than a million children across the U.S every year. We’re also excited to be part of this assisted acquisition with 18F as they scale their digital transformation efforts across the federal government.

“This project brings together both an amazing mission and an innovative approach to technology acquisitions for expanding modernization in the federal government. Ad Hoc is thrilled to support both 18F and the Department of Health and Human Services to build modern tools that will help Head Start better serve children across the country,”

Prototyping a COVID-19 vaccination verification app

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0000

As COVID-19 vaccinations roll out across the country, people need a trusted, easy-to-use application to check their vaccination status, track the time between their first and second dose, and share that status with others.

While some private apps exist for this, the best organization to operate a high-trust, nation-wide vaccination verification application is the federal government. An application run by the federal government is accountable, auditable, and motivated by public service instead of profit. This can help build trust in the security and accuracy of the data while encouraging broad adoption of a shared vaccination verification system.

Prototyping a COVID-19 vaccination verification app

Thu, 28 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Why Ad Hoc is offering free COVID-19 vaccination consulting

Tue, 26 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0000

As we see news reports of vaccination information, scheduling, and sign-up apps failing to serve the public across the country, we’ve felt an increasing sense of urgency to make our knowledge and skills in this area available to governments.

That’s why we’re offering an hour of free consultation to any U.S. government operating a COVID-19 vaccination website or mobile app. There’s no catch. Just contact us, and we’ll help you.

What it's like to be a product manager at Ad Hoc

Wed, 13 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc defines product management as the discipline for building the right things given goals, user needs, and constraints. It’s a mindset, rather than a singular process, for delivering value amidst change. Product management draws from other practices, like agile software development and human-centered design, to iteratively discover and shape solutions.

Product management originated in the private sector but is increasingly core to how the government thinks about the role of technology in advancing policy goals. This is due to two main trends: the increased digitization of government services and rising public expectations of these services. Today, people can manage most aspects of their lives online and with minimal friction, why should they expect anything less from the government?

Getting ready for launch

Fri, 08 Jan 2021 09:00:00 +0000

There is nothing like having your application in production. You and your users will find bugs, surprising behavior, and new challenges in ways that simply don’t happen in any other environment. Consider the initial period of time after launch — hours or days depending on when demand stabilizes — as sacrosanct, an opportunity to focus on operations, system availability, and providing reliable service to your users.

Ad Hoc has been a part of many high-profile launches in government, starting with coming in to help rescue the early troubled launch of HealthCare.gov, to subsequent, increasingly smoother open enrollment periods for that same website, to the transformation of VA.gov, among others. We’ve seen first-hand the stakes of getting launch wrong, and the value in doing it right.

Imagining an app to simplify student loan forgiveness

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 09:00:00 +0000

In the weeks following the election, President-Elect Biden has talked about forgiving $10,000 of student loan debt as part of a campaign promise to ease the burden on borrowers of student loans. Key to any policy roll-out is the success of its technical implementation and digital delivery. A failed website launch or underdeveloped digital strategy can imperil even the largest policy efforts.

It’s critical to consider as a first-class concern the delivery of digital services in the implementation of any modern policy initiative. There is a lightweight way that the new administration could start to achieve its goals around student loan relief, with a modest and timely investment in a digital service to engage with borrowers directly and to facilitate the implementation on the government side.

The impact of internal incentives on product outcomes

Tue, 15 Dec 2020 09:00:00 +0000

Often, organizations we work with are focused on output. It’s easy to understand and measure, and government leaders often use it as a metric to determine if a legal or regulatory requirement has been met. There is value in ensuring teams meet their contractual obligations, but an output-focused culture can create perverse incentives that can harm the outcomes products enable for users.

Output and productivity metrics became standard measures of success during the industrial revolution, which was all about the creation of goods like textiles and I-beams. It also created an imperative to keep the machines running, as that translated into more goods produced.

How bad incentives can lead projects astray, and how to set things straight

Tue, 08 Dec 2020 09:00:00 -0600

In their book Good Services, Lou Downe, the former Design Director of the UK Government, tells the story of when the National Health Service in Britain was given a mandate to ensure doctors saw patients within 48 hours of the patient calling to book an appointment. This effort to ensure patients could be seen quickly backfired, as offices simply refused to book appointments more than 48 hours in advance, leaving patients to call multiple times in hopes of booking an elusive slot.

This is an excellent example of a perverse incentive, which is an incentive that has unintended negative results often directly opposite the problem the incentive was trying to fix. This inspired us to consider ways we can help our government customers avoid similar issues in the services they operate.

Supporting the busiest time of the year for Medicare beneficiaries

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 09:00:00 +0000

From October 15 to December 7 of every year, millions of Medicare beneficiaries enter their Open Enrollment period, where they can find and enroll in the plan they want for the next year. At Ad Hoc, it’s imperative that we think critically and iteratively about how we can make this stressful experience as simple and intuitive as possible.

One of the most important decisions a Medicare beneficiary makes every year is what Medicare plan they enroll in. Whether it’s a mix of Original Medicare, a Prescription Drug Plan, Medigap, or a stand-alone Medicare Advantage plan, this choice determines the beneficiary’s coverage as well as their costs for health care and drugs. This choice impacts their health and drug coverage, financial standing, and peace of mind.

Automating Terraform modules

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0000

On a recent project, my team identified the need to transition from having a directory in our main DevOps repository that contains all of our Terraform modules to having a discrete repository for each module.

The benefits of a multi-repo arrangement are:

The new Ad Hoc Government Digital Services Playbook

Tue, 18 Aug 2020 09:00:00 +0000

In 2018, we launched the first version of the Ad Hoc Government Digital Services Playbook, a collection of best practices from our experience supporting federal agencies. Today, we’re releasing an updated version of the Playbook that compiles six years of lessons from supporting high-traffic, complex user experiences like HealthCare.gov, transformative projects like VA.gov, and major data initiatives such as the Beneficiary Claims Data API and Blue Button.

While the original Playbook offered additional commentary on the U.S. Digital Services Playbook, the 2020 version is now a standalone playbook that any federal agency can use to replace enterprise software patterns with proven techniques from the world of commercial software.

