---
id: "workshop:a-model-for-state-government-operators-colorados-governors-office-of-operations"
type: "InnovateUS workshop"
title: "A Model for State Government “Operators” - Colorado’s Governor’s Office of Operations"
url: "https://innovate-us.org/a-model-for-state-government-operators-colorados-governors-office-of-operations"
date: "2025-10-08"
duration: "60 minutes"
language: "English"
instructors: ["Jesse Marks","Emily Miller"]
recording: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHVB29GcXJ8"
transcript: "automatic, from the recording"
source: "InnovateUS (innovate-us.org)"
licence: "CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org"
---

# A Model for State Government “Operators” - Colorado’s Governor’s Office of Operations

InnovateUS workshop · 8 October 2025 · 60 minutes

Unlike many other roles in a Governor’s Office, there is no real template to follow for State Chief Operating Officers (and their teams). In this session, we will share how the Colorado Governor’s Office of Operations & Cabinet Affairs has grappled with this ambiguity during the Polis-Primavera Administration and, through trial and error, landed on our model for day-to-day governing and for ensuring that the State makes the lives of Coloradans better. 

The team has ultimately become a hybrid of four archetypal COO’s office models, which we believe has led to a mutually-beneficial feedback loop. In this session, we will cover the benefits and drawbacks of each archetypal model, how we’ve approached this in Colorado, why we think it can be helpful to do all of them, and other lessons we’ve learned along the way. 

This session is designed for state and local government leaders working to improve execution and follow-through on priorities, as well as cabinet members, agency directors, and staff who want to strengthen cross-agency collaboration. It will also be valuable for public sector professionals interested in performance management and results-driven leadership, policy and program staff seeking to move from strategy to impact, and anyone curious about how governments turn vision into results and build the skills to make complex systems deliver for residents.

## Learning goals

- Identify some of the archetypal models of a State COO Office, where and how those models are best applied, and what some best practices are for each. These will include: strategy and performance management, transformation or "delivery" (as coined by Sir Michael Barber), innovation, and cabinet affairs

- Learn some basic frameworks and techniques for how to translate a policy vision into operational change and, ultimately, outcomes for the people the government serves

- Use practical tools to track progress, address barriers, and ensure accountability in government delivery.

- Discover at least one way that a State COO Office can tie together strategic planning, performance management, project management, innovation, and day-to-day governing into a mutually-supportive set of responsibilities

## Speakers

- **Jesse Marks**, Director of Operations and Cabinet Affairs, Office of Governor Jared Polis
- **Emily Miller**, Deputy Director of Operations & Cabinet Affairs, Office of Governor Jared Polis

Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHVB29GcXJ8

## Transcript

Automatic transcript of the recording: names and terms can be misheard, and the times can be a few seconds off. Each time links to that moment of the video. The transcript alone: https://innovate-us.org/a-model-for-state-government-operators-colorados-governors-office-of-operations.txt (plain text) and https://innovate-us.org/a-model-for-state-government-operators-colorados-governors-office-of-operations.json (every segment with its start and end second).

[0:00](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=0) Recording. All right. I'm just pulling up my screen just to make one moment. All right. Emily, can you give me a thumbs up if you can see that? Sure can. Can you see my screen? Yeah. Can you hear me? Oh, okay, great. Well, hey, thanks, everybody, for taking the time out of your days. We are really excited to share with you some of our work here in Colorado and some of the lessons we've learned along the way. Hopefully, at least some of this will be helpful for you in your day-to-day work. As mentioned, I'm Jesse Marks, here with my amazing colleague Emily Miller. Together, we lead the Governor's Office of Operations here in Colorado. We are both not your traditional state government executives in that we have not come up through the ranks of state government, but rather had a diverse array of experiences in other levels of government, as well as in the corporate and philanthropic sectors.

