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.

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.

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.

People like to have choices when it comes to accessing the government services they need, and they’re increasingly relying on mobile devices to do so.

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

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

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

As federal agencies adopt artificial intelligence to improve their services, the most consequential policy directive impacting how they'll use AI will ultimately turn out to be an OMB memo issued over ten years ago.

Native mobile apps can and should be be a valuable part of a larger customer experience strategy, and federal agencies should examine how to best apply the benefits of mobile to the needs of their customers.

People with a variety of backgrounds come to Ad Hoc seeking to make a greater impact by supporting the government on large-scale projects. Here, one team member shares insights into their move to a company that's dedicated to empowering government agencies to improve users' digital experiences.

For government agencies, choosing the right partner is critical to ensuring successful outcomes and efficient, responsible use of taxpayer dollars. In this blog post, we identify key factors agencies should consider and how to set partners up for success following a contract award.

We are incredibly pleased to be selected for this blanket purchase agreement, as it will allow us to continue supporting the Department of Health and Human Services.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) recently finalized a new rule that will have major implications for state and local governments across the country.

As agencies use platforms to deliver better customer experiences for their digital services, issues occasionally crop up. In this blog post, we talk about 2 common ones we've seen, what they mean, and how to fix them.

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.

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

Government agencies adopting generative AI tools seems inevitable at this point. But there is more than one possible future for how agencies use generative AI to simplify complex government information.

At Ad Hoc, we believe adopting an Accessibility Beyond Compliance mindset leads to more equitable digital services – even at the largest government agencies.

OMB memo M-24-08 sets aggressive deadlines for advancing digital accessibility. Here’s how to get started.

Your website may be the first interaction your customers have with your organization, so it's critical that you build it around their needs. In this blog post, we explore how the Louisiana Department of Agriculture and Forestry focused on key elements to improve the experience for their users.

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

Plain language may be just one facet to improving customer experience across the federal government, but it’s a powerful way agencies can make their services more accessible to everyone. Learn how the Department of Labor created plain language resources that empowered state unemployment offices to create equitable content for millions of people across the country.

As part of our mission to help organizations deliver people-centered digital services, Ad Hoc is excited to announce we’re now a WordPress Silver Agency VIP partner.

Adequate funding is key to helping teams redesign government services to be more efficient and user-friendly. Read this blog post to learn why funding is so important and how agencies like the Department of Labor are using it in their digital modernization efforts to upgrade critical public benefits.

Through Peregrine, Ad Hoc and IronArch will have the ability to build on our years of experience supporting agencies as they modernize their platforms while providing better services to the public.

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

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

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?

With the rise of AI and large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, government websites will need to change again in response to these new technologies.

As artificial intelligence (AI) tools begin to transform technology in general, they too are making their mark in government. At Ad Hoc, drawing on our practical experience with our federal customers and extensive prototyping and research, we believe AI tools present a valuable opportunity.

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

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

At Ad Hoc, we believe that shared technology platforms are often a critical part of government digital modernization efforts.

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.

Companies have been developing and using artificial intelligence (AI) for decades. But we’ve seen exponential growth since OpenAI released their version of a large language model (LLM), ChatGPT, in 2022.

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.

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.

Fundamentally, research is about helping people make better decisions, and it should be an integral part of how any team develops products and services.

This shift, from prioritizing an organization’s needs to making the customer’s overall experience the driving force, is an incredible opportunity to positively transform people’s trust in the government.

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?

You already know that a well-adopted, well-built technical platform can speed application delivery, allow for increased security, and embed compliance and brand standards across applications — if developers will adopt it.

One of Ad Hoc’s core values is to cultivate great teams. We’ve brought together people from across the country who want to focus their time and talents helping our customers provide positive, efficient experiences for the public they serve.

A technology platform can dramatically improve the delivery of government digital services — if developers will actually use it.

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.

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

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

To create accessible and inclusive experiences, you need to pay attention to accessibility throughout your design process, not just at the end.

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 you couldn’t understand?

