Rapid Acquisitions and Agile Budgeting with John Janek

[00:00:00] John Janek: Everybody keeps talking about rapid acquisitions and fast acquisitions.

And I was like, the fastest acquisition is when you put a finance person, a contracting person, and the program manager in the same room and you say, get it done. Right. And I think when you actually look, especially at field operations, it is rapid because you do have that interconnectedness, right?

You have the person that pushes the buttons on the finance computer. The person that actually writes the contracts and the person that has the need all together. And they're like, yes, this is what we need to do. And this is how we need to do it. Let's get it done. 

[00:00:48] Ryan Connell: Hey, this is Ryan Connell and I'm with the Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office. Here today with my friend, John Janek. John, I'll let you introduce yourself.

[00:00:57] John Janek: Hi, Ryan. my name's John Janek. I'm the chief technologist at Dev Technology Group. before that, I was about 15 years at the U. S. Department of State. I was in the U. S. Foreign Service. I served domestically and abroad. Did a little bit of time with startups. So, I've done a lot of, as I tell folks, I've done a lot of weird things in a lot of weird places.

So, happy to be joining you this afternoon.

[00:01:19] Ryan Connell: Yeah, awesome. I think one of our, first interactions, had to do with potentially GovCity. I think that was it under, uh, working with Molly. and you know, that vision was interestingly tied to bringing the right people together in the room. And I know we were just talking, you know, before the interview started about, about sense of community.

So just wanted to kind of see what you had to offer there. I know, I don't think we actually ever got connected because of COVID through the GovCity thing in person, but we did it virtually. So, uh, just love to get some thoughts on the importance of community.

[00:01:52] John Janek: Yeah, so i'm gonna make a huge shout out to molly kane who I think has Done more to promote effective government in dc than just about anybody else. I know she is An amazing power connector, right? And Molly brought you and I together along with a lot of other folks and her superpower is recognizing Diversity and bringing those diverse voices together for a common good and a common outcome And I think you know when we're talking about what does community mean?

How do we learn from community? How do we translate those? Outcomes that we see happening in communities that we want to like and mirror into our own community, right? It can be very different the cultures can be very different So what we were talking about was we were both at the national contract management association's annual conference this year in seattle It was amazing.

They did a phenomenal job. But at the end of the sessions, I went to one on communities of practice. Dev runs communities of practice for our technical community so that we can bring together folks who are doing similar types of work, right? Whether it's cloud or A. I. Or, you know, What's some of the other ones?

Biometrics, right? Whatever we're working on, we want to bring those technical people together so that they can share and, and disseminate good knowledge and best practices. Not best practices. Sorry. Leading practices. I had a mentor once who said best practices usually aren't right. So, there's some funny discussions around that, right?

But one of the things I thought was really interesting at NCMA was that The same things happen in the contracting space, right? You have groups of people coming together saying we recognize that we're a community of folks who are here to work towards common goals, and we want to share our experiences and our knowledge with others so that we can create a better community and help drive better outcomes.

and that is so impactful and no matter. And even though you may think you're so technical community and a contracting me, what could they possibly learn from each other? There was a ton to learn. So, I really had a, a great opportunity to sit in there for a little bit. I had to leave early to go catch a flight out, but, I got to listen a little bit to some of the things that they had done, some of the data that they had been collecting, as I was there.

who I know was worked with CDO and some other things as well, right? and they did a fantastic job kind of talking about some of the data they've been collecting around kind of, um, 1102, which is the contracting skill code departures from federal service, right? There's a trend down on 1102s in government, right?

So, so a lot of these things are like, why do communities matter, right? Because if you're trying to solve For retention. If you're trying to solve for knowledge and skills and abilities, right, then you have to have strong communities, right? We know this. We know this from public policy data. We know this from evidence based investigations on how to make things better.

better, right? We know this and yet we don't practice it in our own organization. So I'm very proud of the communities that we've stood up inside dev. I know that, was the National Institutes of Health that was talking about the communities they had stood up. It sounded like they were getting fantastic conversation started.