[1:16](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=76) And what we found is that that has helped us to bring new ways of thinking to our work here in the state and has complemented the incredibly deep expertise of our colleagues within state agencies and within the Governor's Office. To orient you a bit on where our team sits in the Governor's Office, we're one of eight teams that reports into the Chief of Staff and collectively help to govern our state. Our responsibility is for overseeing the day-to-day operations of state agencies and, most importantly, ensuring that the Governor's policy priorities are executed through the bureaucracy of the state. We also manage our cabinet on a day-to-day basis, supporting the Chief of Staff and Governor, who are the ultimate appointing authorities for them. And we'll talk a bit more about what that entails. Goals for today I think we're all familiar with from the session description, so I won't We'll try to hit on each of these four themes today. repeat them here.

[2:16](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=136) The core thing that I hope that you get out of this session is that you hear one model of, frankly, infinite models for setting up a Governor's Office or Executive Branch Office of Operations. And the biggest pitch that I want to make is for a model that is what I would call intentionally cross-functional. And we'll talk a bit about which of those things we think it's most important that an office like ours does and how you can best draw connections between each of those things in a way that can make your work multiplicative rather than additive in terms of its impact on the people that you serve. Before I get there, though, I want to share a bit about my personal journey in the role. So I stepped into the Governor's Office in March of 2023. This was very early in Governor Polis's second term. And it was really the moment at which the rubber was hitting the road in terms of one of the Governor's signature legislative achievements from the first section, which was the passage of universal preschool.

[3:29](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=209) After attending a cabinet meeting to start the day, I immediately went to a meeting with my colleagues in the Department of Early Childhood and a set of stakeholders, many of whom had been key proponents in the passage of this bill, but who were not happy on that day. We were about a week away from releasing the first round of matching between kids and seats that they wanted to ultimately take for that first year of the program. This was a new system before what families did before universal preschool was they just reached out to the school that they wanted to to attend and they either got a seat or they went on a wait list. This was a pretty inequitable way of doing things. There's a lot of data suggesting that more privileged kids and families will end up in seats and others went up on wait lists. And so a core aspect of this bill that we were now implementing was creating this matching mechanism so that families could rank the programs that they wanted to participate in and then they could ultimately be matched in a fair and equitable way to seats that they could then take advantage of.

[4:37](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=277) We were just about to release this and these advocates were asking a lot of really good questions. Some of them, fortunately, that we had answers to, others that we did not and needed to find quickly. My first thought coming out of that meeting was, can I go back to my old job? My second thought was, oh, how can I help? Sorry. Oh, I shouldn't go there yet. And, you know, we then joined a debrief just with the Department of Early Childhood team. Most of those folks had been working all day every day for months just trying to get the bare bones of the program launched, never mind all of these new issues that this meeting had identified that they needed to work through. And so, you know, the biggest thing that we realized was that we could help by simply rolling up our sleeves and helping to triage what we needed to do now versus tomorrow and just getting it done. And so that's what we did. And ultimately we glued together a program that worked for year one. The outcome was pretty impressive when you look at the policy goal that we were trying to achieve in that first year.

[5:42](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=342) We served more than 40,000 kids. Colorado went from 27th to 3rd in terms of the proportion of four-year-olds that were enrolling in at least 10 hours of classroom time for UPK. And we'd save families an average of $600 and the families most in need much more. But the program's rollout was marred by those early days in which we did not deliver as we had hoped that we would. And so as we looked into year two, we put in place a lot of different reforms that resulted in a better program. First thing we did was bring in a really good product manager from Colorado Digital Service to just help us to fix the technology that families and providers were interacting with on a day-to-day basis. We also overhauled our call center so that we better knew what people were even calling about. And then we could draw feedback loops with the program and tech teams to ultimately fix We documented the program better. the underlying issues. We held a range of sessions with all of the key stakeholders. And ultimately we delivered a program that worked a lot better in year two.

[6:43](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=403) The main way we know that is we were no longer in the headlines for delivering a program that people were upset about. As we started to emerge from universal preschool, which ultimately was a success in year two even more so, I then had the opportunity to figure out what is my job here? Having spent the vast majority of those first few weeks really drilling down just in universal preschool. And, you know, some of it I gathered from the job description. Cabinet affairs was certainly an important aspect. Cabinet members were calling me and asking me for decisions on a whole bunch of things. And, you know, suddenly I was in the front of the room leading cabinet meetings. Performance management was a statutory requirement for our team. We have this law that requires us to work with agencies to set measurable outcomes that we're trying to achieve. And then to publish our progress against them. And we spent a lot of time focused on that. And then, you know, somewhere in that job description there were things about innovation and just getting hard things done.

