My advice, based on the mistakes made and the lessons learned at 18F, at least from my perspective. Maybe this will all sound simple and obvious, but I’m sharing because it wasn’t for us.
Is the goal to deliver digital services to users or to transform how other agencies do technology projects that deliver services? Many orgs start with the former, obviously, but it helps to know whether you’re trying to segue to the latter, because you’ll need wildly different teams and approaches. For instance: if the former, you’ll need a few PMs and many more researcher, designers, developers, and content folks. (This is like the SF team.) If you’re trying to do tech transformation, aka consulting (like 18F), you’ll need many more PMs and strategy-minded designers/developers/content folx, because projects are likely to run smaller and demand more distributed change-management and strategic leadership.
Who funds your org? Do you have to bill and recover mon