The USAJOBS program was a highly visible, time sensitive program, with potentially high government dollar value. To effectively execute the project, the USAJOBS program decided on an Agile approach and in this approach, government program managers were identified to be Agile Product Owners. This session features the experiences, thoughts, and challenges facing the Agile Product Owners on USAJOBS. Key thoughts from this session include:

1. The differences between Project Management and Product Management 

2. Shifting from big up front planning to responsible up front planning combined with just in time planning 

3. Managing Product Owner bandwidth expectations 

4. The impact of Agile from a Product Owners view

The session is hosted by the former USAJOBS Product Owner along with an Agile Coach.  The session will explore Product Ownership and Agility on Federal Programs.

Bios:

Alesia Booth grew up in Federal human resources - her first job was with the National Institutes of Health payroll office at 16 years old. Since then, she's managed websites, document libraries, corporate recruitment programs, staffing systems and hiring reform process change management activities. Which is she ended up at USAJOBS. Since then, Alesia moved to Department of the Treasury to be the program manager of the HR Line of Business CareerConnector product for classification and staffing. At Treasury, she continues concentrate on solving multiple agency recruitment challenges to bring the best and brightest talent into the Federal workforce. Additionally, she worked with Treasury Enterprise Business Solutions as a champion of Agile development and recruitment data standardization Government-wide. Alesia is now back at OPM leading OPM's USAStaffing efforts.

Richard Cheng, Principal Consultant at Excella Consulting, provides consulting services to commercial and federal clients in the Washington, DC area. Richard coaches, mentors, and trains clients on understanding and implementing Agile and Scrum. He also leads Excella’s Agile Center of Excellence.  A graduate of Virginia Tech, Richard has authored several publications on project management, presented at Agile and PMI sponsored industry events, is a member of Mensa, and holds certifications including Certified Scrum Training (CST), Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) and Project Management Professional (PMP).  Richard is a founder and on the executive committee of the Agile Defense Adoption Proponents Team (ADAPT).

Project success =  f (listening, feedback, intentionality, practices) 

To make your agile practices and processes come to fruition, you need to cultivate an environment that promotes listening, learning, inquisitiveness, intentionality and top notch feedback that everyone is comfortable with. 

Agile projects succeed when there are frequent high-quality reinforcing feedback loops. I will share communication models based on Clean Language questions of David Grove and the Systemic Modelling techniques of Caitlin Walker that can greatly increase clarity, sense of purpose and listening skills within your team and collaborative endeavors.  These include: Clean Questions, Clean Feedback, and Clean Setup.

This is a hands-on, try it out, concrete practice session.

Great systems require active, capable Product Owners.  Functional innovation is not possible without their commitment and involvement in the project.  Too often in government contracting, the Product Owner is an Absentee Owner.  Agile Development teams often seek out tools and techniques to create great systems, however too frequently what is holding them back is the lack of an engaged Product Owner. Teams in this situation must face the elephant in the room if they desire to build a system that brings positive change in efficiency, productivity, quality, usefulness, and adoption.  This talk shares solutions I have used for challenges I see again and again on government contracts.

The talk begins with some introductory material on the problem, its causes, what I mean by functional innovation, and why this is required to build great systems.  I describe four challenges with Product Owner engagement that are not unique to government contracting, but that I see recurring on projects: committing staff, procurement practices, role ambiguity, and absentee ownership.

So what does Collaboration really mean?  It's just ensuring people understand what each other is doing right?

The Power of 13 Collaboration Game illustrates what true collaboration means.  We'll do work by rolling dice over a 3 week Sprint. We'll then explore the results and start our next Sprint. In each Sprint, we're going to increase the participation across players and see what the effect is on productivity.  Prepare to be surprised!

Should there be enough time remaining in the hour; we'll then specifically apply true collaboration to better understand the effects of pair programming by playing Pair Poetry.  This simulates the power of pair programming and demonstrates why the one screen, one keyboard concept works.

Adopting Agile enables an organization or team to fundamentally change their operating ethos, empower team members and improve project outcomes - and yet those advocating that organization change to Agile are repeatedly confronted with “Agile pushback,” because it “will be too hard,” or say, because “it has always been done this way.”

How can you use Change Management to help organizations embrace change and make successful Agile adoption?  The key to overcoming the Agile pushback and successfully adopting Agile is the intentional engagement of the 4Cs of Change management – Coaching, Commitment Culture and Communication.

• COACHING: Using change management as a tool to deepen relationships that help you and the organization leads understand the steeped organizational concerns. This will simultaneously address the core concerns and pushback and while formulating Agile champions.
• COMMITMENT: Engaging the team will increase commitment to the shift to Agile through a clearly defined mutual understanding of the opportunity of Agile.
• CULTURE: Aversion to organization change of any size is often rooted in individual concern -- using change management to provide the organization that the change will not be easy but the outcomes will benefit reduce the self-concern and helping the culture understand the4 Agile will empower the culture
• COMMUNICATION: Agile implementation, like Change Management, is based on intentional communication that clearly articulates roles and expectations – eliminating waste and inefficiency.