[7:45](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=465) And we had certainly done that with universal preschool. But, frankly, it hadn't really cohered, at least in my mind, into something that was a clear vision for the office, which presented, of course, an opportunity. You know, this slide, I think, just articulates what I've just said, which is we were really focused on those first few things. And we had a couple of projects focused on innovation. And when we had to fix something really hard like universal preschool, I would lean in directly. But we didn't really have a standing capacity to do so. So it was at roughly this point that we were able to bring Emily on as the amazing deputy of this team. And together we really said that we were going to do three things differently. First thing we were going to do was rebalance our work. We wanted to make sure that we were focused more proactively on innovation so that we could be bringing modern practices of getting things done into state government, including what we'd done with universal preschool after the fact with the product.

[8:47](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=527) But trying to integrate that into everything that we're doing so that ultimately we can deliver better for Coloradans across the board. The second thing that we wanted to do was really draw better connections between each of these capabilities so that our performance management system was helping us to pinpoint when something was going wrong so we could lean in before it went wrong and combining that with additional capabilities beyond just my and Emily's time to then fix those problems once we realized that we needed to roll up our sleeves to fix them. And that leads into the third point, which is we realized that we needed a lot more than just the two of us in order to do this work. And we had a great team already, but they were really focused on performance management and not on the rest of this portfolio. So we grew the team. That was the first thing that we did. We were lucky to have some federal stimulus money to do that. And we also rebalanced our team so that they were focused less on setting and monitoring goals and more holistically on both doing that and on driving our innovation and delivery.

[9:49](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=589) We also were able to grow the Colorado Digital Service, which we'll talk about later, which reports into myself and our chief information officer in the state and really has provided incredibly important capabilities as it comes to government innovation. What I'm going to do next is really go through each of these functions in more detail, talk a bit about how we set that goal of rebalancing our focus across each and drawing those connections. And so what we'll spend the rest of this presentation doing is talking a bit about what each of these capabilities are or is, how we viewed what we already had, and then ultimately how we then evolved that into something that was better and mutually supportive of one another. So I'll start with cabinet affairs, and I'll also just kind of paint the picture a little bit. I mean, I'll say candidly that this was probably the most intimidating aspect of this role. And I think I'm curious, Emily, if you would agree, we can talk about that later.

[10:52](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=652) But, you know, you're stepping into a government where you have a whole bunch of cabinet members who are twice your age and have twice your experience, and many of whom have been there since day one of the administration. And that's pretty typical for any member of a governor's office. You're generally skewing younger and less experienced in a governor's office. And so I think that's probably a common experience many of you have. And so, you know, right away, my job was to lead hiring for new cabinet members. We had a few early vacancies, conduct their annual reviews about four months in, lead those cabinet meetings and annual retreats, and just help to triage a whole bunch of issues, most of which you do not have any context on when they're calling about. But if they're calling you about it, it's because it can't be solved without a conversation And so, you know, as I started this job, a lot of my focus was just on understanding with the governor's office. what the heck you even did to solve a lot of these problems. Here are a few tricks of the trade that we learned pretty quickly. And I want to talk about these because I think that doing this well, and in particular, building good relationships with cabinet members, is the foundation that is necessary in order to be successful across each of these other three areas, or at least to be able to, you know, go above and beyond in this role.

[12:10](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=730) You know, the first thing that I learned early on is that when a cabinet member calls, it's usually about something horrible. So it's helpful if you're both reachable and funny when they call. The second thing is that it's really important to ask good questions and to try to find consensus rather than just make decisions that are misaligned with where the cabinet member and the agency might be. And the governor can really be a valuable tool here because ultimately he's the person to whom we both report. And so one thing that I've learned early on is that making sure that where there is disagreement that we can't resolve, instead of making a decision that is going to make one side unhappy, instead orienting that towards a decision that we can agree on how it's framed so that the governor can make it, is incredibly important in building and maintaining trust across the administration, which will be necessary if you're trying to then go deeper and solve hard problems like universal preschool. Another thing is to provide value early. I think I was able to do that with the universal preschool program early on.