How agencies can scale up digital services in the wake of COVID-19

Tue, 21 Jul 2020 04:00:00 -0500

Like restaurants and retail stores, government agencies must reinvent how they deliver services in a world where pandemics like COVID-19 make in-person interactions risky.

Before the COVID-19 crisis, many government agencies had begun migrating in-person interactions into digital services. Now, every agency, from federal to local, needs to envision a way they can serve their constituents with as little in-person contact as possible.

For remote work, try starting with trust

Thu, 16 Jul 2020 09:00:00 +0000

Nothing about working during a pandemic is normal, but one thing that has struck me over and over again is that what seems so difficult for so many — working remotely — is completely normal for me. I’ve been a remote worker for five years, the last three of those at Ad Hoc.

It’s an unusual privilege I have — while everyone around me has been transitioning to home offices and Zoom meetings, I’m following (more or less) my usual routines and workflows. Even though everything else in daily life has shifted in some fundamental way or another, work for me remains largely the same.

The problem might not be COBOL

Fri, 10 Jul 2020 09:00:00 -0500

At the beginning of the COVID crisis, the governor of New Jersey called for COBOL developers to help the state fix its unemployment insurance systems. The systems were crashing under overwhelming demand, and the culprit seemed to be the decades-old code underpinning the application for benefits. Predictably, critics jumped all over the government for continuing to operate vital systems using a programming language invented more than 50 years ago.

What does product thinking look like at Search.gov?

Tue, 30 Jun 2020 09:00:00 +0000

Meet one of the most unusual services in government: Search.gov powers the search experience for your favorite government websites, from the National Park Service to NASA, similar to how Google works for the broader internet. The search experience is often a person’s first interaction with a digital service, which is why it’s so important to get the experience right for users.

How to create a welcoming user research environment

Thu, 18 Jun 2020 09:00:00 -0500

Close your eyes, and imagine that you cannot see this page to read it. Perhaps it’s not such a stretch to imagine it being read to you. But what then?

How will you navigate to the next blog post, or learn more about the government programs Ad Hoc works on? While the majority of users traverse web services visually, there is a large range of ways people access online tools. We consider it a fundamental part of our work to build tools that don’t exclude people with different abilities and needs.

Ad Hoc, Fearless, and Ellumen win contract to continue support of Blue Button 2.0

Tue, 09 Jun 2020 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc, along with team members Fearless and Ellumen, Inc., have been awarded a new, four-year contract to continue supporting the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) on the Blue Button 2.0 project.

How to keep your research practice going in a remote world

Tue, 12 May 2020 04:00:00 -0500

Workplaces, hospitals, schools, and other institutions are rethinking the way they conduct their regular activities in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As government agencies continue work on digital service projects, they also need to rethink how to best gather the needs of people and incorporate them into product development. Instead of hitting pause on user research plans, now is the time to understand the benefits of remote research.

Accessibility compliance at Accessibility Camp 2020

Mon, 20 Apr 2020 09:00:00 -0500

This January, 33 Ad Hoc team members came together in sunny Orlando, Florida for the first Ad Hoc Accessibility Camp, a three-day gathering to learn and practice making our services as Section 508 compliant as possible.

Modernizing how Medicare beneficiaries find and enroll in coverage

Thu, 09 Apr 2020 09:00:00 +0000

Nearly 15% of all Americans are currently enrolled in Medicare, with that number expected to double over the next decade. Medicare is a crucial way in which individuals who are at least 65 years of age or have special health conditions get their health care coverage.

As this population grows and more people turn to technology to help them access and enroll in government services, it’s essential that individuals can reliably and easily find and enroll in the Medicare plan that best meets their needs.

Ad Hoc wins contract to continue support of HealthCare.gov

Tue, 25 Feb 2020 09:00:00 +0000

Late last year, Ad Hoc learned that we had won a new contract to support the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in designing and building HealthCare.gov.

Ad Hoc is honored by CMS’s continued trust in the work of our team, and we’re thrilled to continue putting our team’s collective skills towards creating an intuitive and reliable experience for people signing up for healthcare.

Four myths about applying human-centered design to government digital services

Thu, 20 Feb 2020 09:00:00 +0000

Human-centered design (HCD) is a framework for building products based on the needs of people, rather than requirements.

It originated in the private sector but is now gaining broad adoption among government agencies. For example, many organizations are now developing their own in-house HCD teams, while others are requiring vendors to demonstrate that they can effectively apply human-centered methods. All of this is good news for the millions of people that rely on government digital services.

Why design skills are a power-up for researchers

Thu, 23 Jan 2020 09:00:00 +0000

Picture this: it’s the last day of usability testing. You’ve just finished typing up your notes from your final user session, when your stakeholder messages you, “Hey so when can we see results from the study?”

Many of us have been in this position. Sometimes your stakeholder doesn’t even wait until the end of testing to ask for results. Your instinct might be to quickly type up a report, throw some quotes in there, and email it over as fast as possible. But is that the most effective way to get research results out? Words may be faster, but taking the time to visualize your findings through design can have a greater, longer-lasting impact.

Dependency audits on JavaScript projects

Tue, 17 Dec 2019 09:00:00 +0000

At Ad Hoc, many of our projects use modern JavaScript. On the backend, we have projects using Node.js, and on the frontend we use libraries like React.

Anthropology techniques in human-centered design: The deep hang

Wed, 20 Nov 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Anthropologist Clifford Geertz has a great story about a wink.

If you’re in a crowded room and you happen to see someone twitch their eye, what do you think:

The case for listening to enterprise users

Tue, 12 Nov 2019 09:00:00 +0000

For companies that rely on consumer sales, there’s a clear business case for creating intuitive, pleasurable user experiences. But what about situations where the consumer or end user is not the customer?

Where the organization is the customer, there may seem to be less incentive to design around the needs of end users. This is certainly the case in many organizations that rely on enterprise systems. If the system basically works, the thinking goes, why focus too heavily on the experience of using it?

Ad Hoc awarded contract to support VA healthcare modernization

Tue, 05 Nov 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc, as part of a team led by prime contractor Liberty IT Solutions, LLC (Liberty), has been awarded a contract to support a critical Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) healthcare modernization project.

The Healthcare Integration & Modernization (HI&M) project is part of a larger effort by VA to create a smooth and efficient experience as Veterans move from active duty to VA care. Creating a common system for Veterans’ electronic health records will help both VA and the Department of Defense provide a seamless system of care for Veterans.