At its best, data is a tool for learning and innovation. It can help agencies understand markets better, increase efficiency, and improve decision-making.

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.

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.

It may seem obvious, but often forms feel more like interrogations than conversations. State your name. Next. Phone number. Next. They can lack any sense of dialogue, but also feel downright rude.

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.

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.

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

Whether you’re starting a new product analytics collaboration or trying to get a current one back on track, good partnerships require a well-structured, traceable process.

Even with accessibility specialists at our side, there are additional ways accessibility newcomers can and should prepare to run research with assistive technology users.

Adopting a platform strategy should be a key component of how government agencies design and deliver digital services.

As we did with covidtests.gov, let’s take a quick look and see what we can learn about the implementation of this application from a systems design perspective.

We’ve found that product operations can help scale impact by putting objective indicators at the center of product decision-making.

Using data to improve government digital services is crucial. But before you can build your data team, it's important to understand the various data roles and data team structures that can help you maximize your impact.

Building compliance into a platform can accelerate security approval, which can also help speed up delivery of critical services to the public. In this post, we'll explore how it's done.

Building trusting relationships with your platform users is a powerful way to ensure your product remains strong and healthy and those using it have a positive experience. In this post, we outline ways that will put you on a path to achieving these goals.

Through our trauma-informed research practice, we're working to help agencies better understand trauma. From there, we can help them improve how they meet individuals' needs by offering assistance without triggering existing wounds or creating new ones.

Product portfolio management is an essential strategy for tracking initiatives across a large organization. Here are our recommendations that will help set your teams up for success and deliver better outcomes for your customers.

Hear from our team who spoke at the CMS Convergence event about how we use a product approach when developing APIs and the benefits that come from doing so.

The ATO process can be a taxing, frustrating process that may slow down innovation on federal web applications. But enabling a continuous ATO can bring about a number of key benefits to both the program teams and those who review the ATO application.

As more organizations consider remote work, it's important to understand what it entails and how to ensure all team members feel supported. In this piece, we share a few practices we've found success with.

Human-centered design can be hugely beneficial to API documentation and the developers who reference it. Here are some ways to ensure the technical content is clear and concise.

The benefits of working on a cross-functional team are many, and the experience is impactful for both the team and the customer. Let’s look at an example at how the flexibility of this kind of teaming helped us successfully produce under both time constraints and changing needs.

Design systems can be an important tool for agencies looking to scale their digital transformation and improve services to the public. Read more to learn what problems design systems can address and what lessons we’ve learned in developing them.

Data engineers in the public sector often face the challenge of large amounts of uncontrolled data from multiple sources. In this blog post, we look at solutions that help ensure reliability when resources are limited.

Sometimes an intentional absence of content is what's needed in a design system. Here, we'll explore why.

Taking an iterative approach to governance implementation will help you find a balance between the levels of written, automated, and manual enforcement to meet business and user needs without introducing unnecessary restrictions. Here are some recommendations.

The way you choose to implement governance processes can make or break your platform's adoption and level of success.

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.

We talk about platforms in terms of reuse of services, separation of responsibility, and platform “building blocks.” Framing platforms this way helps teams articulate the design, prioritization, and strategy of their platform.

We’ve created a supplemental APM mentorship program that provides a place for aspiring product managers to grow and experienced PMs to teach.

With this guide, agencies can start moving from a project management mindset to a product-based approach to delivering services that enable them to better serve the public.

We created Product Reviews to provide product managers with non-judgemental feedback on their strategic approaches from cross-functional peers.

As we think about ways in which government sites meet the needs of their users, speed is an integral part of what makes a site inclusive and accessible to more people.

To meet the needs of internal customers, Ad Hoc’s platform service design team takes a service design approach to continuously gather feedback and use that information to improve user interactions and experiences with the VSP program.

On a recent project, we had a set of focus styles built into a design system that were inconsistent and ineffective, leading to a not-so-great end user experience.

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.

Follow our plays to better equip your organization and teams with practices that lead to more equitable digital services for all.

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

If you’re looking to try something new, whether in your home state or another, check out our list for some bookmark-worthy adventures!

