Bill BrantleyPresident| BAS2ALouisville, KY, United States
As agile project management is being adopted in governments worldwide, how well does agile work on managing large-scale government projects? Does agile scale well and does it work well in a government environment? Saving Changes...
Sort By:
James DamatoTransformation Advisor| Scrum IncWashington, Dc, United States
As someone currently helping a large (800+ global engineering organization) software company scale, I know first hand that it scales very well, so long as you have a few criteria in place.
1) you have to have each team doing Scrum well. If even one of the teams is not able to deliver working software EVERY sprint, you are not ready to scale.
2) you have to know how to scale. SAFe is the current standard but not the only way. If you don't know how to do mid range planning, your scaling will fail.
3) government processes are designed to make everything perfect from the get go, they are not designed for agility. If the government isn't interested in changing their processes, then your scaling will fail. Saving Changes...
Wayne MackRetired| RetiredSouth Riding, Va, United States
I am in a position to see multiple agile projects in a large US government agency and I can assert it is working well. Teams are deploying as fast as weekly with the average across the organization now at 33 calendar days. Saving Changes...
arlene trimbleAssistant IT Director| Local GovernmentAlamo, Ca, United States
I have worked on agile projects in government and it worked!!! I had a small high performing team of programmer analysts and business analysts. We limited our WIP and had our sponsor prioritize the backlog. We did frequent iterations of the project so that the sponsor would realize the value of the project early on. Good planning, MVP, sponsor support, hyper-energetic innovative team members helped a lot! Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
I have used that in 1999 when I lead a project in Neuquen, Argentine that earn several international awards. It was a total re-engineering of the government architecture. It works but you have to take into account that agile is not IT or software related only and it is not a method or methodology. Saving Changes...
Theoretically it should very much be possible but governments are generally bueracratic so they resist agility and change. Saving Changes...
Lawrence CooperCreator, Lean-Agile Strategy| AdaptiveOrg Inc.Kanata, Ontario, Canada
Its agile at scale - not scaling agile - that we should be pursuing. We wrote about it in Chapter 7 of our book that was released in the spring. This was recently validated by Steve Denning in a great article on how Microsoft has achieved agility - it was number on Microsoft''s 16 Keys To Being Agile At Scale. (http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2...gile-at-scale/)
SAFe is not a standard. Denning (who I happen to agree with) says it isn`t even really Agile as it allows the laggards to adopting agile thinking to feel cozy in seeing remnants of the old ways still present for them. SAFe is also a heavy process - not a light one. Saving Changes...