Navigating government barriers to human-centered design

Tue, 22 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Though many of the techniques are the same, human-centered design practitioners in government face an entirely different world of constraints and incentives than their industry peers.

For human-centered design folks moving from industry to government work, these constraints can feel like a barrier to designing better services.

Human-centered design helps government make better decisions

Wed, 16 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000

The term human-centered design is deceptively simple in its intent. After all, who wouldn’t want to design from a human centered point of view?

It’s also easy to see human-centered design (HCD) as just another design term in a long line of design terms — from graphic design and UX design to more recent terms like design thinking and service design. Why then, is human-centered design different? Why should you pay attention to this term, and how can it add value and meaning to designing in a government context?

Design systems in government: How to ease handoffs

Fri, 11 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000

The end of a contract and subsequent transition is a plight that’s not in any way unique to design systems. It’s a pain point that contractors of all stripes eventually feel during their contracting careers.

With a nascent design system, this represents a risk: not only will the system potentially sit idle or be forgotten, but the culture change you’ve been trying to effect — a single source of truth, design and engineering working together, a single holistic system instead of siloed parts of a whole — may stop as well. Here are some tips I learned from transition off the Medicare’s Quality Payment Program design system.

Design systems in government: When to start

Thu, 03 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000

In my time at Ad Hoc, I’ve had the opportunity to start up two separate design systems: one for VA.gov called Formation, and another for Medicare’s Quality Payment Program (QPP), which I’ll call QPPDS. These two systems served different agencies and audiences, and were in different states when I left them, but they provide a helpful contrast for what it looks like when you begin a project with a design system and when you add it later. Let’s dig in.

Starting at the beginning

Before Formation went to production, VA.gov (at that time Vets.gov) had several different dynamic React applications and a host of static pages, divided roughly into topic areas. Each app and topic area was supported by a different team with some small amount of overlap.

Launching a government MVP in less than a month

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Launching government websites is often thought to be a slow process. Compliance, security, branding, documentation, and reliability all take time and resources to work out. The perception of long product development cycles means agencies often see valuable smaller projects as not worth the trouble.

We can often do better, though. On behalf of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), we recently launched a site for insurance issuers to validate drug and provider coverage data on HealthCare.gov. We went from zero lines of code to a production MVP serving pilot users in under a month. Standing up a government website won’t always go this quickly, but we think there’s a lot of valuable lessons for digital service teams from this simple exercise.

Design systems in government: Improving documentation for better collaboration

Thu, 26 Sep 2019 09:00:00 +0000

In order for teams and projects to be successful, there needs to be as few barriers between the team members as possible. In a previous post, we examined how communication is an essential aspect of efficient teams, specifically through the lens of design systems. One thing we learned is that design systems don’t negate the need for effective communication — in fact, healthy pathways of communication are important whether a team is using a design system on a project or not. So, one aspect of communication and collaboration that we’d like to expand on a bit is documentation.

In this post, we’re going to provide some guidance on building or maintaining the documentation for design systems, but many of these concepts could easily apply to other types of projects. Our Design Systems Working Group conducted multiple research sessions with the Ad Hoc team to better understand the ecosystem of design systems we create, maintain, and use — and the pain points around that work. Documentation was one of the themes that came up over and over again. We decided to try and distill that feedback into some general recommendations.

Using feature flags and dynamic blocks in Terraform 0.12.x

Tue, 24 Sep 2019 09:00:00 +0000

With the advent of the new HCL 2 language in Terraform, I’ve been using the newly available methods to make the internal Terraform modules that my team has written more functional and less inter-dependent.

One of the issues I’ve been trying to resolve in the Terraform codebase is the dependency of one module to related resources in another module. In many scenarios, I want a security group I’m creating inside a module to include an ingress rule for a security group that was created in a different module, leading to ordering problems, and often resulting in failed terraform apply commands. Sometimes running the code twice will fix the problem, but to me that feels less than ideal. Modularization of Terraform code is important in my mind, as it really allows you to do less work and have better results, and bringing up new environments is easier when you don’t have to cut and paste and hand-edit large sections of boilerplate code. Better to push the boilerplate into a module for re-use!

Design systems in government: Communication is critical

Wed, 18 Sep 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Design system communication is a two-way street. Establishing a strong communication strategy to get information from teams using the design system as well as provide the core team with information is critical for its success.

With a design system, you often have lots of people working on lots of different things, and over time you get design sprawl. Now imagine this sprawl across multiple government agencies, multiple programs, and multiple contracting teams. Throughout the lifecycle of a product, teams need clear ways to communicate successes, troubles, and improvements. They also need to be able to ask for support. The core design system team needs to ensure a mutual understanding for teams using the design system.

Design systems in government: Less can be more

Thu, 12 Sep 2019 09:00:00 +0000

There’s a problem with the way we think about design systems. On the one hand, they help designers and developers collaborate more efficiently and avoid unnecessary work. On the other hand, they’re products unto themselves. They require thought, maintenance, and work, and they’re never truly done.

In the world of government technology, this can be magnified exponentially. Most agencies have a complex array of programs and services with vastly different needs, users, and interfaces. In contrast, even a large business in the private sector may only need a design system for one main use case or user persona.

The 21st Century IDEA Act Playbook Part 5: Scaling design systems

Tue, 10 Sep 2019 09:00:00 +0000

The 21st Century IDEA Act mandates that any website of an executive agency adhere to the website standards of the Technology Transformation Services of the General Services Administration. Though the law isn’t explicit, the “website standards” likely refers to the U.S. Web Design System (USWDS), a library of components built especially for federal government websites.

The 21st Century IDEA Act Playbook Part 4: Prioritize modernization with user research

Wed, 04 Sep 2019 04:00:00 -0500

The 21st Century IDEA Act mandates that every agency with a website or digital service review those services, assess which are “most viewed or utilized by the public or are otherwise important for public engagement,” and prioritize those that need modernization. The best way for agencies to prioritize their services is to thoroughly research how users interact with those services.