[13:14](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=794) But you really can't build a relationship until you've been in the trenches on an issue with a cabinet member. And I think at that point you start to be able to build that capital that you can then use to do even harder things. Not all state COOs have this as their responsibility. And I do want to point to the downside. This is a random day in my calendar. I think Emily can attest that every day looks like this. There is not time for lunch. There is not time to go to the bathroom. It is back-to-back all day. And so that can be particularly challenging when you're also trying to drive a innovation agenda and a set of priorities that require focused attention. And so this is the downside. But the payoff is in terms of building those relationships and being at the focal point of how governing is done in the state allows you to then use that platform to, as you're building your performance management system, ensure that the work that you're doing is actually aligning with what's most important and what is on top of your mind when you're governing a cabinet.

[14:22](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=862) That as you're determining how you're going to innovate across the state, that you're able to set the tone from the top to having a set of cabinet members that you can bring along and are on board with the direction that you're trying to go. And it helps to target where you're really rolling up your sleeves to solve hard problems because you really want to make sure that when you're dedicating precious time and energy of your team that you're doing it towards what matters most for the administration. And so in sum, I think really building that relational capital early and just being easy and fun to work with is incredibly important than every other aspect of your role as a CFO. Doing it well. Talk a bit about performance management, and then I'm going to hand it off to Emily to talk through the latter two areas. So, as I mentioned, our performance management responsibilities are defined in the SMART Act, which basically requires us to define what we're trying to achieve every year in a measurable way, and then track progress against it and hold ourselves accountable.

[15:26](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=926) And when I stepped into this role, we had a great foundation here. We had agency staff that knew exactly what they needed to do. We had well-documented best practices. We had cabinet working groups for all of our cross-cutting priorities. All the infrastructure was in place, and we'd received some national acclaim, too, from Results for America and other national organizations for what we've been able to create. That's not to say, though, that this was without problems. And both of the problems that I'll really point to with our performance management responsibilities related to the overemphasis on this and the lack of connectivity between the work that we were doing there and the work that we were doing across the rest of the team. First challenge was because performance management was so time-consuming, it was delegated. It was delegated both within my team and within agencies, such that it became a technocratic process of setting goals, publishing our progress, and ensuring that we had a really robust dashboard, that we could communicate that to the public.

[16:32](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=992) The problem was that when I was sitting in cabinet meetings and my cabinet affairs role on a monthly basis, my cabinet members didn't even know what their goals were, which certainly means that they are not doing everything in their power to achieve them. And so the first thing that we did was we flipped the script. So for the next year, as we started the annual process, we started with a cabinet retreat where we defined our legacy vision for the remaining three years of our administration. And then from there, we translated that into measurable outcomes where we could, that then resulted in us setting a set of goals and strategies against it. The second issue that we had was that, as is, I think, inevitable when you're scaling a process, you have to standardize in some ways. And there's risk that when you do that, you standardize in ways that lose nuance. And so we had a very dogmatic focus on setting annual goals that we then revisited every year, really trying to focus on singular outcomes because they're really measurable.

[17:32](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1052) And following what was then our focus, which was the Franklin Covey 40X model in doing so. So what we really did was say, hey, everybody knows the basics now. They've learned all the rules. So now let's figure out where we can break those rules in order to build a system that makes the most sense. And so we added a lot of flexibility and a lot more rigor to how we did this work, which then resulted in us having a lot more confidence that, one, we're actually measuring the right thing. If that's multidimensional, publish multiple dimensions. If that is a multi-year goal where in that first year you're just doing the groundwork, let's not set goals that result in us holding ourselves accountable for achieving outcomes when we haven't put the conditions in place to do it. And so we put in place a much more rigorous and a much more flexible process. And we also went under the hood pretty deeply in a couple of areas. My colleague Jordi, who I see on this call, made this awesome framework to help us as we were thinking through how we would really attack a problem, which is a goal for this year, which was high auto insurance premiums in Colorado.