Every organization should be looking at how do we integrate communities and recognize those communities exist and connect them together in meaningful ways.

[00:05:03] Ryan Connell: I'm curious because it's something you said kind of got my mind spinning a little bit in terms of the communities of practice or just community in general. And like whether it's AI or software or something technical related, versus what I'll say, like maybe discipline where it's like a contracting community practice and a program management community practice or a finance community practice.

Do you have any thoughts on like How that intersection should work, or if it should be both, or like, if an A, should an AI community practice be just the technical aspect of AI, or should we talk about all of the disciplines within that, you know, you know, I'm asking.

[00:05:37] John Janek: Mm hmm. Yeah. Yeah, I you know, I think you can go both vertical and horizontal and I think where you see real interesting And this is where you know, dev is a you know, an emerging large is our is our leader Kendall holbrook's our ceo. She's an amazing individual She's won a lot of awards. She's truly a powerhouse.

She likes to call us an emerging large, right? And we truly are. We're not at a scale or size yet where we can have kind of vertical and horizontal communities, but what's really interesting in some of the, especially at the federal agency level, right? You certainly could have horizontal and vertical communities and that cross section where you start having practice and disciplinary leads come and talk to your, Yeah, work based areas, right?

So let's say you have a contracting vertical in an A. I. Horizontal, right? Well, why shouldn't those two interact in meaningful ways, right? So this is all about kind of the system of systems approaches, right? Or to quote the standard crystal, right? The team of teams, right? You need to have these individuals kind of moving and articulating and working between them because not all your experts are going to be interested in procurement.

Right, but I guarantee you some of them are and for sure not all of your contracting folks are going to be interested in ai in fact Arguably, maybe a lot of them are not but some of them will be and so you need to find those commonalities And you need to think of it as a ven and we want to figure out How do we connect the people that want to be connected and need to be connected in meaningful ways?

[00:07:10] Ryan Connell: I love the term merging large. It makes me think of, uh, it's kind of visionary. It makes me think of, um, we got Fidelity here as a local pretty big finance company. And so I just said, I said finance company and they have self identified as a software company, which I find so interesting from a vision standpoint.

[00:07:28] John Janek: Yeah Well, it really

is. Software is eating the world, right? I realized it's a cliche, but it's never been more true. 

[00:07:35] Ryan Connell: One of the things that I think, I think it was right after our cohort with gov city,I roped you into helping write a playbook on hiring, which, which was a fun activity to work with. And I loved, I think you were. Potentially the only technologist in the group. And I loved how you just kind of started with how technology can help solve the problem.

And that was one of the things, at least from my perspective as a takeaway. And I, I don't even remember the website, but I remember you introducing,a website that we could go play a, a game where you tried to create a bridge and stack shapes. and I think it was an eight minute game and the output was effectively like a personality treat, type report where you kind of.

You could use that as technology for the hiring practices. anything you want to add to that in like how technology has evolved since then? Cause that was years ago.

[00:08:23] John Janek: So obviously technology has evolved a lot since then. Although, you know, in a lot of ways, the basics are the same. Right. The basics are always going to be the same. uh, there's a great security personality out there on LinkedIn. His name's Alan, uh, Alan Alford, I think his name is now I'm not entirely sure about it, but he was talking recently about people, process and technology.

and where do you start when you're thinking about how to approach these problems? And I said, it's not an, either or it's a yes and because when you start with people your approach tends to be a lot more nebulous and you're finding your way there because people are social We're interactive our needs change.

We're constantly changing, right? But you can also start from the other perspective which tends to be very tactical and very specific, right? So when we start with technology from a problem solving perspective, it's very much like here is a problem. Here's a way to either You get around the problem or to create pathways to get through the problem much more quickly automation, right?

So, you know you really how you think about it is really kind of so so whenever folks like oh, you know Technology should not be a starting point for problem solving generally I say it depends, right? It depends on what are you trying to solve for. In our case, when we were talking about the hiring playbook, we had a very good articulation and idea of like what some of the big stopping blocks in the process were.

