Challenges to Agile in the Federal Government

A short blog for today.  I was recently asked about the challenges of implementing Agile in the government.  My quick response was the following:

 -------------------

There are a number of challenges that one encounters in the government sector and these challenges are even further called out when trying to implement Agile in the government space. 

At its core, Agile is built around delivering results while the government focuses on managing risks.  Let us look at the Agile Manifesto:

Individuals and interactions over processes and tools

Working software over comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration over contract negotiation

Responding to change over following a plan

The Agile world focuses on the left over the right.  However, in today’s world the Federal government largely operates on the right side of these statements.

Thus key issues include:

·         Reporting of value.  The government largely uses EVM methods for reporting of value.  While EVM is not necessarily incompatible with an Agile model, most government organizations use EVM in a waterfall type model, which causes problems when mapped to an Agile program.

·         Governance.  Organizations such as GAO and OMB provide oversight to government projects.  There was an old theory that the more paper you provided to these organizations, the better your program looked.  Although it is getting better, there are still issues with resources at these types of governance organizations understanding the Agile model and being able to translate that into what they traditionally have required from projects.

·         Funding and Procurement.  The funding of government programs can have substantial lead time which creates challenges to programs.  In addition, government contracts are generally not written to support Agile methods.  This combined with limited knowledge of Agile by program contracting officers creates challenges for implementing Agile.

·         Misconceptions.  There are many in the government that have been use to running programs in a traditional way.  Often they believe that if a program fails, it is not because the traditional process is flawed, it was that the process was not implemented correctly.  Thus even more process is placed on the program.  Additionally, Agile is still new to many in the Federal government and misconceptions and misunderstandings on what Agile is have slowed acceptance of Agile.

·         Agendas.  In the Federal government there are multiple vendors, contractors, and organizational groups working on any given program.  Since these groups ultimately do not report to the same leaders and do not share the same vision, this can cause conflicts and political issues that can handicap projects.

As a side note, when I first started on my government program, I came to a project that had a nine person PMO overseeing 3 project managers, 4 business analyst, 1 architect and 1 developer.  The team size was probably ok, but I think the makeup of the team may have been a little off.