[18:39](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1119) And so we broke the problem down into its constituent components. We approximately measured the impact. We focused on the highest impact things that we could do. We built a hypothesis tree to then test out which ones made the most sense, and then ultimately built a roadmap, which we'll be releasing imminently. And we tried to do this across the board. The result of this has really been transformative. What you're seeing here is our rate at achieving our wildly important goals, known as WIGs. When the last year of Term 2, we were only at about 52% of our goals we were achieving. As we started to implement changes, first in fiscal year 23, then in fiscal year 24, we've seen a dramatic increase in our ability to achieve what's important, which is really, I think, helping to validate both the importance of doing this work at all, as well as the benefit of really ensuring that that is a top-down and leadership-driven process. We've had similarly strong results in our most recent fiscal year, ending June 30th, which we're still tabulating and therefore isn't yet on this chart.

[19:45](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1185) And these are outcomes that matter. We've saved almost $2 billion out of Coloradans' pockets for healthcare. As mentioned, we've enrolled almost 70% of kids in universal preschool. We've decreased the rate of auto theft in Colorado by 26%. We've given 93.3% of Coloradans broadband access. It's actually increased a lot in the most recent fiscal year. And so, you know, across the board, we're delivering outcomes that really matter to Coloradans. I'm going to hand it off now to Emily to now talk about how we innovate in Colorado and then how we get hard things done with the innovative tools that we apply. Awesome. Thanks, Jesse. All right, let's go to the next slide. Before we talk about our innovation agenda as it stands today, it's probably important for us to talk about where we were when we came into this role. So, Reimagine State Government 1.0 was our original innovation agenda. This preceded both Jesse and I and was largely in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

[20:48](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1248) As you can see here, a lot of focus on, you know, safe custodial facilities, virtual services, employee engagement, which was really important at the time. And also, this was very performance management based. We set very, you know, visible public goals, but we weren't really able to go super deep on any of our innovation agenda 1.0. And so, you know, as Jesse and I were thinking about where we wanted to take our innovation agenda next, we were asking ourselves, you know, what do we want our legacy to be in this space? And how would we achieve this? So, let's go to the next slide. But before we could formulate that plan, we also had to be really clear-eyed about the challenges that we faced. You see these challenges on the right-hand side. I'm sure many of you in government have encountered similar challenges. Decentralized agencies, legacy software systems that had siloed data in them. And then another really big area that jumped out at us was really big gaps in our talent, specifically in our digital space.

[21:51](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1311) Things like product management, user-centered design, engineering, things like that. And so, our North Star really became leave state government better than we found it. So, if any of you are familiar with the campsite rule, you leave the campsite better than you found it. That became our North Star for our innovation agenda. All right. Let's go to the next slide. So, just had to make a campsite reference because this is a Colorado presentation. So, we had to make a big decision. All right. Let's go to the next slide. So, Jesse and I really landed on three main criteria that would help us narrow down our innovation agenda, which became what we call the governor's operational agenda. The first is transformative, but for impact. And what we mean by that is, but for our involvement in this particular problem, we probably wouldn't be able to solve that challenge, right? It would require extra resources and our intervention to be able to push it over the finish line. So, we were looking for those challenges where we could make that kind of transformative impact. Secondly, we obviously wanted it to align with the governor's policy priorities, which And then third, we wanted it to be ambitious, but also achievable.

[22:55](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1375) was super important. So, grounded in our operational realities, but we could still get there at the end of the day. So, where we landed are five pillars for the governor's operational agenda. And this is really work that is statewide, cross-cutting, and this is what we anchored on. So, digital government, you know, we want seamless, intuitive services. So, when you pick up your smartphone and you go to any app, let's say Uber Eats or something like that, it's a pretty seamless experience. I'm sure, you know, if you've heard of Uber Eats, it's a pretty seamless experience. We wanted that same experience, type seamless experience for government services, which I'm sure, you know, if you've been on the DMV website or something like that recently, it's not always the case. Contact centers were also super important because contact centers are really the front door into government, right? A lot of people pick up the phone and they want to be able to talk to a human on the other end of the line to help them figure out the problem. Greening government was all about setting some long-term sustainability commitments and keeping them.

