Traci Walker

‘It Was Teaching People about the Flexibilities’: Traci Walker on Rethinking the Government Procurement Process

Traci Walker was the first Director of Digital Service Procurement at the U.S. Digital Service, a role she held for over six years. Prior, Traci was a Senior Contract Specialist within the Executive Office of the President.

Traci joined U.S. Digital Service from the federal government’s Office of Administration, bringing a wealth of knowledge about the procurement process — especially IT contracts. 

During her six-year tenure — one of the longest at U.S. Digital Service — Traci helped transform how agencies approach procurement. She brought a results and product oriented focus that made the contracting process quicker and more cost effective. 

Below, Traci discusses the importance of procurement training for public servants, the benefits of an Agile methodology, and purchasing the first-ever presidential Blackberry.

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February 26, 2020

Kathy Pham:

Traci, tell us about your journey to USDS.

Traci Walker:

I was already doing Office of Administration (OA) and the Executive Office of the President (EOP) procurement and contracts for the Obama Administration. At that time, I was learning how to do Agile development contracts in a different manner. The typical government way of buying IT was absolutely not serving the administration. They didn’t want to pay for just the time and the effort anymore; they wanted to pay for results and for a working product. That was when I really started to get my arms wrapped around the concept of product and Agile development. Over the next couple years, we started building contracts in a way that pioneered how we do digital service procurement today. 

Then Healthcare.gov launched, and didn’t work. Part of that challenge was the procurement process and how the contracts were set up to begin with. They were still leveraging waterfall processes, relying on teams and teams of sub-contractors, and were not incorporating commercial best practices, such as load balance testing, into their processes. All of these were situations I had already worked on personally in my capacity at both GSA and the White House. 

After HealthCare.gov happened, the Office of Federal Procurement (OFPP) convened a group of people and asked, “Theoretically, what would it look like if we did Agile development and put it into contracts?” I said, “Theoretically, I’ve been doing it for three years and have actual results.” 

I sat down and answered a whole bunch of questions. They pulled that information together, along with other expert procurement input from SMEs, to create the TechFAR Handbook, which was launched at the same time as the Digital Services Playbook. We heard rumblings that there were going to be new offices created to help ensure the situation that happened with healthcare.gov did repeat itself, and they were going to be the places where my knowledge of procurement would be useful.

I really liked working with the White House. So when we heard that there was going to potentially be a White House team, I was eager. Somebody introduced me to Haley Van Dyck, and she brought me to a recruiting location. I thought she wanted to talk more about the TechFAR Handbook. Which she did — but what she was really doing was offering me a job at the newly formed U.S. Digital Service. 

Kathy:

So you basically got yourself approved for this new job before the office was even created?

Traci:

Yes. I’d been working on digital service contracts for seven years. Both my bosses at the time — the White House Chief Procurement Officer and Chief Financial Officer — knew that what I was doing was important to the rest of government. They wanted me to be part of this new team.

I came over as a detailee to begin with, as it was a lot easier that way; then in October of 2014, I became the seventh or eighth person on the USDS team.

Kathy:

Can you talk more about your early experience in government? Because that was critical to you building out USDS’s entire understanding of procurement. 

Traci:

When I came to D.C. at 18, I thought: “I love this place. This is what I want to do — I want to change government from the inside.” It wasn’t about being a politician, because they come and go. It was about becoming integral to the government machine-like being a Hill staffer or senior official who makes the policies and can direct how the work gets done.

I thought, “How do I get into this line of work?” and decided to start with contracts. My thinking was, “I’ll start there. I’ll get money, I’ll pay for college, and go back for a law degree.” Once I learned the business of IT contracting, I realized what I wanted to do. Early on, I got put on a four-year large IT system implementation project for the General Service Administration (GSA) and learned project management, finance, contracting, invoicing — the whole management of the process. I also learned IT systems and processes — and what a hundred million dollar waterfall failure looks like from the inside.

Three years later, I joined a nine-month executive leadership program. From there I got a two-month detail at the White House, and I ended up staying for seven years. I became a senior-level IT contracting officer and handled the majority of the White House’s IT budget and actions. 

It’s a very important thing to make sure that all the IT systems work when you’re at the White House. Failure was not an option, so you had to have high quality solutions and always keep inventing. When the Obama team came in, they had won on a social media platform and had new expectations for how robust their technology platform had to be, including moving services to the cloud and leveraging open source solutions, which were all new concepts. It’s funny: They walked in and sat down in 2008 to find Gateways as their computers, and Gateway had just gone bankrupt. I got to buy the first-ever presidential Blackberry and laptop. “Blackberry One” and “Laptop One” were my purchases. 

Kathy:

Let’s go back to when you started at USDS in October 2014. What were your first days like?

