SUPPORTING THE WARFIGHTER WITH AGILE DEVELOPMENT APPROACHES

Last week I was sitting at home taking a break from my work and putting together a 1000-piece Harley Davidson puzzle that was much more difficult than I expected. As any good puzzle enthusiast might do, I propped up the box with the picture on it, and the vision for my puzzle was clear and compelled me to want to fit all the pieces together. I was excited to see the colorful and intricate motorcycles come to life. As I picked up each piece and examined the colors and the known stable interfaces with the other puzzle pieces, I started to think about my Scrum Teams at work, and how they are motivated by the product vision, which the Product Owner has clearly described and communicated.

I work mostly with Department of Defense (DoD) agencies and contractors, and the organizations that have chosen to use Agile development approaches instead of the old waterfall approach are more likely to have a clear vision that compels teams to build increments of working product that can be released to customers faster.

Our nation’s warfighters expect our defense industry to produce and deliver the equipment they need to fight, survive, and win. Many of the DoD programs I’ve worked on that are still using waterfall approaches have gone the same way: pockets of innovation and amazing products, some really great people - but teams don’t always know how their piece of the product fits in the overall solution, and they are constantly pressured to speed production to catch up to a somewhat arbitrary baseline schedule set by a Program Management Office (PMO) that is tasked with preparing monthly reports for government customers.

The spirit is there – program managers and teams want to enhance warfighter lethality by ensuring timely delivery of quality products, but the waterfall approach is outdated and hinders innovative product development. There are countless studies that have been published over the last several years about how DoD programs should embrace agility if they are to be successful in delivering superior capability to our military.

The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported some critical success factors underlying successful major acquisitions. The success factors include program officials who are actively engaged with stakeholders, program staff had the necessary knowledge and skills, senior department and agency executives supported the programs, end users and stakeholders were involved in the development of requirements, end users participated in testing of system functionality prior to formal end user acceptance testing, government and contractor staff were consistent and stable, program staff prioritized requirements, program officials maintained regular communication with the prime contractor, and programs received sufficient funding. All these characteristics can be found in the Scrum Framework.

Programs that are moving toward agility and use the Scrum Framework are more likely to have a product vision that allows the team, customers, and stakeholders to see the big picture and break down the scope into small, manageable pieces. Visibility and transparency are valued, everyone can easily see how much working product has been built and delivered, and what’s still in the prioritized product backlog. Stakeholders can see the value of the products real time at the sprint reviews, and by logging in to the Agile tools to view automated, up to date dashboards instead of waiting until the end of month reports come out.

The agile development cycle relies on an accurate understanding of the customer’s needs and the ability of an organization to rapidly develop innovative solutions that best satisfy those needs. A product vision is the first step to defining what needs will be met through the development of a product solution. It gives the company, development teams, and stakeholders a unified direction and a common understanding of the desired outcome. Product vision development includes: Identifying and connecting with your customer’s needs, conceptualizing the product features that satisfy those needs, understanding your main competitor’s product and identifying why your product is favorably different. 

Agile methods have been favored in private sector industries for decades. More recently, organizations in the DoD sector have begun to realize that they can serve military customers more effectively and outmaneuver other military forces by adopting agile approaches and increasing transparency and collaboration. Involving users throughout every project, agile methods allow agencies to use tax dollars efficiently, deliver better services, and modernize legacy products with less risk. To compete with other world powers, the U.S. government should continue to adopt agile methods paired with a DevOps culture. DoD programs can improve delivery of solutions to the military community by making sure everyone works towards a clear, compelling vision, employing new agile approaches, tools, and processes that enable teams to simplify and deliver higher-quality solutions with improved robustness and resiliency in a more timely manner.

Embracing agility doesn’t mean the project will go smoothly and that there won’t be any impediments as the teams build product increment. Even with a crisp and compelling product vision, inevitably the middle is messy. Kind of like the motorcycle puzzle…take it one piece at a time and refer back to the product vision often.