Federal Agency
Customer
Department of State, US Agency for International Development (USAID)
USAID is the world’s premier international development agency and a catalytic actor driving development results. USAID’s work advances U.S. national security and economic prosperity, demonstrates American generosity, and promotes a path to recipient self-reliance and resilience.
The Bureau for Management provides centralized administrative services which include: logistical, financial, operational program support, information technology, and procurement services for the Agency. The Office of the Chief Information Officer (M/CIO) in the Bureau for Management ensures USAID has access to cutting-edge technologies to improve both our day-to-day operations as well as our response to crisis, disasters and humanitarian assistance situations.
Challenge
The M/CIO wanted to enhance the speed of delivery of services, specifically development of custom software applications and systems, to the users and partners in the field. The traditional use of waterfall development methodology was falling short and the M/CIO wanted to explore the use of Agile methodologies and framework.
The Bureau’s Project Management Branch had approximately 20 PMs in the branch and a portfolio of approximately 70 active projects. Four of the PMs served in the capacity of Scrum Master on their projects. These PMs had other projects they managed as well so they were not dedicated to their Scrum Teams. They had shared resources (rather than dedicated members on the Scrum teams) which is one of the challenges the teams faced.
Solution
Agilious started by conducting a session with the M/CIO leadership and senior management to explicitly identify their major drivers to transition to Agile practices. Based on these high level objectives, we worked with their PMO and Process and Quality Management group to develop an Agile Development Framework Playbook and Agile Development Framework Process Guide. The playbook and guide outlines the use of Scrum in their environment and incorporates only the absolutely necessary traditional gate reviews that occur typically.
Agilious’ Agile Coaches mentored and coached the agency appointed Product Owner on the Scrum framework, the Scrum values, product backlog prioritization, effective creating of product backlog items in user story format.
Impact
During Agilious’ engagement we conducted several ICAgile Agile Project Management (ICP-APM) training sessions for their entire PMO, technical leads and Subject Matter Experts (SMEs).
The resulting framework has lightweight gate reviews, continuous updates to software artifacts in each sprint, continuous product backlog refinement, continuous validation (UAT) in each sprint and the ability to deploy a Product Increment at the end of each sprint. See a visual of the framework below. The framework has been in use since 2018.