[23:58](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1438) Workforce of the future we wanted to do because we really want to unlock talent that's much broader than just, you know, folks with certain educational credentials. And then reducing our physical footprint is one that we did carry over from our original innovation agenda because, you know, we felt very strongly about judiciously using all of our public resources and space. So, let's go to the next slide. So, you know, the previous slide was really the what of our innovation agenda. And this is really, you know, the levers for change. They're really the how. It's how we make a difference on these problems. And this is really where I think where the magic happens. You know, Jesse and I were very intentional about what could we bring to these problems So, as I walk through these, you know, you look at something like executive sponsorship to really move the needle. Those really directly relate to what Jesse was talking about with cabinet affairs. and convening power. If we have that trust and that buy-in with our executive directors and our cabinet members, that allows us to have that alignment. That allows us to walk through the door and help an agency.

[24:59](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1499) And it also removes obstacles. Public accountability. Likewise, that's borrowing from our performance management playbook where let's put up a public dashboard. Let's be really transparent about what our goal is and how we're planning to get there. Funding is another big area. You know, we have a really incredible partnership with our statewide Internet Portal Authority. They have a GovGrants program. And we were lucky enough that they were willing to kind of align some of their strategic priorities with the governor's operational agenda. And then lastly, and I think most importantly, we have an incredible partnership with our Colorado Digital Service team. And that has really allowed us to go deep on many of these problems because, you know, without their technical expertise, it'd be really tough to solve some of these challenges. So, I wanted to talk about an actual real-life case study to kind of bring this to light for you. So, we published the operational agenda. And we decided we were going to focus on, you know, some of our biggest and most impactful programs across the state.

[26:01](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1561) We had to really focus. And so, we focused on basically these eight agencies and really high visibility programs. So, things like our universal preschool, our family and medical leave program, SNAP, healthcare, things like that. And one of our programs we'll talk about is unemployment insurance. You know, we had for a long time been focused on timeliness. So, how quickly you got your unemployment benefits from when you applied. And, you know, as we started to kind of double-click and dig under the hood of this, we started to realize, oh, we're getting some more headlines. You know, the wait times at the call center are really bad. The wait times for our unemployment applications are super long. So, that led us to really take a deeper look in terms of what was happening with our digital products and our contact centers. So, where I'd really start here is our contact center insights. What we did in partnership with the Colorado Digital Service, they came in and they really helped us do things in the call center like build disposition codes.

[27:07](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1627) So, we could figure out why people were calling and also customer satisfaction. So, we could see, you know, if somebody was really dissatisfied with a particular reason they were calling, that would allow us to really zero in. And what we found was that almost 40% of the people calling the unemployment contact center just wanted an update on their status, on the status of their claim. They just wanted to know where their claim was in the process, right? And so, that key insight then led us to what improvements can we make in the call center itself and also in our digital products? And so, one of the first things the unemployment team did, which was really, really innovative, was they used an AI-powered virtual agent. This allowed for call runs to call in, they could enter their claimant number, and it would basically give them an update on their status claim. That then led us to think, okay, if we could do that on the call center, what can we do on the website that would also make this easier? So, now on our roadmap is going to be an ability to check your status from your mobile phone.

[28:10](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1690) And so, we had some really great insights from that that then led the UI team to really getting their average speed of answer and their wait times down all the way from 36 minutes to almost 11 minutes in nearly seven months. So, we saw some really, really big improvements there. The last thing on our innovation agenda is how do we build a culture that makes this stick? We didn't want this to just be isolated projects, right? We wanted to actually embed this innovation into the fabric of state government. And Jesse and I talked a lot about, well, I think to do that, it comes down to our people, and we need to invest in our people through these programs. So, we stood up three of these professional development programs. The first is our executive fellowship. So, that's targeting our state executive leaders. So, deputy executive directors, chief strategy officers, the folks right beneath the cabinet level. And that was really empowering from the top, right? The next was our innovation conference, which is for any state employee or changemaker who wants to learn about innovation practices.