And so when we talked about that gamification process where you could learn a little bit about yourself by playing a game and understanding are you tenacious, right? Are you a player? creative problem solver. How do you think about these different things? Right? These air very tried and true understanding processes to kind of figure out how do you work in these environments?

since then, right? I think you've been there's a lot of different Additional tools that have come into the to the place if and when and where they're being leveraged Sometimes they're being held back by for because of legal requirements Sometimes so so at the end of the day, we're still kind of relying on these kind of tried and true processes.

I will say Coming from an organization in a previous life, you know, the State Department does have like industrial psychologists on staff that help to kind of develop our criteria for the U. S. Foreign Service and how we analyze and vet people that are coming in for the Foreign Service. And having that kind of capability inside the organization is absolutely phenomenal.

I think each and every agency should have organizational psychologists, right? Industrial psychologists as part of the team to give you that understanding because Like management is a science right organizational dynamics. There is a science to it So when you talk and ask a question like technologies that can make processes better, right?

Well, you could say okay. Look it's easy to say ai can understand and create You know baselines and highlight, alternatives and do stuff like that very easily but it can also normalize things that you wouldn't expect to normalize. So, you know, You All of that has to be guided by people, right?

All of that has to be guided by people who can meaningfully engage and connect to those things. we are at the same time kind of counterbalanced by more disruption than we've ever seen. And I know you've been a proponent of this and looking into some of the AI tools that create artificial avatars that create artificial voices, right?

There was a statistic I saw somewhere. that showed a shocking number of fallacies on modern resumes. Like the number of people who are just outright lying on the resumes is just disturbing. We were, we're in a group chat with a bunch of people and somebody was talking about how somebody just got off the phone with three different people, all who said they had the same name, you know, from the same place.

But didn't sound like it right so we're in this very weird space of technology creating both incredible opportunity And also massive disruption And in some cases risk, right? So how we deal with that You know, I think is probably a bigger interesting challenge than just about anything we've ever faced before and I don't know yet I think the technologies Are out there to help us get through it But I don't think they've been assembled in a way yet that is meaningful and adds value to the conversation Compared to where we were a few years ago.

[00:12:49] Ryan Connell: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. you know, on this kind of trifecta of people process technology, you know, as you're listening, I was just thinking through the, the various Processes, task actions that I have at work. I'm sure you have your own big list and thinking through like,almost this iterative process where you kind of work down the list and then start again and start again and start again.

And you continue the loop. is there something out, like, has that been defined anywhere in terms of like the approach to how do you tackle those three things?

[00:13:18] John Janek: There's lots of different frameworks I mean like there's literally people go to school to learn all right, so I mean they're right So, you know, I'm hesitant to say like this is the way I think that for me You know one of the big changing points was so there i'm in fact i'm writing a blog post about this on linkedin right now I don't know when i'll finish it, but at some point which talks about work decomposition and the differences between work activity work job and career Right, because we sometimes use that word in interchangeably and it's not like your work is not your job, your job is not your career and activity is not your work.

Right. And those are different ways to describe much more complex things. Right. And one of the most important things that I wish that I had known at 18 that I now know it. You know, the age I'm at, which you can see from my gray hair, is a lot older than I would like it to be, is that, there is an important criteria around understanding how Part whole relationships work and I use that term specifically because it relates back to something called systems thinking Right and specifically i'm a big fan of something comes out of cornell It's called dsrp has to do with how we approach systems thinking with a very unique human bent, right?

Because usually systems thinking is just relationships and that sort of thing what they've done at cornell is they've added to as a career Labs has added to it to create this kind of fulsome Thing that includes a very kind of people oriented way of thinking about systems, right? You Because when we think about systems, everything changes.

We start to look at the world as interconnected pieces. And we start to understand that everything is made up of many other things. And those many other things are just parts of other things. And so, when we start to think of the world in terms of systems and interconnectivity and how things are put together, task decomposition becomes much easier.

We understand that anything that we look at is made of many other things and those other things can then be interacted with individually It's an important criteria for understanding how the world works and being effective in any environment And so I think you know when you're asking like what's new in the zoo as far as that sort of thing You know systems thinking really embracing that is probably one of the most important things that you can do.