Ad Hoc wins contracts to continue support of Veteran digital services

Wed, 28 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Recently, Ad Hoc and our prime contractor partners at Oddball and GovernmentCIO won two contracts from the Department of Veterans Affairs to support the VA’s Veteran-Facing Services Applications and Platform programs. We’re thrilled to be able to continue our work with VA and to bring our expertise to the mission of serving Veterans.

In May 2016, Ad Hoc was awarded a three-year contract by VA to work with the Digital Service @ VA to build Vets.gov, a single destination for Veterans and their beneficiaries to find, apply for, and manage all the benefits that VA provides. Over the course of the contract, we worked with VA to support the development of over 25 services to Veterans used by over one million Veterans. The success of Vets.gov opened the door to discussions on how to bring this approach to a larger audience. On Veterans Day 2018, VA merged Vets.gov into VA.gov to power a new Veteran-centric version of their agency website.

The 21st Century IDEA Act Playbook Part 3: Customized, mobile-friendly experiences

Mon, 26 Aug 2019 04:00:00 -0500

The 21st Century IDEA Act hopes to change the fundamental way agencies go about designing, building, and presenting digital services to the public. Luckily, Ad Hoc is here to bring our experience to help other teams comply with the Act’s requirements in a smart way that improves outcomes for users. In part 1 and part 2 of this playbook, I covered requirements from avoiding duplication to secure connections to designing around user needs.

Today, we’ll finish up the first section of the IDEA Act with the final two requirements for public websites and digital services. But that doesn’t mean we’re done with the IDEA Act Playbook. There are many more requirements for agencies throughout the Act, and I’ll be turning to other experts at Ad Hoc for strategies that can help agencies through implementation.

What makes an API simple?

Fri, 23 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000

When designing an API, you should always strive for simplicity. Unchecked complexity can make your system more difficult to use, change, and debug. These compounding effects can put you and your team in a bind when it comes to improvements, and it can make the system painful or impossible to use for those who depend on it.

While you typically use an API to facilitate machine-to-machine communication, it’s almost always going to be a human who will spend the time building the thing that integrates with your API. Taking the time to ensure that it’s as easy as possible to get your API to do what the customer needs it to do will make your API a better and more effective tool.

The 21st Century IDEA Act Playbook Part 2: Search, security, and serving users

Wed, 21 Aug 2019 04:00:00 -0500

Welcome to part 2 of Ad Hoc’s playbook of strategies and insights from the ground for agencies looking to implement the 21st Century IDEA Act. In part 1, I covered continuous accessibility compliance testing, ways to give your websites a consistent appearance, and a case study from our work at the Department of Veterans Affairs in how to reduce duplication in your digital services.

In this section, I’ll continue looking at the IDEA Act’s new requirements for public websites and digital services, including a deep dive into what it means to design services around the needs of your users. Let’s jump in.

The 21st Century IDEA Act Playbook Part 1: Accessibility compliance, appearance, and overlap

Thu, 15 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Late last year, Congress passed the 21st Century IDEA Act (IDEA Act), which compiles a number of new and existing requirements for federal websites into a path for how agencies should design digital services.

Reading the IDEA Act, I saw much of how Ad Hoc works with our customers on external-facing government digital services, such as HealthCare.gov, QPP.cms.gov, and VA.gov, reflected in its mandates. I thought it would be helpful to share our experience in implementing these kinds of digital services so that others could use that as input into how they approach these same challenges.

Defining digital services and what they mean for product teams

Wed, 14 Aug 2019 09:00:00 +0000

While at this year’s Code for America Summit, I met up with friends and former coworkers from 18F, the U.S. Digital Service, Code for America, and similar organizations and realized that we’re all focused on improving “government digital services,” but don’t have a shared definition for what that term means.

This post offers one perspective on the conversation, by outlining how we think about digital services at Ad Hoc and how these ideas relate to our product practice and approach.

Expanding the possible with the Find Local Help tool

Thu, 20 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Find Local Help is a tool from HealthCare.gov that connects people to in-person, one-on-one help signing up for health insurance. Users can enter their zip code and get a list of people in their area to help them complete the process in person, free of charge. In 2017, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), which runs HealthCare.gov, contracted with Ad Hoc to improve the performance and user experience of the Find Local Help tool.

A case for incremental change and Section 508 compliance

Tue, 18 Jun 2019 09:00:00 -0500

When we think about computer access, we often focus on compliance with Section 508, the law mandating that websites, IT resources, and electronic documents procured and maintained by federal agencies are accessible to people with disabilities. Current best practices in the broader UX world also look to ensure minimal access requirements. In my work with Medicare beneficiaries, I’ve learned that the challenges of ensuring people can access electronic resources go beyond what can be described in a set of standards. For many individuals, aging is accompanied by changes to their vision, hearing, manual dexterity, and/or cognitive abilities. As they’re managing these uncontrollable shifts in their lives, the constant modifications introduced by updates to websites, applications, and operating systems can make using computers an ongoing struggle for many people.

Prototyping the Ad Hoc Hotel & Casino

Thu, 13 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000

A successful check-in is complete when a customer is comfortable and satisfied in their room. Not just when they leave the check-in counter. — General Manager, Ad Hoc Hotel & Casino, Las Vegas

Three Ad Hoc-supported projects win FedHealthIT awards

Tue, 11 Jun 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Recently, three federal health projects supported by Ad Hoc won Innovation Awards from FedHealthIT. The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) won for their work on the Beneficiary Claims Data API (BCDA) and the Federally Facilitated Marketplace Cloud Migration, while the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) won for Lighthouse, their API program. Ad Hoc is proud to support these projects and help federal health offices better serve the public.

Product management at Ad Hoc

Fri, 31 May 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc designs and delivers technology that empowers government to better serve people. The role of our product practice is to guide this work by collaborating with our customers to deliver the right things, in the right way.

Successful procurements are built on strong relationships

Thu, 30 May 2019 09:00:00 +0000

I’m at the Code for America Summit this week in Oakland, CA, gathering with hundreds, if not thousands, of amazing people who are all united by a passion for making government effective in serving people. This is my fourth time at Summit, and I’m looking forward to learning about all the amazing work going on in so many places. Last year, I spoke at Summit about the role of vendors in government technology, and what the community could do to help make vendors more effective in fulfilling our role in the ecosystem.

