Case study for Sunday, Apr 26th 2020
Here is the case for Sunday, April 26th, 2020. We will discuss it online at https://bluejeans.com/200517868 starting at 7:00pm PDT. (Don’t forget to sign up at the meetup group Silicon Valley Professional Scrum).
This case involves the budget for a municipal government but it could have just as easily been about any medium to large size organization. Annual budgets are the norm and always pose the same challenges. I will be very interested to hear our discussion this time!
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You are a high level Agile Coach. You have been given an interesting challenge by a local municipal government.
Each year the City Council must approve a budget for the coming fiscal year. The budget authorizes expenditure levels for services to be provided: so much for police and fire, so much for the library, so much for street paving, etc. When it is presented to the City Council the fully detailed budget is more than 900 pages of information.
Each year the budget is considered and approved in the month of June. This is a firm deadline as the fiscal year begins on July 1st. Creating the budget is such an arduous task that work on the next budget generally starts in September. People joke that is takes as long to create a budget as it does to create a baby.
The CEO of the municipal government (ie. the “City Manager”) has come to you with a question. Normally the operation of the City is more or less routine and the budget remains fairly in tact. This is a good thing as any change to the budget requires public notice, a public debate and a vote by the City Council in order to enact.
The challenge this time is that the Coronavirus pandemic has played havoc with everything that is normally “routine”. Demand for some services (ie. parks, recreation and the library) are way down, whereas other needs (Senior assistance, Emergency services, supplemental nutrition programs, etc.) are way up. Furthermore, the needs are constantly changing. There are also the “normal” unexpected challenges, such as the sudden failure of an old sewer main line that had to be repaired on an emergency basis.
The City Manager has realized that the City Budget is a plan. It is in fact a “waterfall” style plan that maps out activities for a full year. The assumption behind it is that it is possible to predict all of the needs for a city before the budget is approved. The City Manager now realizes that this assumption is completely false. This “waterfall” plan is hampering rather than helping the city cope with the COVID-19 crisis.
The City Manager asks you if there is some Agile based alternative to the city budget mechanism that will 1) give the flexibility needed to deal with the unexpected, and 2) preserve the power of the City Council to control how taxpayer’s money is spent.
The City Manager points out that the current budget mechanism is used because it allows the elected City Council to set the city’s priorities. Any Agile solution must preserve the City Council’s “power of the purse” or else they will never agree to it.
Your assignment:
1) Analyze this situation vis-a-vis the Scrum Framework
2) Determine whether there is in fact an “Agile” alternative to the annual budget mechanism. If there is one, give a detailed description of it.
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