Values

Office of Innovation - Mission & Values

Mission: Improve the lives of New Jerseyans by solving public problems differently

And by “differently”, we mean: using participatory, evidence-based, and data-driven approaches and methods.

The following values are shared Office-wide (not just within the engineering practice). They are defined on our website and you can expect all your team members to subscribe and adhere to these values.

As the Office of Innovation, we are:

• human-centered: we put the user at the center of our problem-solving process, and we design with New Jerseyans, not just for New Jerseyans
• agile: we solve problems iteratively to allow us to measure results, learn fast, and deliver impact as soon as possible
• data-driven and research-backed: we use data and research to guide what we do, and how we do it
• cross-functional: we leverage diverse skill-sets (product, engineering, design, data, communication, and policy expertise) and diverse tools (technology, process, policy, communication) to solve problems
• collaborative: we work across teams, departments, agencies, levels of government, and nongovernmental partners to advance our work

XP Values

The following are the Extreme Programming (XP) Values. We don’t follow XP as a methodology/philosophy at large, but we have found that the values laid out in XP is well-aligned with our engineering discipline and we find it useful to leverage for our engineering values.

Everything we espouse and try to do should fall from a commitment to these values. And when we disagree with a teammate about the best practice or path forward, returning to these shared values as a baseline of agreement can be a useful tactic for resolving disagreement and finding compromise. This is not just your responsibility as an individual, but something that we should be able to expect from others.

• Communication: We care about fast, clear, succinct, well-formed communication.
• Simplicity: It’s easy to build a complex mess of software. It’s hard to build simple software.
• Feedback: Software is best built through a process of learning, not up-front planning. Feedback enables us to know what works and what doesn’t, and allows us to use those learnings to adjust future action.
• Courage: It takes courage to do the right thing, to choose the hard thing over the easy thing, to tell stakeholders difficult truths, to take calculated risks, to ship a Lean-yet-unfinished slice of your code to production. Note: this goes hand-in-hand with respect & psychological safety, to create a space where we can be safely vulnerable to be courageous.
• Respect: We need to respect each other to give and receive effective feedback, to communicate kindly, and to collaborate fully. We assume positive intent & we place kindness first. As well, self-respect is key to a healthy team.