Guest blog by Melissa Velez, IPP ’24
The experiences and learning within the Implementing Public Policy course helped me to look deeper into the problems faced within my city, gave me a step-by-step process to work through those problems with my team, and encouraged me to reflect on my personal leadership and time management skills. At the very beginning of this course, I thought my problem was complicated, but not necessarily complex. As we dug in and started working through the PDIA process, I realized that the problem was indeed complex and that there were many smaller complex problems within the overarching problem. My problem statement, shown in Figure 1 below, started out as: How to write and implement a zoning code that promotes affordable housing, job growth, walkability & better building design and have it accepted by the public and city council.
I was focused on getting the rewrite of the entire zoning code passed and implemented. After working through the first fishbone exercise, I decided to focus on one of the smaller complex problems because I learned that, in order to get to the overarching problem, we needed to start with the small ones. Within those smaller problems, I could determine which entry points had the most potential, in which my team had the greatest ability, authority, and acceptance to enable us to work toward successful implementation. I choose one of the smaller problems to start with, which is shown in Figure 2 below. The most recent iteration of my problem statement was then narrowed down to: Low-income citizens being priced out of housing within the city. Not enough affordable housing being developed.
This turned out to be a good starting point. During the program, we learned that legislation was proposed in Pennsylvania relating to affordable housing. We were also awarded a federal recompete grant that targeted a lot of the points on my most recent fishbone within the lowest income areas of the city, such as the lack of higher paying jobs close to home, insufficient of public transportation, and loss of diversity and culture. My team has been working through revisions of the proposed zoning code to promote the development of affordable housing by offering developers incentives, including reduced parking requirements and minimum unit sizes and increased building heights. We are also promoting home ownership and aging in place by allowing homeowners to add an accessory dwelling unit. The timing of these coming together has helped to increase our ability, authority and acceptance. We have been expanding on this momentum and moving on to other smaller problems using the PDIA process to deconstruct and focus on entry points for each problem.
For future implementation projects, I will be using the tools provided during this course to get into the nitty-gritty, looking for the smaller problems and working through those instead of risking a failed implementation by only focusing on the overarching problems and not getting to the roots. The time spent on working through the smaller complex problems will help build up to a more successful implementation project. I will also continue working on myself and sharing the leadership and time management skills learned in this course with my team to help us be more effective and efficient. Overall, this program has been a transformative experience of growth that encourages sharing all we have learned with our teams so we all have the opportunity to grow and succeed, both personally and professionally. Embracing even one of the individual key learning points throughout the program can help you grow.
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Implementing Public Policy Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 42 Participants successfully completed this 6-month hybrid program in November 2024. These are their learning journey stories.