[29:16](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1756) And that is more of the broad grassroots engagement really bottoms up, right? So, like equipping all of our frontline staff and leaders. And then lastly, we did our communities of practice. And so, that was a deep dive with our functional experts in two key areas, our contact center leaders and product management to ensure we have better digital products. And so, we believe, at least our hypothesis is that through investing in our people with this, that innovation will stick much longer beyond Jesse and I's tenure here. Let's go to the next slide. Great. All right. So, now we're going to talk about delivery or doing really hard things. Government, wrangling government to do transformative things, and for this I'm going to talk about greening government. This was really our transformative case study. So we knew that we had a big goal with greening government, but to do that work really well, we had to lay the strategic foundation.

[30:17](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1817) I see Caitlin on here. She is our fabulous, you chimed in at the perfect time, Caitlin, she's our fabulous director of the Office of Sustainability. And shout out to Caitlin because she's a one-woman office. And we knew that Caitlin had big, big ambitious goals, 10-year goals, right? But she also needed help. She needed capacity. So we built this partnership with the Office of Sustainability, and we basically whiteboarded out, you know, what do we want our 10-year vision to be? And that really helped us build and publish a strategic plan for where we wanted the state to head on our greening government goals. And then after that strategic plan was published, we had the governor actually issue an executive order which would cement the work and ensure continuity and accountability, which was a really key part of this. Go to the next slide. So with the foundation laid, that was when we decided, all right, now where do we want How do we move the needle on our greenhouse gas emissions and on our EV goal? to go deep? And what we realized was that, you know, we were on track to acquire the 1250 EVs by 2027, but we didn't have the charging infrastructure that would support those EVs.

[31:27](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1887) And I got to tell you, EVs without charging infrastructure are not going to be super helpful in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. So we knew that was the problem we wanted to tackle. So as we kept kind of double-clicking into this problem, three big challenges emerged. Challenges that we are still living with right now, and I'm sure many of you can relate to this. First off, funding fragmentation. Not only fragmentation, but the funding was drying up. So a lot of our EV charging funding came from federal programs that are now gone, or philanthropic contributions that were running out, and everybody was getting funding from different places. So it wasn't sustainable. The second was that agencies were doing everything differently. They were doing their own planning, and it led to coverage gaps. So we had a big swaths of the state in our super mountainous or remote areas that had no EV charging. And then utilization. So what we kept hearing is like, employees don't know how to use EVs. They're unfamiliar with them. If they have an EV, will they be able to charge it in a more remote place?

[32:29](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=1949) So these were the kinds of interconnected challenges that really demanded this coordinated approach. So what we did, this is how we mobilized. We're still mobilizing on this to date, right? So we're not even finished with this. But we formed a brain trust with EV subject matter experts across our four largest agencies that were using EVs. And we decided, let's really focus on these three things. Let's focus on the gaps in our charging. Let's focus on how we get our employees to use EVs. And then let's identify any other operational, programmatic, or policy barriers that are in our way. So before, where it was siloed, now we have the Office of Sustainability in a central coordinating role, right? So we're able to be more strategic and more holistic about how we allocate our funding, how we allocate our resources, and where this goes. So at the end of the day, our goal, we'll report back to all of you, but by the end of the calendar year, our goal is to have a statewide EV charging strategy that tells us exactly where we're going to get money from, and where we're going to put those chargers, and how we're going to help our employees use EVs more consistently.

[33:37](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=2017) And with that, I think I'm going to hand it back to Jesse. Yeah, I'm happy to take us home, Emily. Tying what we've talked through together, we had a couple of takeaways that might be helpful if you are finding yourself now, or in the future, setting up an office similar to ours, or in a similar role. First and foremost, and I think we've hit on this, we see a lot of value in an approach in which you are intentionally cross-functional, or I think here we described that as do-it-all strategically when you're setting up your office. Second point is that the reason why that is of value is because if you're then really intentional about the interplay between each of these things, you may be able to have a really transformative effect. I kind of mapped out what Emily had talked through for our innovation work, where each of the things that we're doing help to both inform the focus that we've chosen, as well as have helped us to give momentum in then deploying the ideas that we have helped to generate statewide.