As people within Engineering take on new responsibilities, and new people join our teams, they are entering an intentionally-structured way of operating.

In keeping with this year’s theme of “Embracing Change: Adapting for the Future,” our panel explored the question of what happens when accessibility isn’t integrated into security practices.

Ad Hoc will be responsible for providing human-centered design (HCD) and research capabilities to this partnership. HCD and research are both areas of expertise for Ad Hoc.

While government websites don’t need to match or outpace commercial websites on design novelty or retention metrics, they should aim to outperform on ensuring users accomplish their goals easily and efficiently.

We believe customer experience 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.

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.

For us, that has meant doubling down on our people and investing in new structures that promote professional development, technical excellence, and the impact of the digital services we support.

Ad Hoc’s #remotelife culture gives our team members the flexibility to adjust their work to meet the needs of their lives.

We know that in order to build effective software, we need to understand the service’s current process. That’s where we turn to service design tools and methodologies.

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?

Popular JavaScript frameworks and tools can’t tell you when to manage focus. If you’re a product manager, designer, or engineer, properly managing focus so users know where to go is on you.

Ad Hoc and our prime contract partner, Bellese Technologies, won a contract from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services to support the Hospital Quality Reporting 2.0 task order.

We know we need to build digital services holistically and inclusively to make them available to the largest possible number of people, regardless where the compliance bar is set.

Threat modeling at Ad Hoc often starts early in the process of designing a system, and can involve product managers as much as it does any of the engineering staff.

Perhaps it’s time for an equivalent of Maslow’s classic hierarchy of needs, but for legacy modernization projects.

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.

With support from Ad Hoc and our prime contractor Oddball, the VA quickly built a COVID-19 digital reponse dashboard to help measure the trajectory and success of their COVID-19 digital services.

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.

Just as interest on financial debt adds to the amount of money that must be repaid, interest on technical debt adds to the amount of code that will need to be revised.

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.

While this mismatch in priorities can be a challenge, Bellese and Ad Hoc have found a number of product management strategies to bring the values of HCD into a SAFe environment.

CMS and IRS could use 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.

The collective knowledge of a team's individual members is one of its most valuable assets. Today, I'm here to make the case for putting in extra effort to cultivate this collective knowledge.

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.

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.

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.

Today, we're happy to announce that we have open-sourced the code that powers the COVID Report prototype.

Maturing a process is not easy, even if there is interest. It’s incumbent on human-centered design practitioners to recognize where an agency is with their practice, so they can identify how to help them grow.

Let’s talk about how governments can change course to create a vaccination process that improves equity and takes the burden of finding appointments off of individuals.

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

Through research, we’ve landed on a handful of principles that could shape a federal vaccination website and core features the website should provide on launch.

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’ve gathered a short list of ways state and local governments can improve their services now and prepare for the upcoming phases of the vaccination rollout.

Ad Hoc has created a prototype that would allow Medicare beneficiaries to check their vaccination status in an easy-to-use web app.

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.

We’re looking for people at all levels of experience who are interested in solving hard problems and helping organizations adopt more iterative and human-centered ways of working.

Launches can be unpredictable. Having a plan for launch can help you focus on that which you can control and set you up to recover more quickly should things go wrong.

To wrap up 2020, we wanted to share the highlights from our book clubs and other staff favorites to inspire your winter reading list.

What’s needed is a simple, purpose-built website to help borrowers apply for loan forgiveness, and help them stay enrolled in payment programs.

Agencies that take the time to set outcome-based North Stars, align their internal incentives to reward outcomes, and empower their product owners are better prepared to build excellent products for the public.

While there is a great deal written about how perverse incentives can lead to unintended outcomes, we wanted to focus on how using the right incentives can drive the right behaviors — both at the individual and organizational levels.

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.

Ad Hoc researchers come from a wide variety of backgrounds from archaeology to anthropology to museums to education. The team is proudly a place where we accept and encourage the diversity of people and their experiences.

We recently launched a new career ladder for the design practice. Each step has clearly-defined competencies and responsibilities that help staff chart a path for how to grow at Ad Hoc.