New services from the Ad Hoc Innovation team

Thu, 23 May 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Today, we’re excited to announce that Ad Hoc is launching a new set of services from our Innovation team. These new services are designed to be low-risk introductions to digital service methods (such as agile and human-centered design) for government teams, in the context of a specific product or service. Our workshops and short discovery sprints will help teams incorporate short, iterative cycles into their projects. Too often, government teams are forced to make critical decisions related to hiring, budgeting, procurement, and even launch deadlines when they have the least information about their product. Our Innovation team wants to change that.

Ad Hoc wins place on Medicare Payment System Modernization BPA

Fri, 17 May 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) awarded Ad Hoc a place on the Medicare Payment System Modernization (MPSM) Blanket Purchase Agreement (BPA). In a field of 73 bidders, Ad Hoc was awarded one of six spots on the BPA. We’re thrilled for the opportunity to continue serving CMS as they improve the systems that enable them to deliver critical services to millions of Americans.

Becoming stewards of the social infrastructure

Fri, 03 May 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Most of Ad Hoc’s daily work is focused on health care and Veterans, but I want to take a step back and look at government as a whole for a moment. I want to remind ourselves of the truly enormous number of public services it provides.

Measuring a process’ memory in OS X/Linux

Wed, 01 May 2019 09:00:00 +0000

I found myself needing to measure the memory usage of a program throughout its run time and was surprised that I didn’t find a tool out there already that did what I wanted. After a bunch of work, I figured out that it’s easy to roll it yourself. In the hope of saving somebody that work in the future, here’s how to do it. This post describes how to run a process, sample its memory throughout its run using only bash and unix tools, and plot the results using gnuplot.

The power of being naive

Tue, 23 Apr 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Subject matter naiveté is our super power. We’re brought into new contexts as experts in process and creation, not in the subject matter we’re supporting. We’re there to help create clarity and value from something that subject matter experts know intimately, but may struggle to see with an outside perspective.

Come see Ad Hoc at the Code for America Summit 2019!

Thu, 18 Apr 2019 09:00:00 +0000

On May 29-31, a contingent of the Ad Hoc team will be traveling to Oakland, CA for the 2019 Code for America summit where we’ll be running a hands-on workshop demonstrating the power of prototyping digital services and testing them with users. If you’ll be attending the summit, we’d love for you to participate in the workshop and meet some of the Ad Hoc team.

Creating a human centered information architecture on VA's developer portal

Wed, 17 Apr 2019 09:00:00 +0000

As announced recently by Department of Veterans Affairs Office of Information and Technology, Lighthouse is the front door access to VA’s high-quality APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) which developers can use to learn about and access services using VA data. The portal launched in August of 2018 as a proof of concept and is a work in progress with development teams constantly improving its offerings.

Decommissioning Cohorts

Wed, 13 Feb 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Cohorts is Ad Hoc’s custom-built user research participant management application. Since its launch in March 2017, Cohorts has been used at some point by nearly every research team at Ad Hoc, with heavy use from our Veterans Affairs and Hospital Quality Reporting research teams. Our teams often work with vulnerable populations, so there are security and regulatory compliance concerns on how research participants’ data is stored and accessed. Because Cohorts was developed in-house, with limitations on who could access it, and its data owned by Ad Hoc rather than a third party, it was an attractive solution to our research teams’ needs and our government partners’ requirements for security and regulatory compliance.

Gift exchange — because even #remotelife people like gifts

Wed, 06 Feb 2019 09:00:00 +0000

Let’s be honest — there are many great perks about our #remotelife. We get to work anywhere in the United States, which means none of us has to move to a major city to do impactful work. We have a great team of people who vary in their background, age, life status, interests, and so much more. We have the flexibility we need to live real lives – taking off 2 hours in the middle of the day to hit up that long post office line or peacing out at 4:00 because we are on carpool duty or taking one of the many beloved dogs of Ad Hoc for a mid-day walk.

Ad Hoc's design team experiments with a book club

Tue, 11 Dec 2018 09:00:00 +0000

I spent two weeks of excitement and anxiety waiting for my first day of work at Ad Hoc.

I paced around my house like the first sentence of A Tale of Two Cities personified. That period of career transition was one of intense emotion and expectation – because nothing can truly prepare you for leaving one team and joining another. What are the people like? What is the cadence of work? Will I fit in more with the engineers or designers? Sketch or Figma? Spaces or tabs? The interview process and blog posts on the company website can tell you a lot, but it seems like nothing but time can really give you answers.

My view of OpsCamp

Fri, 30 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Internal company training events are often associated with boredom, long monologues, and Powerpoint presentations. My first Ad Hoc training event was exactly the opposite. OpsCamp featured role-playing team members seeking to sabotage our efforts, a card game to learn incident management, and an active scenario that used our skills as a team to respond to a carefully planned incident. In a short period of time, I have applied the skills I learned to help myself and my co-workers provide resilient digital services.

Ad Hoc receives Contractor of the Year award

Tue, 13 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc is thrilled to be named a Greater Washington Contractor of the Year by the Northern Virginia Chamber of Commerce (NVCC) and the Professional Services Council (PSC). The awards recognize leadership, innovation, and commitment to excellence among contractors, executives, and program partners in the greater Washington, DC, area.

Ad Hoc begins work on MACFin

Fri, 09 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

In late September, Ad Hoc began work on the Medicaid and CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program) Financial System, otherwise known as MACFin. MACFin is part of a broader initiative — the Medicaid and CHIP Business Information Solution (MACBIS) — to modernize federal Medicaid IT systems. Specifically, MACFin will be consolidating and replacing several legacy systems that had been used for program budgeting, reporting, and analysis.

HealthCare.gov turns five

Fri, 02 Nov 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Over the past five years, Ad Hoc has played a critical role in the recovery effort for HealthCare.gov. Our efforts embody the core values we hold today: an emphasis on practicality and a focus on the people impacted by our work. But making lasting change in our government institutions requires a maturity that goes beyond top tech talent and short-term involvement. Government needs a partner that can build and guide the delivery of digital services over the long haul. As we’ve grown up with HealthCare.gov, so has our understanding of what it means to be that partner.