[34:42](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=2082) We talked a bit in the cabinet affairs portion about how one of the key enablers here is to build trust early with key agency leaders and then grow from there. Even if you don't own the cabinet affairs function in your office, I think that this Unless you have trust and you have shown value to a problem that is top of mind for the partner point still stands. that you're working with, it will be very difficult to get them to be on board with doing something that may require them to make an investment given all that's on their plates. Really emphasizing picking up the phone, offering to help, and then helping to show value. One thing that we haven't talked about yet, but that I did want to call out is that as we built and staffed this team, we've really tried to balance between breadth and focus in each team member's role. We agonized a lot over how we staff our generalist advisors, like Jordi, who I've mentioned before and others on this call.

[35:45](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=2145) Really where we landed was that the best approach is to build portfolios of related state agencies so that our advisors can build context, relationships, and expertise that they can then use to help do both the performance management side of their jobs, as well as the helping to solve hard problems, which often grow from the performance management work that we're doing and the things that we're not on track in accomplishing. We took a different approach to staffing our leadership. Each of our deputies on our team instead have a functional responsibility. Emily, of course, is responsible for our operational agenda. We also have a great leader, Piper Holliday, who is responsible for the overall performance management system, and Seth Walter, who leads our federal funds implementation, which is a whole different can of worms that we haven't really talked about here today. We thought that that was really important so that we continue to focus on what matters and in particular, that we preserve Emily's capacity to focus on the long-term strategic work of changing how the state operates and not getting sucked in solely to the day-to-day firefighting, which can often take the balance of any governor's office's time.

[37:01](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=2221) Of course, Emily still helps in that regard as well. A couple of other lessons, and this is my last page before I get to questions. We also made the intentional decision to set an extremely high standard in our work early and to stick to it. We benefited in this regard from Lisa Kaufman, who is the chief of staff to the governor for all of term one, and really set that tone at the cabinet level. And then what Emily and I have done is really apply that downward into our team, particularly setting that tone early for the awesome new hires that we've been able to bring into this team. In the two areas in which we particularly hold our team to a high standard are one, moving away from admiring a really hard problem towards creating some order from the chaos. And the second one is being the first to assert a solution and to not just come with a problem. And that often means being really hypothesis-based, putting forward a well-justified but maybe not right approach to solving the problem, because what you need is any approach to get started, and you can always adapt your approach as you go.

[38:07](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=2287) And I think our team has worked through a lot of discomfort in that area in ways that I think have resulted in a real superpower for the team that we've assembled. Another piece of advice, Emily talked about how integral the Colorado Digital Service has been, particularly to our innovation agenda. If you have a state digital service, become their best friends. If you don't, maybe create one. We did that in Term 1. If you want advice on how to set one up, we'd be happy to connect you with the right folks. But we have found that incredibly valuable in just bringing in the right subject matter expertise to solve what otherwise feel like really intractable technology problems. I think many of us have probably had a problem that we've wanted to solve and heard from our technology vendors that is impossible to do with the system that you have. And over time with the digital service, we've been kind of shifting our momentum towards controlling our own destiny in the area of technology and procurement. The last one that I'll just say is we have made a lot of mistakes.

[39:08](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=2348) And what's important is that we've learned from them, because you will rarely be operating from full information in your work. We rarely are. And what matters is that you make the best decision with the information you have, you mitigate your downside risk, and you learn from what you've done. One other thing that's not on the page is, you know, if you want to learn more about our work, operations.colorado.gov, we'll link you to our dashboard, we'll link you to our operational agenda, and we'll also link you to our performance management guidelines. All of those might be helpful resources depending on your role in your organization. On that note, if you have questions or want to swap ideas, Emily and I are very happy to do so. You know, if you're local to Colorado, we're happy to go to one of our 457 craft breweries, or otherwise meet up at a convenient location. And if you're not from Colorado, one visit, but two, we're also happy to get on the phone. So with that, we'll stop our presentation, and I'll stop sharing my screen so you can And I'll hand the floor back to Jess. see each other.

[40:12](https://youtu.be/yHVB29GcXJ8?t=2412) Great. Well, thank you so much. I'm going to stop the recording.

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Original page: https://innovate-us.org/a-model-for-state-government-operators-colorados-governors-office-of-operations · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/), as stated on innovate-us.org