You know, I think kind of reflecting back on it the other you know the other way and that's like a whole disciplinary study, right? There's a lot of management and disciplinary sciences that are kind of aligned to that So so that you know, that's really kind of the framework I tend to recommend There's a lot of there's a lot of pop books, you know, like I mentioned team of teams earlier but at the end of the day They all kind of draw back to this big academic science around systems thinking and disciplinary approaches to thinking, metacognition, that sort of stuff.

if you can figure out how things work together, then you can also figure out how they work apart, and that's a really important dynamic.

[00:16:22] Ryan Connell: Yeah one of the other things that we talked about was, Hey, we're in August, we're getting ready to approach year end here. in the government world, you made a comment just regarding like it's, it's strange how we're seeing, you know, everyone kind of rushed to figure out how they're going to spend FY 24, but also, you know, trying to plan 25.

So I'll turn it over to you to expound upon that.

[00:16:44] John Janek: Yeah. So, so, you know, it's funny, right? Because people who have been in GovCon long enough, right? There's this, so, so the, what was the origin of the conversation? It was this weird dichotomy between end of fiscal year. Somebody who's running down the hall with money guns, just blazing cash as they go. Right.

which is like a real thing. Like we've all seen it where somebody is like, I've got a hundred thousand dollars or a, or even a million or even more, right. That I got to get spent before the close of the books. Right. Because what's the famous phrase in the government, right? I think we've all seen it I know, you know in my interactions through various government jobs i've had right that roll up of cash at the end of the year It's not like you get it the next year, right?

It's gone It goes back to the treasury in the worst case scenario But I guarantee you somebody in your organization has a plan for your cash And that's why at the end of the day, it's always like I will spin this or I will die trying right? And so it creates this weird pressure You Cooker environment where right before the end of the fiscal year because of all kinds of different reasons So we won't i'm sure get into right now You end up with all this money that has to be spent but to our point earlier, right?

You have to have contracts in place. You have to have Finance people who are ready to obligate the funds you have to have The money in the right place you have to have the right color of money, right? It's all these other things that have to line up. So it's not just that there's money to be spent You But there's all of these other complexities around the money that make it that much harder to actually get on To a task or on to a contract that make the whole thing just completely ridiculous the way that I you know, we were talking about that is like Everybody keeps talking about rapid acquisitions and fast acquisitions.

And I was like, the fastest acquisition is when you put a finance person, a contracting person, and the program manager in the same room and you say, get it done. Right. And I think when you actually look, especially at field operations, right, it is rapid because you do have that interconnectedness, right?

You have the person that pushes the buttons on the finance computer. The person that actually writes the contracts and the person that has the need all together. And they're like, yes, this is what we need to do. And this is how we need to do it. Let's get it done. Right. So I think that's the really big part.

The other part is like, if you, I think there's this weird dynamic where because so much energy and focus is talking about, how to spend money now. People lose sight and like well, what's the actual plan, you know, and we talk about this a little bit And I think it's something actually needs to be talked about a lot You know the actual timeline on getting a real line on a program budget is two plus years You know And so There's a lot of intensity right now as cash kind of comes available But in many ways it's loose change in the couch cushions, right?

it's whatever gets clawed back from various unspent places and then gets reallocated to other on uh, shoot, what do they call the term? I can't remember it now. But um, thank you ufrs. Yep. Yep so, uh unfunded requirements, and You You know, you've got all these environmental variables that are creating all this weird tension But the reality is like if you haven't been working this for two plus years You shouldn't be creating A lot of pressure Now there's a huge gap between those two things and I think that's also something that a lot of entrants from the commercial side of the market don't understand or recognize about the government contracting market that like Otas have done a lot to disrupt that right but the fact remains and this is really important I have been a huge advocate of this for years now until or unless we get agile budgeting To really start talking about how and where money comes into the government and how it gets allocated out of the government onto Contracts for deliverables to the end user right until we fix that It doesn't matter how fast we can deliver or how fast we can write an agreement or how fast we can Put the money on target because if you don't have the money in the first place And it's not the right color of money and not the right amount of money and not the right place to money and oh It expires this year and we needed x year money, right?

then it doesn't matter. It just doesn't matter and so I think that there's, we're still relatively young in this transformation journey. You know, we've been only at it agile has been at it for what, a couple of decades. Now the government's only really recently started to take this idea that like, maybe we need to cycle faster.