Traci:

I was used to coming in, and being at my desk at 8 a.m. in my old office, and I noticed at USDS that people were not coming in until 9:30 or 10. It was a different culture that was built on autonomy and expertise. I was introduced to Mikey Dickerson who said, “I don’t know much about procurement, so whatever you want to do is fine by me. I replied, “No problem, boss. I got this.” In that first month, Charles Worthington and I worked on recreation.gov, which had received bad press. Charles and I went to Denver and helped rewrite the solicitation to adopt Agile practices. 

In November 2014, the new budget passed and dumped a lot more money into USDS. And everyone’s like, “what do we do now? We have to hire.” We looked at how our early work was unfolding at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and decided, “Let’s try to get more agency teams.”

In the procurement world, we were running blue sky ideation sessions, along with the 18F procurement teams, and re-evaluating all of the rules and the regulations for acquisition. It became clear it wasn’t about changing the procurement process. It was about teaching people about the flexibilities, and giving them the right tool set. That is where the idea of creating comprehensive training programs took shape. It had taken me three years to learn Agile development, cloud, open source, and the new digital service concepts that I did with trial and error, and I thought, ” I should distill this down into a training program.”

Kathy:

Traci, your earlier point is so important: It wasn’t about changing the rules. It was about teaching people how to be flexible with what exists. 

Traci:

Another thing I was struggling with was that I couldn’t find anybody to hire at USDS, because people with a very specific skill set in digital service procurement did not exist. You couldn’t find subject matter experts in the space. However, we were able to find Jonathan Mostowski, my first hire. We also found Michael Palmer from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Claire Koroma, and Shannon Sartin. This was 2014 through the beginning of 2015. 

The hiring process for procurement people was very challenging. HR said, “You can’t be a Schedule A”, which was how the other digital service experts were being hired from outside government” So we really had to fight. We explained, “The President said acquisition has to be on the USDS team, lets find a way to make this happen.” Eventually, we worked closely with the USDS Talent team and HR to find the way to classify the role as a digital acquisition specialist. 

Kathy:

You mentioned that USDS received more money in funding. Do you know how that happened?

Traci:

Haley and Todd Park, the Chief Technology Officer, were talking with legislative affairs behind the scenes. But also, Congress had heard about the USDS being created and saw the potential. It was bipartisan: Government tech is bad, we can all agree on this issue. 

We were shocked; we had thought USDS was going to stay a small targeted team of around 12 people. It actually caused problems internally to now receive this funding, as we had to reset the strategy. We thought: “Well, what do we do now? How do we grow fast? What does this look like?” Everybody went out to try to find people. 

Kathy:

What was the team setup like at the time, and how did it grow?

Traci:

Haley managed us from the internal standpoint, and Mikey was drumming up business and figuring out where to point us. People would go on discovery sprints, come back, and then we’d make a decision. In the first year, everything was on GitHub; you could see all the projects we were doing.

Initially, we didn’t have Communities of Practice (COPs), which was a later decision made to help organize us into our areas of expertise. For the procurement team, we were part of the strike force teams, but many times, we didn’t have the authority or support to completely revise the contracts at the agencies we were partnered with. That’s when we started the training program and created the TechFAR Hub, which was a collection of best practices, principles, case studies, training opportunities, and community gathering space for the digital service procurement ecosystem.

A lot of times USDS teams went into agencies but weren’t touching base with the procurement teams; they didn’t understand how to manage the contractor. So they’d find themselves in navigating tricky waters and didn’t know to come back to us and say, “Hey procurement experts, you should be in the room when we’re trying to manage contractors.” We started mitigating that and helping people understand a better way of doing this. 

Both agency procurement and hiring professionals are very risk-averse and want to do things the way they’ve always done them, and we were pitching new concepts that agencies had trouble wrapping their heads around, even though the TechFAR Handbook provided the guidance. It helped that we were fellow contracting officers saying, “We understand what you’re going through, we get it. Here’s how you can do this,” it was a very hard struggle. We had to come up with legitimate ways of showing that this was the new way forward. That’s where I came up with the idea of the Clone Army. Everything at the beginning of USDS was “Star Wars” themed.

Kathy:

The Clone Army?

Traci:

Yeah. The idea was: “I’m going to clone myself and create my clone army of procurement officials in agencies, who hopefully are the people we will then work with to create our contracts.” That was my push to support the bigger picture. And it was a little different from the rest of USDS model, so it did take some convincing that in our particular world of procurement, we had to help educate the people who signed the contracts to support the work the USDS teams were doing with the agencies. 

Kathy:

What did the Clone Army become?

Traci:

The Digital IT Acquisition Professional (DITAP) training program, or the FAC-C digital service certification. It was a training & development program we worked on with the OFPP. Joanie Newhart, from OFPP, was my partner in crime on putting this together, because we needed the legitimacy of that office along with the subject matter expertise to pull it off. We did a pilot on Challenge.gov with an initial 30 contracting officers.

