Insight Using Agile in Government Agencies
Using Agile in Government Agencies
02 MAR 2011 | Posted in agile project management, Government, IfG | Author John Wright
MailIndigoBlue has released a case study and white paper “Using Agile in Government Agencies” describing the successful piloting of Agile methods at the Home Office.
The project was part of a wider research programme managed by the Institute for Government’s (IfG) which looked at improving IT delivery in Government.
Join the LinkedIn GroupWhat is Agile
Agile is an advanced approach to the management and governance of projects, providing a wider range of options for handling complexity and uncertainty. A key element of the approach is that the solution is built up through a series of continuous incremental deliveries, achieving the end goal through ongoing enhancements. The project is set up to be able to accommodate change more effectively, and this improved responsiveness is then used to optimise the process.
Agile is frequently used to refer only to techniques associated with technical projects or IT development – to do this is not only incorrect but prevents the main advantages of Agile being exploited: early return on investment, responsiveness to change and reduction of risk. Agile techniques are appropriate for projects of all sizes – the individual techniques that are used will vary dependent on the size of a project, just as they do for all management processes. However, the fundamental strategy, to ensure incremental delivery and allow organisations to respond rapidly and effectively to change, are implicit within all Agile projects.
Key Agile techniques include:
Governance
- Objective based governance
- Strategic limits to allow controlled change
- Value segmentation
Management
- Incremental delivery
- Prioritisation
- Timeboxing
- Work-in-play limits
Delivery
- Test driven delivery
- Refactoring
- Pairing
Why use Agile?
Agile methods offer a number of advantages over traditional project methods. These include:
- Rapid delivery
- Earlier return on investment and incremental delivery
- Reduced waste and cost reductions
- Responsiveness to change
- Higher quality
- Greatly improved risk management
- Clearer management visibility
Agile techniques apply at all levels within projects and programmes – governance, management and delivery. As such, they can be adapted for particular organisational or departmental circumstances and constraints. They are also entirely compatible with traditional methods in use within Government including PRINCE2, MSP etc.
Fundamentally, the main reason to consider Agile techniques is the ability they confer in allowing an organisation to accommodate changing circumstances and thus deliver better more cost-effective solutions.
Considerations in using Agile within Government
To take advantage of the benefits offered by and Agile approach, it is important to ensure that wider organisational factors are taken into consideration. Some key areas that help ensure responsiveness, quality and early return on investment include:
Commercial framework – contracts or specifications should be based around either services or outcomes depending upon the complexity of the project. Relations with 3rd party suppliers (eg Outsourcers) also need to be able to deal with change and evolving requirements.
Bigger is not necessarily better – identify minimal fit solutions to prove end-to-end solutions and deliver key features early ensuring early return on investment.
Uncertainty – delivering partial solutions early is usually better than attempting to deliver complete all encompassing solutions, which are usually late, inadequate for evolving needs and over budget
Governance – set up governance structures to ensure appropriate decisions are taken at appropriate levels. Avoid micro-management but ensure that real progress is communicated to senior stakeholders.
Size – Agile techniques can be applied to projects of all sizes, with the largest benefits being achieved with the largest projects. As with all methodologies however, the types of techniques applied will vary between different projects to ensure the optimum benefits are realised.
Example - ID Fraud Prevention
Situation
In 2010 The Home Office worked with IndigoBlue on a project to tackle identity fraud by facilitating effective information sharing across different Government departments. ID Fraud was identified by the Home Office as a key policy area, with increasing financial, social and political impact. The current tools being used to combat the problem were not fit for purpose. The project was sponsored by the Institute for Government and the results were used as part of the analysis to assess the potential use of Agile techniques by the IfG.
The following departments were involved in defining the scope of the project:
- Amberhill, a team in the Metropolitan Police responsible for collating and sharing ID fraud data obtained from ID Factory raids
- Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), to reduce benefits fraud
- Criminal Records Bureau (CRB), to assist organisations recruiting people into positions of trust
- CIFAS, a not-for-profit organisation who share information about fraud in the fight to prevent further fraud
Requirement
The high level objective for the project was to reduce ID fraud in the UK. Although the different departments and agencies had developed a good understanding of the detailed requirements for tools and processes, there was no agreed set of requirements and no obvious source to generate these. The team recognised that new or changed requirements would emerge as new fraud data and techniques became available and with new police activity planned, it was important that new tools were available within some key, short-term deadlines.
Context
The project team believed the adoption of Agile techniques could help meet the project goals and overcome constraints described above. However, the wider context needed to be taken into account to ensure the right techniques were applied.
Stakeholder engagement: Early and regular stakeholder engagement is key to the success of any project, but particularly a project with unclear and emerging requirements, such as this. The stakeholders had little experience of Agile and so familiarisation and specific training was required for key individuals who required knowledge of specific techniques. Targeted training to individuals who need to use specific techniques is a recommended part of an Agile change programme. For others, shorter, simpler familiarisation sessions are given. This reduces costs and prevents overwhelming organisations with too much change during a transition.