Our four day discovery sprint with San Jose

Thu, 25 Oct 2018 09:00:00 +0000

In mid-September, a small team from Ad Hoc conducted a four day discovery sprint with the innovation team in the city of San Jose. Ad Hoc is experimenting with different consulting models aimed at helping governments adopt new ways of working, starting with understanding the problem they’re trying to solve, and experimenting with both citizens and public servants to rapidly identify opportunities and shape solutions. We think these engagements can not only help our clients solve real problems, but also demonstrate that more experiment-driven ways of working are possible and worth investing in.

Ops Camp 1.0

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 09:00:00 +0000

One of the things that distinguishes Ad Hoc is that we prefer our application teams to operate the things that they build in production, as a way to foster ownership in those applications as well as ensure the quality of applications we deliver.

Saying goodbye to middleware, or retiring homework for fun and freshness

Wed, 03 Oct 2018 09:00:00 +0000

Today is a bittersweet day for Ad Hoc Engineering, as we fully retire middleware, one of our Engineering homework assignments. Middleware was replaced in our homework pools for engineering positions by noclist back in May, but we wanted to give anyone who may have had a solution in-progress time to complete the assignment.

Validating business rules and building confidence through tests

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 09:00:00 +0000

It can be challenging for organizations to adapt, migrate, modernize, or otherwise change legacy systems for new uses or business requirements. So-called digital transformation or legacy modernization efforts, while motivated by concerns such as finances, new technology, or shifting priorities, can be risky endeavors from a logistical perspective, and are often dominated by the needs of operations. I want to highlight one example of how we at Ad Hoc helped the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the agency that administers HealthCare.gov, navigate such a change.

Award: CMS Medicare Coverage Tools

Mon, 09 Jul 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Recently, Ad Hoc was awarded a task order from The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) for Medicare Coverage Tools. The program centers around developing a replacement for the current Medicare Plan Finder (MPF).

Greg Gershman at Code for America Summit on reshaping the government technology ecosystem

Fri, 01 Jun 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Yesterday, co-founder and CEO Greg Gershman joined Rafael Lopez of Accenture, Marquis Carbrera of IBM, and Dan Hon, CfA Summit Co-Chair on the main stage at the Code for America Summit for a session on Reshaping the Government Technology Ecosystem.

A phased approach to modular contracting

Wed, 30 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Modular contracting is all the rage now. It promises to reduce risk, add flexibility, and deliver great software, faster. But merely breaking a $500 million procurement into smaller procurements isn’t going to solve your problem. Any complex project contains a lot of uncertainty. To be successful, your program needs to be responsive to what you learn as you go and update the direction based on what is discovered. Using multiple, small contracts does not necessarily guarantee this result, but you can build better products and get better at incorporating new information as you go by:

Ad Hoc at the Code for America Summit 2018

Tue, 29 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc is sending a contingent of ten people to this year’s Code for America Summit, which is focused on four major themes: digital capability in government, what it looks like when government starts to design policy with tech at the table, the state of the government technology market, and citizen engagement.

Ad Hoc at RevTechX - California’s digital revolution conference

Wed, 16 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc is a sponsor of the RevTechX conference, “Future Technologies for a Better Government”, which begins today and runs through tomorrow at the Cal Expo in Sacramento, CA.

Ad Hoc at 2018 Health Datapalooza

Thu, 26 Apr 2018 07:51:38 +0000

This morning marks the start of 2018 Health Datapalooza, “the gathering place for people and organizations creating knowledge from data and pioneering innovations that drive health policy and practice”.

Launch: VA appeals transparency tool

Wed, 28 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Last week, Ad Hoc helped our clients at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and the U.S Digital Service launch an improved Appeals Status tool “to increase transparency and enable Veterans to track the progress of their benefits claims appeals”.

Getting great people on government contracts

Tue, 20 Mar 2018 09:20:00 +0000

Most contracts I’ve seen have a period of performance that starts the day after the award. That doesn’t give the winning vendor much time to assemble an excellent team. From a business standpoint, it’s not practical to have highly qualified (and expensive) people on the bench. Great people are also highly motivated and want to work on things that matter, not wait around.

Quality Payment Program at HIMSS18

Sun, 11 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

There’s lots of great sessions and resources at #HIMSS18, The 2018 HIMSS Conference & Exhibition, in Las Vegas this week, around the Quality Payment Program.

The launch of the Quality Payment Program website

Sun, 11 Mar 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks a milestone for our Quality Payment Program Front End Development Services program — the public launch of the submission system for clinicians in the Quality Payment Program.

Ad Hoc awarded CMS contract under the ADELE-QRI BPA

Sat, 10 Mar 2018 11:47:32 +0000

Today, Ad Hoc was one of six companies to receive a prime contract award under the Agile Delivery to Execute Legislative Endeavors for Quality Related Initiatives (ADELE-QRI) Blanket Purchasing Agreement (BPA) from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Moving into UX

Thu, 01 Mar 2018 08:00:00 +0000

I have an anthropology degree, and I believe that working in User Experience (UX) research is one of the most meaningful applications of that training. I started my journey into UX a few years ago when living in Washington, DC. Exposure to the many and far-reaching issues that our government deals with everyday made me realize that I needed a career that had more impact. There’s a lot of good work to be done in the world. I trained in anthropology because I want to conduct research that is accessible, actionable, and immediately beneficial to a large number of people. Working as a user researcher at Ad Hoc has helped the government build the services that millions of people rely on.

Why we use homework to recruit engineers

Mon, 26 Feb 2018 09:00:00 +0000

With a remote-first team, Ad Hoc has some interesting challenges when it comes to recruiting engineers.

One of those challenges is finding a way to evaluate technical ability without an in-person technical interview. We do this by issuing homework assignments to candidates to be completed on their own time, and we’ve had great results with this approach. This blog post will highlight some of the benefits of our homework-based evaluation process, both for our company as well as prospective candidates.

Developer-driven focus management for single-page applications

Fri, 16 Feb 2018 08:00:00 +0000

“Focus on the things that are important.” For web browsers, focus means an element will be scrolled into the visible area when a user presses the Tab key. But what happens when a single-page application disrupts the natural focus order? I am going to outline a development strategy I call developer-driven focus management.