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

The 2020 version is now a standalone playbook that any federal agency can use to replace enterprise software with proven techniques from the world of commercial software.

Every agency, from federal to local, needs to envision a way they can serve their constituents with as little in-person contact as possible.

If your team is new to remote work, spend as much time setting up an environment based on trust as you are setting up technical tools to make it possible.

The government's problem isn’t using old code or older programming languages. The problem is often that they’re using code that wasn’t designed to meet the needs of people who use it.

Search.gov is an enormous opportunity to improve interactions between government and the people it serves. However, like any tech product, there is more to build than we have resources for.

As researchers, we’re on the front lines of understanding the people who use our services, and that means we need to be inclusive in how we conduct our research.

The Blue Button 2.0 program is a pivotal part of the move towards a more interoperable healthcare system that will give people more control over their healthcare data.

We at Ad Hoc denounce police violence, intimidation, and oppression, which is antithetical to a free, equitable democracy.

It’s important for designers and developers to consider the more nuanced difficulties that “thinking” disabilities and impairments can cause for users.

Instead of hitting pause on user research plans, now is the time to understand the benefits of remote research.

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 more accessible.

Our approach to the Medicare Plan Finder was to build a tool and process that would allow us to continuously improve what we provided to beneficiaries and those who support them.

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

While human-centered design (HCD) is gaining traction, its underlying concepts are sometimes misunderstood. This can mislead teams into thinking they’re working in a human-centered way when in fact, their work is largely driven by requirements.

Accessibility isn't just about checking a box. It's about an equitable, inclusive future for all.

Figuring out your research questions, finding participants, and doing the research are only part of the challenge. Perhaps the most significant work comes when you need to tell the story of your research.

To help improve the security of our projects, we integrated a way to audit our application dependencies into our agile development process.

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

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, 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.

Human-centered design practitioners in government face an entirely different world of constraints and incentives than their industry peers. For human-centered design folks entering government work, these constraints can feel like a barrier to designing better services.

Why is human-centered design different? Why should you pay attention to this term, and how can it add value and meaning to government work?

The end of a contract and subsequent transition represents a risk: not only will the system potentially sit idle or be forgotten, but the culture change you’ve been trying to effect may stop as well.

These two systems 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.

On behalf of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, we recently launched a site for insurance issuers. We went from zero lines of code to a production MVP serving pilot users in under a month.

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.

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.

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

Let’s examine two directions you can take when creating a government design system: incorporate everything into the design system, or make the design system as small and flexible as possible.

The details of how the Office of Management and Budget will interpret this mandate into regulation are still to be determined, and it’s important that those regulations provide a smart, flexible way for agencies to adopt the USWDS.

The 21st Century IDEA Act mandates that every agency prioritize public services that need modernization. The best way for agencies to prioritize their services is to thoroughly research how users interact with those services.

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.

Today, we’ll finish up the first section of the IDEA Act with the final two requirements for public websites and digital services.

Whenever you're trying to make something simple, it's important to think of the people who are using your tool.

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.

Reading the IDEA Act, I saw much of how Ad Hoc works with our customers on government digital services. I thought it would be helpful to share our experience in implementing these kinds of digital services.

We don’t have a shared definition for what government digital service means. This post offers one perspective by outlining how we think about digital services and how these ideas relate to our product practice.

Ad Hoc is a proud sponsor of Write/Speak/Code and their mission to support technologists of marginalized genders. This year, we want to do more.

Find Local Help is a tool from Healthcare.gov that connects people to in-person, one-on-one help signing up for health insurance. In 2017, CMS contracted with Ad Hoc to improve the performance and user experience of the tool.

As we consider accessibility, we also need to keep in mind the impact of disruptions, particularly for audiences who rely on predictability and for whom recreating their accommodations can be a painful process.

We used this scenario to introduce people to the human-centered, service-design-rooted processes we employ to understand a problem, learn quickly, and adjust.