Technology: Government departments (and many other organisations) often have large outsourced technology platforms, rigid standards and existing service providers. Although, these can help generate economies of scale and shorten delivery times where projects can utilise previous technology investments, they can also cause delays and not respond flexibly to new or emerging technologies and requirements. For this project use of the existing stakeholder platforms would require delay and expense beyond of the projects resources.
Timescales: The stakeholders identified a key event, a police anti-fraud operation, three months from the project start which would require the use of the new tools
Disparate group: The stakeholders were represented from different departments and agencies and had minimum knowledge of each others skills, requirements and working practices.
Commercial: Project costs were required to be kept to a minimum whilst meeting Government procurement rules and the project timescales.
Approach
The key focus for the project was to ensure a set of requirements which could be prioritised and delivered for the key event. An initial stakeholder workshop identified high level requirements. At the workshop cross departments / organisational representatives worked in three groups where they identified requirements. Working collaboratively the stakeholders prioritised their joint requirements which were grouped into key themes:
- Central repository of fraudulent document identities
- Ability for agencies to query the data online
- Background bulk matching of applications against the database
- Exchange of information with the private sector via CIFAS
- Extending the reach and quality of recorded fraudulent documents
The workshop identified that the highest priority was to engage with Amberhill to:
- improve the quality and efficiency of data capture
- reduce the time to get data out to third parties
- build a baseline for a central repository of data that can be extended over time
- provide a first generation search capability for sharing data with third parties
Incremental Delivery Strategy
Following discussions and working closely with the team at Amberhill an expansive list of features was created and prioritised to focus on delivering a production system that could provide immediate business value without requiring all the requirements to be implemented. This initial delivery would enable multi-user data capture and eliminate the manual management of data collated on spreadsheets.
The longer term incremental delivery strategy included additional requirements which were placed on the backlog.
Requirements that did not relate to the initial delivery of core data entry, query and extract process were excluded from the detailed analysis and immediate development prioritisation discussion.
Stakeholder Engagement
Active involvement and engagement of stakeholders has been key to the success of the project. For each iteration of the project the stakeholders identified requirements, assisted in planning and prioritisation, responded to questions and provided feedback at the end of each iteration.
Prior to any application development IndigoBlue engaged with the Department of Infrastructure (DoI) to ensure that the technology stack and proposed architecture were aligned to the corporate standards. As the application will be deployed onto the corporate network the technology guidance and support from the IFG has allowed IndigoBlue to build a compliant application and will ease the acceptance of the product into service. A Detective Constable from the Amberhill team was assigned to support the project delivery. Although he was not co-located with the development team he was able to explain current processes and inefficiencies, answer questions promptly and help set the development priorities for each iteration.
Incremental Delivery
Two week development cycles were set-up with the intention of delivering the initial version of the software after four iterations.
Prior to each iteration an analysis session was held with the Amberhill stakeholders. The purpose of these was to think through the next set of priorities and document the user requirements that would be considered on in the planning game.
At the start of each iteration a planning session was held where the user stories were reviewed and the estimates on the stories and available development resource were considered. User stories were selected collaboratively by Amberhill, the development team and the Home Office.
The next two weeks focused on implementing the selected user stories and building appropriate automated regression tests. This approach ensured that the impact of future change could be identified during the automated test and build process. Regular conversation with the Amberhill stakeholders enabled IndigoBlue to build test cases and clarify uncertainty over requirements.
At the end of the two weeks, the developed software was demonstrated to stakeholders. Feedback and changes that were identified were agreed and incorporated into the selection of user stories for the next iteration.
Results
A fully system tested web based application backed by an Oracle 11g database was completed following four development iterations. The application will reduce data entry and QA times by fifty percent and eliminate the manual management of multi-user data entry across multiple spreadsheets. The data quality has been dramatically improved and the ability to generate extracts of data for third parties has been simplified.
The deployed application enables the generation of a single spreadsheet per Operation of data which can be processed by researchers according to the current business processes.
The project has been recognised as a great success by the stakeholders, and has the potential to act as the foundation for improved information sharing in relation to ID fraud across Government and law enforcement agencies. Further iterations are now planned.
Conclusion
The Coalition Government has identified that traditional high cost, large scale projects will no longer be the norm. In the current climate, where the public sector has to deliver more with less, an alternative approach for successful project delivery is required. Agile is widely adopted in the private sector and should be considered for use within public sector projects. The ID Fraud Prevention project has successfully demonstrated the benefits that can be achieved through applying Agile within the public sector. We would urge that each Department identifies a high priority project to be used as a pilot to facilitate the processes of transitioning to Agile.
See also:
- IfG report "System Error - Fixing the flaws in Government IT"
- IfG launch event "Fixing the flaws in Government IT"
- IfG videos "What are the benefits of an agile approach to Government IT?"
I'm an experienced Agile project manager and am particularly interested in governance and contractual issues. I have a hands on approach and have been running and coaching Agile teams since the late 90’s.
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While I was working with one of my clients a few years a go, I was given a book to read by the CEO. "The Speed of Trust". I read the book with a healthy dose of scepticism having read many management books in the past. But this book resonated with the core principles of Agile for me.
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