Ad Hoc sponsors Code for America Summit

Tue, 13 Feb 2018 10:00:00 +0000

At Ad Hoc, we’re just starting to gear up for the Code for America Summit, held in Oakland from May 30 to June 1, 2018.

Ad Hoc partners with Fearless on CMS Blue Button

Mon, 12 Feb 2018 09:00:00 +0000

The Blue Button project is one of the earliest modern examples of creating government technology that empowers people to make decisions based on data.

Staying agile in a shutdown

Mon, 22 Jan 2018 10:00:00 +0000

Today marks the first workday since the federal government shutdown. As a federal contractor helping run several large systems, we seek to be of greatest use to our customers and for the people we all seek to serve. Here’s our thoughts on this:

This is a test

Fri, 19 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

Details have emerged as to just how bad the bad design was that led to the false ballistic missile alert in Hawaii last weekend. As Jason Kottke points out, Hawaii’s response, to reassign the civil servant who inadvertently issued the alert, while a political necessity, does not help get at the actual problem: that the root cause of this incident is bad design.

What Jurassic Park can tell us about human resilience and human-centered design

Thu, 21 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Life finds a way — Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jurassic Park

Faith in the foundations: Lessons from DC history for compassionate design

Fri, 15 Dec 2017 08:47:00 +0000

You can find all kinds of contradictions on 16th Street NW in Washington, DC. Nicknamed “Church Row,” any number of different Christian denominations, as well as Jewish and Buddhist congregations, make their homes along this busy thoroughfare. Population shifts over time have affected the demographics and sects housed on 16th Street but, when one faith community moves out of their building, they frequently pass it on to another faith community.

Ad Hoc at the ISM Conference

Wed, 25 Oct 2017 00:00:00 +0000

On Monday, I attended the 2017 ISM Conference at the Gaylord National Harbor, south of Washington D.C. It is the 50th annual conference of the sponsoring organization, American Public Human Services Association, APHSA.

Ideas for creating mobile applications for Veterans

Tue, 24 Oct 2017 19:00:00 -0500

Recently, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs released a Request for Information looking for ideas in how to create mobile applications for Veterans. The prompt for the main section of the RFI was: “Submit your creative ideas on how VA can incentivize industry to develop mobile applications.” Here’s a summary of our response:

Industry is looking for one thing: users. VA can spur the development of mobile applications for Veterans by giving industry access to new users. In the private sector, an approach that has proved successful is to build a platform that provides third-parties controlled, governed access to your users and their data, with their consent. Two examples of how launching such a platform led to industry investing in application development are Facebook and the IRS.

Stop your (business rules) engines!

Tue, 10 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0000

One of the many surprising artifacts of the initial failed HealthCare.gov launch was a “business rules engine.” This was a new concept for most of the team that was assembled to help rescue the site.

Guest lecture at the Rhode Island School of Design

Fri, 06 Oct 2017 12:00:00 +0000

Last week, I had the honor of speaking to a group of students at the Rhode Island School of Design’s The Web and Democracy class. It was a great opportunity to talk about the history of accessibility on the web, and how current technology including front-end frameworks, ARIA, Section 508 and WCAG 2 play a vital role in ensuring the web is medium for everyone.

Accessibility compliance: Start with the right tools

Thu, 14 Sep 2017 12:00:00 -0500

When people ask what I do for a living, I reply “Web accessibility designer.” I’m proud of that fact; I get the chance to make the web better every working day.

Soapbox: DevOps with the Ad Hoc Infrastructure team

Wed, 23 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Soapbox is an open source software platform for building and deploying web applications using cloud providers like AWS. It represents our take on DevOps-done-right.

R&D: BEAM clustering with AWS Auto Scaling

Tue, 22 Aug 2017 16:00:00 +0000

Want to skip to the code? ClusterScrape is an example Elixir application to demonstrate one way of using BEAM’s baked-in clustering on AWS.

Easy eclipse viewing with #remotelife

Mon, 21 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, a once-in-a-generation event comes along to mess with your work day.

James' uptime beard - #remotelife at Ad Hoc

Tue, 08 Aug 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I usually wake up to quick six year old footsteps downstairs an hour before my alarm. I check my phone for PagerDuty alerts and pull my mustache from between my lips. Vets.gov was available through the night; I won’t need to shave this morning.

UX Offsite 2017 in Portland, Oregon

Fri, 28 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As designers, we love working remotely for the flexibility we gain in our creative process — time to think, time to create, and problem solve in ways that work for each of us, free from the constraints of office-based work environments. But if we’re honest, designing remotely also presents some real challenges too. Specifically, how do you create “water cooler” moments where you can bounce ideas off each other, or come up with an entirely new solution, based on an unplanned hallway encounter with a colleague? How do you share work with people you don’t collaborate with on a day-to-day basis? Google hangouts and slack, while incredibly important, don’t solve this problem very well.

Ad Hoc and DHS FLASH

Wed, 26 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In November 2016, Ad Hoc was one of small group of companies selected as awardees on the Department of Homeland Security’s FLASH (FLexible Agile Support for the Homeland) contract. We were incredibly honored to have been selected, and very excited for the opportunity to work with DHS and help with their critical mission.

Needed: Full stack software developer for short-term, high-impact project in Sacramento

Mon, 03 Jul 2017 00:00:00 +0000

As we noted last month, the California Department of Technology (CDT) added Ad Hoc to the State’s expanded Agile Development Pre-Qualified (ADPQ) vendor pool.

#remotelife is for the birds

Wed, 28 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This spring, a robin decided to use my rain gutter’s downspout as the perfect place for her nest. Since the downspout is right next to our screened-in porch, my family was intensely interested in her progress as she sat to hatch her eggs. A short while later we were rewarded with two baby chicks.

How to run a gameday exercise in complex, multi-product environments

Wed, 21 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

In my role as Senior Software Developer here at Ad Hoc, I recently led a gameday exercise for a number of systems we support for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services under our Website Development Support (CMS WDS) contract. A gameday exercise is a series of mock disaster recovery drills run in a technical environment designed to test the skills and processes teams have put in place to deal with production incidents.

Ad Hoc and the State of California

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 12:58:00 +0000

Recently, the California Department of Technology (CDT) added Ad Hoc to the State’s expanded Agile Development Pre-Qualified (ADPQ) vendor pool.