Katy Saulpaugh shares her experience, successes and challenges when helping government and nongovernment organizations eliminate Agile pushback and increase Agile adoption. Katy will share case studies from both the public and private sector providing attendees with concepts, methods and change management tools that defeat Agile pushback and easily transfer to a current project or a future Agile adoption.

Agile methodologies originated with and gained recognition from software development projects. With an enviable track record of success, more and more organizations are adopting Agile as the standard approach to managing all types of projects.

You rarely hear about the enviable track record of success managing Business Intelligence projects so you may find yourself thinking about using Agile on your next BI project. Once you decide to try Agile, it can be tough to know where to start. In this presentation, we will focus on the first major step in getting started: Assess the Current State.

Before you embark on implementing Agile, a crucial path to success starts with knowing where you are today and where you want Agile to take you. The group will identify what we think are the biggest BI challenges. We will go through a provisional maturity model to determine what questions to ask and will discuss how those challenges may or may not be addressed by taking steps to increase your organization's Agile BI maturity.

1. Many federal government organizations have a requirement to perform independent verification and validation (IV&V) of software development projects for purposes of risk identification and compliance
2. As more federal agencies move towards agile, they will need to devise agile-appropriate methods for evaulating agile teams and contractors for process performance and project risk identification
3. Traditional approaches to IV&V are heavily biased towards waterfall, gate reviews, and traditional SDLC artifacts and hence, do not work well within an agile envrionment
4. Agile programs have their own process-specific risks and issues that need to be evaluated uniquely.  The document-centric approach that has traditionally been used is innapropriate and ineffective for agile teams as it does not find the right risks and does not find them early enough in the development process.
5. We at DHS/CIS have developed a unique, agile-appropriate IV&V model for a large agile transformation effort within DHS
6. The model is used to discover process risks, design risks, code risks, and testing risks in real-time for agile teams
7. The model serves as actionable and real-time feedback to teams, contractors, and federal managers that can be used for process improvement, vendor evaluation, and as a means to find and elevate delivery risks on agile projects
8. Positive results, challenges, and recommendations related to the development, roll-out, and execution of this agile-appropriate IV&V model will  be shared

Are you working in a distributed team and feel like your retrospectives are failing to deliver meaningful results? Are you spending less and less time on them? Are your retrospectives becoming boring dull and uninspiring? Retrospectives are a key mechanism for continuous improvement. This is especially true with non-collocated teams that deal with additional impediments and barriers due to communication difficulties. Come to this session to reverse this trend and learn new tools and techniques to conduct distributed team wide retrospectives that keep everyone engaged and result in effective discussion and follow-up action items and continuous improvement.

We have heard a lot about no defects or zero defects, but is that reasonable or achievable in the government context?  How else can each sprint be deployable? Or how can you get to true flow with each story deployed to production?

 This session will explore how to get to a no defects posture across all of the tests required in a government setting. 

We will look at the various types of testing:

Unit, Functional, Integration, Security, 508, System, User Acceptance, etc 

We will look at what defects mean and how (or if) they should be tracked

We will look at what potential impediments from government organziations may exist in reaching a no defect state of software delivery

We will look at what tools and techniques can be used successfully in the government setting to address the impediments and achieve no defects in released software

Change is hard. For any organization, team, or individual, the ability to change is difficult even when the desire for the change exists. Some studies have revealed that even when people know they need to change, even at the risk of their lives, it is still difficult to adopt new practices and behaviors.  Knowing this, what are organizations and project teams doing to make agile adoption easier and how are they supporting the teams and the individual new to this way of developing software products and systems?

Through a roundtable discussion with representatives from industry and government, we will share with you our experiences with Agile on Federal government projects and programs, the challenges we faced, lessons learned, and different activities we performed as we went through an agile transition. The intent is that our experiences will provide you with ideas that you can take back to your organization and teams to support your agile journey.

The panelists will share their experiences in bringing agile to their own organizations as well to their government clients.  Topics to be addressed include:

• What makes adoption easier?
• Challenges faced and tactics to overcome them.
• Lessons learned from a broad spectrum of successful, and unsuccessful, adoptions of agile methods in acquisition.

Moderator:

Dave Chesebrough, President, Association for Enterprise Information

Panelists:

Dr. Suzette Johnson, PMP, CSP, CSC, Certified (Agile) Scrum Coach, NGIS Technical Fellow and Chair of the Northrop Grumman Agile CoP.  Suzzette leads development of agile practices across programs serving government customers, including DoD and Federal Health IT. 

Robin Yeman, Agile Transition Lead / SME, at Lockheed Martin where she defines Agile Strategy across capability areas at IS&GS; identifies and implements metrics to ensure results of strategy and enable course correction; develops Agile SMEs to support strategic consulting for program start-up, transition for waterfall, release planning, and execution; teaches and educates all levels at LM to allow LMCO to better meet customer needs; certifies large teams in the Scaled Agile Framework; and provides support in developing Performance Measurement Baseline and Agile EVM.

Jerome (Jerry) