# Boston Permitting Transformation

Senior Director of Product, Licensing & Permitting · 2025

## Define the service Boston needed

Permitting decides whether someone can open a business, fix up a building, or move a project forward. In Boston that could mean several departments, several systems, and different requirements, with little visibility into what would happen next. For a small business owner or developer, predictability matters as much as speed.

The Mayor was ready to put real resources behind a fix, and I was recruited to lead the City’s Permitting Transformation Initiative as Senior Director of Product for Permitting & Licensing, a role I held for ten months. I inherited a five-person technology team and was joined by a co-lead from the Mayor's Office who came in with deep permitting experience. I brought a product and organizational-change perspective; she brought years of improving permitting from the ground floor.

We started with discovery across departments and research into how other cities organize the same services. Departmental policy, processes, organizational structure, and technology were all in scope.

The vision was a coherent service: clearer requirements, better coordination, and a predictable path for applicants, with new technology supporting changes to policy, process, and org structure.

## Build the capacity and coalition for change

Permitting and licensing involve **more than 400 staff across seven departments and five cabinets**. None of them reported to me, so the job was to build a shared direction with the leaders and teams who did the work.

We set up a governance structure with the chiefs of every cabinet involved, proposed priorities and a roadmap, and got their support. Then we took the plan to more than 100 managers across the City, and into dozens of existing meetings and related initiatives, so the people closest to the work could shape it and explain it to their teams.

My co-lead had already built a practice in Inspectional Services of working on the business and not only in it. We wanted to spread that model: give each department support and time to improve its own operations while still processing applications every day.

Within my own team, I introduced agile and product practices to improve the existing system while the larger effort got underway, and I designed and hired for three new roles: a service designer, a digital transformation coach, and a technical solutions architect.

We began deeper process and user-experience discovery with the Fire Department and Public Works. Our first process rebuild was sidewalk deposits, which we redesigned so the team and the technology could implement city policy coherently for the first time.

## Make the technology choice tangible

Early discovery showed the existing platform couldn’t support our long term vision. We looked at off-the-shelf permitting products and concluded none could do what we needed, and that building on an enterprise low-code platform with vendor support would likely cost less.

I designed a hands-on evaluation around a real Boston workflow. Vendors received the same sidewalk-deposit specification and prioritized backlog, then built against it in a time-boxed session. Our technical team examined how they built it and asked for changes on the spot. Departmental stakeholders assessed the applicant, staff, manager, and inspector experiences. This let us evaluate both the service people would use and the City’s ability to maintain and improve it. We reached a technology decision in about three months (the average for decisions of this magnitude is two years).

## Turn the vision into a delivery model

![Transformation delivery model: research, organizational redesign, policy change and system design support Discover and Design led by the service designer, Build and Test led by the solution architect, and Enable and Support led by the transformation coach, with City teams and consultants supporting delivery.](https://gideon-emmanuel.com/assets/cases/permitting-delivery-model.svg)

The transformation delivery model.

By the time I left the City, we had established a practical approach for the multi-year initiative:

1. **Organize around what constituents are trying to accomplish.** Focus on experiences such as building housing, opening a business, or running an event, rather than individual permit types or departmental boundaries. Help people understand what their project requires and navigate the full process across departments.

2. **Redesign the service and its technology together.** Work through policy, process, responsibilities, and handoffs alongside the digital experience. We defined an architecture connecting guidance and project planning with applications, payments, inspections, and staff tools, so each improvement could contribute to a more coherent service.

3. **Give the team a repeatable way to deliver change.** We defined three stages: Discover & Design, Build & Test, and Enable & Support. The service designer, solutions architect, and transformation coach would each lead a stage, with departmental staff, the technology team, and specialist partners contributing throughout. Adoption and ongoing support were part of the delivery model, not something to figure out after a new system launched.

## Explore the work

[The City’s permitting transformation page](https://www.boston.gov/departments/boston-digital-service/new-era-permitting-boston)

## Scope of my work

I co-led the first phase: defining a service vision, building a cross-department coalition and governance structure, aligning on a roadmap, making a technology decision, and restructuring and re-envisioning the team that would lead the change.

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[Gideon Emmanuel](https://gideon-emmanuel.com/about/) · [Let’s talk](mailto:gideon.m.emmanuel@gmail.com)

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