I mean, we've talked endlessly about people like Colonel Boyd in the Utah loop being, being. So highly regarded and yet colonel boyd himself was just considered a complete outcast in the pentagon, right? so You know there's this And we have a lot of cultural growing to do and a lot of maturity to kind of gain as we continue to go through this process of understanding What does a mature agile organization look like?

[00:21:40] Ryan Connell: Yeah, I mean, on the Colonel Boyd topic, he didn't help himself by putting his cigarette out on, on his, uh, his 06 his tie, I think, or his general's tie. I don't remember.

Um, great book, by the way. Um, yeah. And to further your point, uh, when did we get money this year? Was it January? it wasn't October 1st.

[00:22:00] John Janek: what yeah, exactly it was definitely not october. I don't even think it was january for some agencies I think it was it was later than that. So It's um, it's a real problem because we just don't have mechanisms in place for understanding And and part of it too is you know, and I always advocate this for folks to understand the value stream and a lot of people don't really take that seriously or they look at it only through a technical lens, but it's like under one of the most important things that I ever did as as a foreign service officer is I understood I was a management officer.

So from need to execution I was able to understand and see all parts of the value stream, right? And I think it is so critically important to be able to do that And if you can't do that, then you need to find teams Where you can interact with people who give you that exposure Right diverse teams create the best outcomes And so if you can't be in a position where you can play all those different roles and have those opportunities for growth Then find teams where you regularly interact with the people who can And that has been probably the single biggest problem that we've seen in government is that they continue to focus on siloing those skill sets Away from each other despite the fact that all evidence suggests that the best outcomes are created when you come up with those Integrated actively Participant systems where they're all in the same room all working on the same activities together 

[00:23:36] Ryan Connell: Do you know, I guess maybe two part, because you're not the first person on this podcast to say, this idea of like, Hey, everyone just get in the room, PM finance contracting, like, like let's solution it. Let's put an hour on the calendar.

We're done. Right. Right. So like, I like to ask. First, why don't we think that happens more? And, and secondly, since you're the tech guy, and, uh, here I am with the people process technology, but do you know of any technology solutions that exist to like, help corral and orchestrate that environment?

[00:24:08] John Janek: so let's all right, so let's tackle the first one first the answer is you do see it so even in government institutions, right? So in the military on the forward deployed edges, you absolutely see it Right. You absolutely see, especially when we were in Afghanistan, Iraq, you know, you would have four deployed units that would have all of the different elements that they needed to get stuff done and get it done quickly because because there was both need and everybody was in the room and they were all getting the same message.

That this needed to get done today, right? When I was in Afghanistan, it was the same thing for me. Stuff needed to get done. We were trying to accomplish a mission. I could walk down the hallway to our finance person and to our contracts person. I could email them. I could walk to the other side of the compound to talk with them, right?

I could talk with everybody I needed to talk with to get things done, right? How many times. Has that happened in your experience? Do you even know where the finance people are in cdao? I mean, that's a that's a legitimate question, right? And so have you seen them fair enough accountants? I love accountants.

You can go talk to our controller. She's like Why are you so weird about numbers? I love numbers. Numbers are how we get things done. They're an abstract representation of the resources that we have available to us. And so some of this is both people who are not disciplinarily aligned becoming more comfortable with being uncomfortable.

I don't understand what these numbers mean. Can you help me understand? And the fact that people who do like to kind of tend to work in isolation being encouraged, Hey, you need to spend a little bit of time with the rest of the group to kind of do that activity. So, so you do see it. The answer is you do see it.

We have institutionally created silos that, that really, and this was done Because of industrialized economy, preferences, right? there was some indication, and this goes all the way back to like Max Weber and Taylor and some of the other folks saying like, hey, efficiency is about taking a skill set and super loading that skill set.