Sophia’s #remotelife at Ad Hoc

Mon, 12 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Four months ago, I joined Ad Hoc as a designer working on Vets.gov and Ad Hoc’s website. The Vets.gov work is pretty equal parts hands-on design and user research, which means I go between being immersed in Sketch and Marvelapp and spending a lot of time in Join.me channels.

Getting help, fast

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Sometimes, the humble, un-exciting solutions have the largest impact.

Katie Gwinn’s #remotelife at Ad Hoc

Fri, 09 Jun 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Transitioning from corporate life to #remotelife and #momlife

Before joining Ad Hoc, I commuted to the office of a large, traditional company every day. I felt excited and nervous about joining a remote company. It would be a large change from settings I was used to and would be my first time returning to work after becoming a mom.

CPU profiling with Qcachegrind

Thu, 18 May 2017 10:16:00 +0000

Following is a presentation I made to my engineering colleagues at Ad Hoc about CPU profiling with qcachegrind, a tool that allows visualisation of profiling data in the callgrind format.

Curtis’ #remotelife at Ad Hoc

Tue, 11 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

For me, #remotelife means awesome food.

Working remotely is pretty cool. It’s by no means a breeze, and it comes with its own set of difficulties, but one thing I’ve come to greatly enjoy is the ability to eat amazing food.

Ad Hoc begins user experience research work on Hospital Quality Reporting Project

Mon, 10 Apr 2017 09:00:00 +0000

Today, Ad Hoc began work as a subcontractor to our prime contractor partner, Bellese, on the Hospital Quality Reporting (HQR) Task Order under ADELE-QRI.

Danny Chapman’s #remotelife at Ad Hoc

Thu, 06 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Danny Chapman, Creative Director at Ad Hoc. In my current role, I assist other design teams where I’m needed, and advocate for good design principles in all of the work we do.

Introducing Cohorts

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today marks the launch of Cohorts, a service of Ad Hoc that allows us to conduct incisive research with groups of relevant people to make government digital services work better for all. There are two components to Cohorts — finding the right people and conducting the right research.

South by Ad Hoc

Thu, 09 Mar 2017 00:00:00 +0000

The SXSW Interactive Festival begins tomorrow in Austin, TX, and three Ad Hoc staff will be there: Greg Gershman, Leanna Miller Sharkey, and Dan O’Neil.

Digital collaboration at the VA - Federal News Radio

Mon, 27 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

Today, Ad Hoc CEO and Founder Greg Gershman took part in a radio interview with our partners, Blake Hall of ID.me and Emily Tavoulareas of VA Digital Service. They discussed the large-scale collaboration that’s necessary to solve the many issues with “funneling 500 Department of Veterans’ Affairs websites into one portal”.

Ben Kutil’s #remotelife at Ad Hoc

Tue, 21 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Ben Kutil, product manager and designer for Ad Hoc’s work with CMS on HealthCare.gov.

Don't go chasing waterfalls

Wed, 02 Nov 2016 00:00:00 +0000

At our Code for America session, designers Ben Kutil and Alex Taylor and researcher Laura Ellena share their paths in civic tech, tools and practices for stakeholder communications, and challenges and opportunities for small tech companies in government contracting.

Presentation at Web Content Mavens Meetup on content-driven user experiences

Thu, 22 Sep 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Tonight, Ad Hoc User Experience Research Manager Laura Ellena gave a presentation at the Web Content Mavens meetup in Washington, D.C. called MavenMini: Content-Driven User Experiences

Paul Smith at Chi Hack Night

Fri, 26 Aug 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Ad Hoc Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder Paul Smith spoke tonight to Chi Hack Night, Chicago’s weekly event to build, share & learn about civic tech. Here’s his talk — Beyond the HealthCare.gov Fix: Making Better Government Software.

VA awards Vets.gov contract to Ad Hoc

Wed, 04 May 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Silver Spring, MD: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) awarded the ‘Vets.gov Technical Support’ contract to a team of technology vendors led by Ad Hoc LLC, to design, develop, and operate vets.gov. Vets.gov is a new Veterans-centered website that will consolidate all of VA’s existing services in to a single, self-service user experience. Veterans will be able to access all of VA’s information, benefits, and services from one site, with one login, all with a cohesive design organized around their needs.

The HealthCare.gov rescue

Tue, 09 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

In the days following the initial launch of HealthCare.gov in the fall of 2013, the White House, under the direction of U.S. Chief Technology Officer Todd Park, assembled a team of top engineering talent from outside of government, including software developers, designers, and operations experts who had worked in Silicon Valley and technology startups around the country. Crucially, they all had experience delivering high-quality consumer experiences and operating high-traffic websites, exactly the expertise needed to run a site like HealthCare.gov.

Podcast on responsive design at Vets.gov

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 00:00:00 +0000

Today, Ad Hoc Creative Director Danny Chapman joined Vets.gov USDS Design Lead Emily Wright-Moore in a podcast about the vets.gov project on Responsive Web Design.

Patient Evaluations

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Faced with a growing backlog of claims, we built a new, flexible solution that helps VA medical examiners do what they do best — help patients get the care they need.

The problem

Hundreds of medical forms stranded in legacy software needed to be incorporated into an online solution for medical examiners, and quickly.

Vets.gov

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

The Department of Veterans Affairs needed to deliver a new beta website to quickly showcase how VA services could be conducted online.

The solution

Ad Hoc was engaged by the VA to help deliver the first version of Vets.gov. Faced with an aggressive adhoc-timeline, the Ad Hoc team was engaged in all aspects of the project, including branding, user experience, visual design, development, and technical infrastructure.

Window Shopping at HealthCare.gov

Tue, 07 Apr 2015 00:00:00 +0000

HealthCare.gov needed a way for shoppers to view plans without being caught in the bottleneck of creating an account.

The solution

Ad Hoc was engaged by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to fully redesign, develop and operate the Premium Estimation Tool (PET) for open enrollment 2015 (November 2014 - March 2015). With a small agile development team and less than 5 months of development time, Ad Hoc delivered a responsive, mobile-first solution that served over 400 million unique visits, the highest traffic portion of HealthCare.gov, with no downtime, over the course of open enrollment for 2015.

Accelerating how agencies move from zero code to launch