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services won for their work on the Beneficiary Claims Data API and the Federally Facilitated Marketplace Cloud Migration, while the Department of Veterans Affairs won for Lighthouse, their API program.

At Ad Hoc, we define product management as “the practice of shipping the right things, given business goals, user needs, and constraints.” It’s a discipline, not a process, for maximizing value.

My theory is that a more relationship-based approach would better enable the government to have success on technology procurements than the seemingly distant and transactional relationship that appears to often exist in traditional procurement.

Today, we’re excited to announce that Ad Hoc is launching a new set of services from our Innovation team.

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).

As an organization committed to improving social infrastructure, we must also put our research, design, product, and engineering skills to work on all aspects of public service delivery.

I recently 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.

Subject matter naiveté is our expertise. We’re hired to be experts in process, creation, and problem solving, and the primary tool we use to do this work is asking questions.

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.

VA's Developer Portal 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.

Most of our work is focused on qualitative studies, and we find that there is often a lack of clarity among our stakeholders on the benefits of qualitative versus quantitative data.

Cohorts is Ad Hoc’s custom-built user research participant management application. Cohorts has been used at some point by nearly every research team at Ad Hoc, however, we’ve run up against Cohorts’ limits.

As 2018 drew to an end, the season of appreciation, gratefulness, and gifting was coming upon us.

Over the course of 2018, the UX team at Ad Hoc refined our principles. Because a new year is always a great time to reflect on what’s important, we’re sharing our principles here.

Four months ago, when so much felt uncertain and I was getting ready to begin my first day at Ad Hoc, passages from Bird by Bird are what made the excitement swallow the anxiety in my stomach.

Internal company training events are often associated with boredom, long monologues, and Powerpoint presentations. My first Ad Hoc training event was exactly the opposite.

The awards recognize leadership, innovation, and commitment to excellence among contractors, executives, and program partners in the Greater Washington, DC, area.

In late September, Ad Hoc began work on the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Program Financial System, otherwise known as MACFin. MACFin is part of a broader initiative to modernize federal Medicaid IT systems.

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.

The focus of our sprint was MySanJose, a mobile app that residents use to make service requests of five services, such as reporting abandoned vehicles, or graffiti.

Ad Hoc recently held a two-day OpsCamp in Chicago, IL, focused on helping team members learn through sessions, activities, and simulations.

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.

As a company that provides government digital experiences that rival consumer products, our greatest asset is our people, who are skilled in everything from building efficient, scalable software, to lean product methods, to human-centered design.

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.

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

In March 2017, Ad Hoc’s LGBTQ+ employees set up an #lgbtq Slack channel, and since then, Ad Hoc-ers who identify somewhere within the LGBTQ+ family share articles, swoon over Janelle Monaé’s latest, and talk about the tough stuff.

Yesterday, co-founder and CEO Greg Gershman spoke at the Code for America Summit for a session on Reshaping the Government Technology Ecosystem and what was needed to effect real, sustained change at scale.

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.

Hang out with Ad Hoc at this year’s Code for America Summit in Oakland, May 30 - June 1, 2018. Here’s some of the talks we’re excited about.

Ad Hoc CEO and co-founder Greg Gershman will speak today at a session called, HealthCare.gov: From Disaster to Operational Success.

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”.

It's clear that data, and making it available and usable, is an acute challenge facing the industry.

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.

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.

Today, Administrator Seema Verma of the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services announced the launch of Blue Button 2.0. Ad Hoc is working on this project with our [prime contractor partner Fearless Tech.

There’s lots of great sessions and resources at the 2018 HIMSS Conference & Exhibition around the Quality Payment Program. Ad Hoc is the prime contractor on the Quality Payment Program Front End Development Services project.

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.

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 Blanket Purchasing Agreement from CMS.

Ad Hoc at the 2018 HIMSS Conference & Exhibition, which “brings together 45,000+ professionals from around the world for five days of education, innovation and collaboration to help uncover the promise of health information and technology.”

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.

One challenge 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.

We recently conducted a session over video with potential candidates, and we recorded it so that others can get a feel for how things work.