So if you find somebody that's really good with numbers, all they do every single day is accounting, right? There's not a lot of evidence. Now, flow states are important, don't get me wrong, but there's not a lot of evidence that actually works the way it was originally envisioned, and that good, high performance work requires a diversity of tasks across a diversity of kinds of activities.

In order to get the mind stimulated in a place that both a encourages flow and b creates the right and proper outcome For those high performance indicators, right? So so it really does pay and because of the government is still struggling in this transformation for a lot of different reasons We have not yet found a good way other than these extingent emergent Necessity driven environments where we know we have to get stuff done of creating institutional constructs that create that approach.

And by way of example, by the way, there's a really fantastic book called Corporate Rebels that highlights and there were some articles that they wrote for the Harvard Business Review that highlight some of these activities were entire enterprises. There's one in China named Hire. there's a place,there's a company, there's a healthcare company in, the Netherlands that does it as well, right?

Where even down to the team level, all profit, loss, hiring, firing, execution, alignment, all that stuff is driven down to the team level. And the results are telling. We have a very clear picture of what high performing organizations can do to create better outcomes. The government has not yet chosen to execute on that science based, evidence based observations, yet.

I think it'll come. Your other question was what technologies exist. So I mentioned a few, right? The technology suites exist today to enable all kinds of things. Now, when you think about financial planning, hiring, all this, all those tool sets exist so that no matter how big your team is or where they're located, you can give them all the tools to make all the information decisions they need to actually affect the outcomes that their teams are creating.

The fact that we don't do it is not Bye bye. Indicator of the lack of technology. It's only an indicator that we've chosen not to do it. Right? So, I really think that, one of the things that I failed at, right? So talking about like, you know, hashtag fail fast, right? Is this idea that having everybody at the table and agreeing to how we're going to work and how we're going to work with others.

One of the single most important things you will ever do, and we talk about this in agile, through agile teaming agreements or agile work agreements. the, there's another great book called Team Topologies that talks about the team, API construct and really kind of talks about how team interact with other teams.

But the most important thing that all of this does is it makes the implicit explicit, right? we need to stop asking people to guess. In our work when we stop asking people to guess And we are explicit about what we want and what we need and how we're going to get there and what's available to us and how we're going to deploy that right all these other now people may be upset about it but it becomes a much more open and interesting conversation at that point because at least you can start understanding what's going on is I like to say Transparency is the best disinfectant if your organization has You A deep seated infection.

The best thing you can do is open it up and really make that information transparent as much as possible

[00:30:02] Ryan Connell: Yeah, I love that. Transparency is the best disinfection. That's pretty cool.

[00:30:07] John Janek: It really is. 

[00:30:08] Ryan Connell: yeah, no, took that down on my notes, filling up a page here per usual.Hey, a few minutes left. would love to just turn it over to you in terms of just any, big takeaways, anything you kind of want to leave listeners with.

[00:30:22] John Janek: Hmm.Yeah, so well i'm grateful for the opportunity to come and talk with you all. This is a I think that when we talk about defense tech and kind of how do we think about defense tech and all the different things that means right most of my time has actually been you know in the federal civilian in the national security space it's all aligned right?

It's all interconnected So, you know, I think that, you know, we can talkat length about, all the different things that it means, but,I'll leave you with a thought that, that was introduced to me by a, a friend, Carrie O'Connor, who was, one of the founders of the State Department's, Office of Research and Design, who, uh, later to the City of Austin to be the first Chief Innovation Officer there, and she said, you know, when you sit down Next to somebody instead of across from them Everything changes and I think that would be the comment I would leave you with the next time you go into a room for a meeting or a discussion Sit next to the person you're there to meet with and see how the dynamic changes I think in at least in my experience, it's always a interesting social experiment and you might find a different outcome

[00:31:30] Ryan Connell: Yeah, that's super powerful. Thank you. Appreciate it. Uh, John will wrap. So thanks so much for being on Defense Mavericks today. Thanks for coming.

[00:31:39] John Janek: Yeah, thanks for inviting me.