Spectacular technology failures require dramatic rethinking of approaches – even in the US Federal Government. From the FBI Sentinel project a few years ago, to the more recent Healthcare.gov launch and the appalling scheduling-related snafus at the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), career IT professionals across the Executive Branch have revamped how they purchase, run, and deploy technology projects, showing some notable successes in particular with Agile software development approaches.
Conventional wisdom might say that the government’s labyrinthine procurement processes are fundamentally antithetical to the collaborative, iterative Agile way of thinking. But for executives like Stephen W. Warren, Executive in Charge and CIO of the VA’s Office of Information and Technology (OI&T), federal procurement regulations and processes present surmountable challenges. The secret is to fundamentally rethink what it means to deliver working solutions.
Focusing on the Wrong Things
Warren joined the VA in 2007 and has headed up the OI&T since 2013. The scheduling application in place at the time he joined dated from 2001, and according to Warren, “didn’t deliver.” It was killed in 2009. The problem “wasn’t just scheduling, but the way they did development.”
At the time, such large software implementations followed the traditional waterfall methodology: hammer out an extensive list of requirements and put it out for bid. Select a winning contractor and then expect them to deliver on the requirements within the specified timeframe and budget. However, this traditional approach almost always led to failures – each a spectacular waste of taxpayer dollars.
In fact, the success rate was so low that people threw desired features onto the initial requirements list on the unlikely chance that some of them might make their way to a working system. However, according to Warren, “60 – 80% of required features weren’t used” – even when they found their way into a functional application, which they often did not.
However, when Warren asked the project manager at what point he realized the current scheduling project was in hot water, Warren got a surprising answer. “According to the project manager,” Warren reports, “the project was never in crisis” since they were spending the entire budget every year, and thus were able to renew their funding for the next year. Their measure of success at the time was whether the project would continue to get funding, rather than whether it was able to deliver the necessary functionality.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2014/10/23/fixing-scheduling-with-agile-at-the-va/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: Adam Fagen.
