By Instructional Designer Lisa Tully

Introduction 

In today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape, how can a learning and development consulting team help the government sector effectively modernize its operations and workforce? At Bixal, we’ve discovered the answer lies in creating sustainable, scalable functions that can quickly connect participants with the tools they need to solve pressing problems. Modernization, like learning, is not a one-time event but an ongoing journey. By creating these tools for teams to take back to their agencies and team members, we are empowering government professionals to make progress towards their goals. 

Over the past few years, Bixal has partnered with a key federal agency that focuses on accelerating government-wide modernization efforts required by various regulatory and compliance requirements, such as executive orders, statutes, and other policy directives. Our primary focus? Increasing technology adoption through an agile, human-centered approach to changing the way people work.  

For example, one of our most engaging products was a three-part customer experience (CX) series. 

• The Need: The 2021 Executive Order on Transforming Federal Customer Experience and Service Delivery to Rebuild Trust in Government required all federal government agencies to improve their customer experience (CX) practices. The objective is to ensure that every federal service is designed and delivered with a primary focus “on the actual experience of the people whom it is meant to serve.” 
• The Solution: Bixal’s CX series introduced the participants to the disciplines, skill sets, and tools essential for effective CX. The aim of the series was to equip participants with the knowledge and strategies needed to understand and improve user satisfaction and engagement in any context. This focus on CX ensured that the needs and preferences of users were given the highest priority during the design and implementation stages. Participants learned the fundamental concepts of CX, human-centered design (HCD), and journey mapping to improve user satisfaction and engagement. The content was presented through diverse learning methods, including live presentations, Q&A sessions, peer-to-peer interactions, hands-on activities, and on-demand access to asynchronous content.

Bixal’s Learning Experts’ Approach to Government Modernization

As learning experts, we understand that true transformation goes beyond technologies. It requires changing the way people work, think, and approach challenges. Every client challenge necessitates establishing consistent learning opportunities. This requires us to develop a platform template that can be easily duplicated and customized to address the unique challenges faced by our clients. In the case of the CX modernization project, for example, we were able to take different modernization topics and plug them into the template to create specific learning products tailored to our client.

The Bixal Learning and Development Team encompasses a range of cross-functional expertise in leadership and workforce development, coaching, change management, facilitation, e-learning and multimedia production, event coordination, project management, and product management. For this project, our learning experts collaborated with key client stakeholders, including decision-makers and subject matter experts (SMEs), to establish a shared vision. This partnership led to the development of efficient and effective learning experiences tailored to the specific needs of the agency. 

We leveraged a blend of tools and methods to create a robust learning ecosystem. Our approach included live online content as well as supplementary guides, tools, templates, office hours, and Q&A sessions. These offerings provided flexible and accessible ways to access the materials asynchronously, accommodating government professionals with busy schedules. Our instructional design process was rooted in evidence-based adult learning principles, ensuring that each learning experience, whether through peer-to-peer learning, subject matter expert Q&As, or real-world case studies, was optimized for maximum application, engagement, and retention. 

Collaboration with government SMEs was integral to our content development process. This partnership ensured that the learning materials were not only pedagogically sound but also contextually relevant and immediately applicable to agency-specific challenges. We adopted a collaborative approach to refine and evolve our products through a continuous improvement cycle, incorporating sophisticated learning analytics and regular feedback loops. The result was an agile, adaptive learning environment that not only meets the current needs of federal agencies but is also poised to evolve in tandem with emerging technologies, evolving policy directives, the challenges of hybrid work, and other shifting workforce dynamics.

We produced learning experiences spanning a dynamic set of topics beyond customer experience (CX), such as strategic foresight, cloud migration acquisition, product management, plain language, and AI-enabled capabilities.

By the Numbers

The Bixal team created over 20 learning opportunities to support federal agency modernization initiatives. Our collaboration with members of the client’s team allowed us to design learning experiences that resonated with our government audience. As we expanded our range of learning programs covering various modernization themes, the reputation of our products started to spread across the government sector. This increased interest and engagement from a broader government audience year after year played a significant role in enhancing our client’s credibility in the modernization space.

Between 2022-2024, the Bixal team:

• Trained 2,412 attendees.
• Engaged 276 unique federal government agencies.
• Increased unique federal government attendance by 67% (from 2023-2024).
• Increased total training attendance 1800% over the two-year timeframe.
• Created over 80 templates, tools, and on-the-job reference materials, totaling over 643 SME-validated pages of support materials.

Additionally, 97% of training participants reported that the information was immediately applicable to their work and we recorded a participant satisfaction rate of 98%. One workshop participant shared, "I joined the workshop series to learn some techniques I can use to feed into, and update, our agency's strategic plan, as well as assist us with enterprise-level risk planning and mitigation. The facilitated workshops were fantastic, and the tools turned out to be easy to follow and use."

We understand that change is never easy, whether it involves adapting the way you respond to a customer’s question or implementing new processes to replace a legacy system. Our approach, as demonstrated by our recent achievement with this government partner, goes beyond simply increasing knowledge. We also provide the essential tools to enable actionable steps towards modernization. By creating effective, scalable, and sustainable tools, teams can bring these resources back to their agencies and share them with their team members. This empowers them to make meaningful progress toward their goals.

Conclusion

We deeply appreciate and are encouraged by the positive feedback we have received from our government partners and participants, who shared their experiences and insights through testimonials. Participants described the trainings as “extremely informative,” “very well presented,” and valuable in addressing their pain points, from employee morale and support to employee engagement and customer experience. 

As we wrap up this project at Bixal, we are confident that the products we have developed will play a vital role in advancing our clients’ modernization efforts, as well as contributing to the modernization of the federal agencies they support. We take pride in our human-centered approach, the creation of scalable and sustainable tools, our collaboration with SMEs, and our commitment to helping empower government teams to deliver better services to the greater public.