This post will outline some best practices for focus management, and how it relates to accessibility.

We’re looking forward to meeting with potential teammates and hearing from a great speaker lineup of leaders in the field of government digital services.

Ad Hoc is supporting our partner, Fearless, to make Blue Button even more useful to more people. Blue Button is one of the earliest modern examples of creating government technology that empowers people to make decisions based on data.

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.

Details have emerged as to just how bad the bad design was that led to the false ballistic missile alert in Hawaii last weekend.

The ways we engage with government websites and services reveals the resilience of people. We work to adapt to processes and make the technology work for our purposes even when they aren't suited to us.

In our work designing, building, and maintaining websites, we could take a lesson from the 19th Street Baptist Church, and the many other religious buildings throughout DC that have served as homes for multiple faiths over time.

While the benefits of remote work are fairly self-explanatory (living where you like, being able to travel and work, etc), some candidates have concerns about whether or not remote work is right for them.

ISM is the largest health & human services technology event dedicated to improving the delivery of health and human services programs.

Recently, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs released a Request for Information looking for ideas in how to create mobile applications for Veterans. Here's a summary of our response.

Ad Hoc held its fourth all-company retreat in beautiful Leesburg, Virginia. This get together was a chance for all of us to make deeper connections between team members and the work we do.

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 helped rescue the site.

Ad Hoc Creative Director Danny Chapman recently guest lectured at a Civic Design class at the Rhode Island School of Design.

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 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.

Something we pride ourselves on at Ad Hoc is our preference to own the operations and maintenance for the things we build.

Sometimes, a once-in-a-generation event comes along to mess with your work day. Fortunately for Ad Hoc team members,

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.

Our growing UX team got together in real life in beautiful Portland, Oregon last week to talk, work, drink lots of coffee and tea, eat, and generally, spend some quality time together.

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.

Ad Hoc is looking for two Frontend Web Developers for a project in Sacramento, CA to help the California Department of Motor Vehicles create a new driver license / ID card program.

This spring, a robin decided to use my rain gutter’s downspout for her nest. I grabbed my phone, fired up a meeting room, and let everyone know that we had a live stream of the nest.

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.

I love the flexibility to cowork with other members of Ad Hoc when I need human contact, or to hole up in my basement den when I need to focus in solitude.

HealthCare.gov has a service called Find Local Help that allows people to search for one-on-one help. This vital search had problems sustaining more than a small set of searches at a time.

I have found working remotely has been invaluable in being able to pursue my career while balancing the demands of a family.

As a follow-up to our report on our Retreat, here is a quick update on the current state of Ad Hoc.

Last week, Ad Hoc held our third Retreat — a periodic gathering of all team members in the same place so we can learn from each other, have fun together, and build our shared culture.

As research manager, my days have a lot of variety. I frequently use our co-working space near the White House to plan projects, facilitate remote feedback sessions, and sync with teammates.

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 is providing the User Experience Research team, four professionals responsible for conducting all research.

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.

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.

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

Ad Hoc CEO and Founder Greg Gershman and our partners discuss the large-scale collaboration that's necessary to solve the many issues with "funneling 500 Department of Veterans’ Affairs websites into one portal."

I'm Ben Kutil, product manager and designer for Ad Hoc’s work with CMS on HealthCare.gov. I’ve worked independently for 8 years, and value the flexibility and focus remote work provides.

At our Code for America session, staff shared their paths in civic tech, tools and practices for stakeholder communications, and challenges and opportunities for small tech companies in government contracting.

What it all comes down to in the open data movement, like pretty much anything else in life, is love.

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.

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.

The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) today announced the award of a contract to a team of technology vendors led by Ad Hoc LLC, to design, develop, and operate vets.gov.

In the days following the initial launch of HealthCare.gov, Greg Gershman and Paul Smith, who would eventually go on to found Ad Hoc, joined a group gathered to rescue the site.

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.

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.

Creating a new way for Veterans to get the services they need.

We delivered HealthCare.gov's first window shopping application, empowering millions of Americans to quickly comparison shop for health insurance.