Mikey and some of the other USDS people sat in on our mock classroom and got to understand the procurement process a little bit better, too. We did an initial 6 month pilot, reviewed how it went, and then launched a 4 month “minimum viable product” or “MVP” that mirrored the common iterative best practices. We trained another 30 contracting professionals and then transitioned the training program into a policy, official certificate, and an industry-led open source training concept that has supported training thousands of acquisition professionals. 

Kathy:

One of my strongest impressions at USDS was when I joined your series called “Life of a Contract.” It really helped me understand how things moved around in government, especially as I was sent out to all these places.

Traci:

Yeah, Procurement 101 was definitely one of my duties for USDS. Because there was a big misunderstanding of what you could do and couldn’t do when you went to talk to contractors, and we wanted to make sure nobody got in trouble.

Kathy:

Traci, how would you describe USDS?

Traci:

It was the best job I have had to date. It was very chaotic and fun and out of place. It took me at least six months from when I started to join the USDS “Hoody Culture” and put on jeans and wear them to the office, because I was still so ingrained in traditional government culture. It was a really neat experience talking with some of the smartest people I’ve ever encountered and seeing their passion for government. 

Also, seeing how frustrating the work could be — and then being one of the people who could help them navigate that. When you ask, “Who were the bureaucracy hackers?” there were definitely those of us who had come from government. We said, “Let us help you navigate this. Here’s how you talk to these people. Here’s how you know who is the most important person in the room.” 

I remember throwing the first St. Patrick’s Day networking happy hour. We had everybody from the Chief Information Officer’s office (CIO) to 18F to the Presidential Innovation Fellows (PIFs) — the whole alphabet soup. We were at Jackson Place and it was a lot of fun. Many years after that party, there were still shamrocks and green ducks around, because people were just like, “It’s part of our culture.” 

Also, we had meetings in the boiler room. Having to walk through somebody’s conference to get from one room to the other became the norm. So was coming in during the night and finding a bunch of people playing board games. A lot of people were transplants from other cities — they weren’t leaving like me and going back to their house out in the suburbs. Everyone was like, “I don’t know anybody. This is my community now.” 

Kathy:

Traci, what are the things you’ve done that have stuck around?

Traci:

I started crab claws, which is the USDS hand gesture that everyone uses as “agreement” and “applause,” and eventually the crab became the mascot. As the story goes: We were at the first offsite in West Virginia for two days. For the first group activity, everybody got a number, had to close their eyes, and then line up in numerical order. When we were done, half the group was loud and boisterous. The other half was quietly sitting back and observing. The facilitator asked, “What are the quieter people thinking? Do you like this activity?” 

Somebody replied, “We should find a way to show silent approval when we’re all in agreement.” The offsite’s theme was sea-related, so I stuck my hands up, demonstrated opening and closing my hands like a crab, and said, “Why don’t we do crab claws?” Then everybody started doing crab claws. For the next two days, whenever the facilitator asked, “Do you like this?” we held up our crab claws.  And when we came back to the office, we decided that crab claws were still going to be our thing. 

Kathy:

Traci, what else are you proud of from your time at USDS? 

Traci:

The biggest thing for me is the legacy of the training program, and the impact the people who went through it were able to make in their agencies. When the new administration came in, they were able to latch onto it as a tangible thing and really appreciated it. Seeing where people who went through that are now in their career is amazing to me. That’s the legacy that I got to leave behind: People being able to step out of their norm, be strategic about the acquisition process, and get things done quicker.

For example, we had people at the VA who said, “This will never happen. We’ll never do this in a thousand years.” But now they have CEDAR and SPRUCE, contract models that are based on the strategies and the methods we were trying to put in place all those years ago. People today don’t ask, “Why Agile?” They ask, “How can we use it?” Now that’s the standard, and you have to get justification for not using it. 

Kathy:

Anything else are you particularly proud of?

Traci:

The personal growth as a leader I got to experience as part of the management team. Helping establish the COPs, being the procurement director, managing the logistics for offsites, and hiring a team was a really interesting professional challenges for me. I thought we were going to be a small team with potentially one more acquisition person, but we became a small but integral team we dubbed “The Procuremenati” . 

The friendships, the ability to make noticeable changes in procurement, and the impact that we saw day to day for millions of people-both internal to government and who interact with government, was what I consider proud moments. While there was fun and a relaxed environment, it was also typical to see people really working very hard on very important projects. We had an open concept room where everyone had laptops and discussions around the best way of solving a tech problem. I was able to learn so much around design, product, engineering, etc just from doing the discovery sprints. I truly value that blended environment and the passion that everyone brought to a very important mission. 

Kathy:

Thank you Traci!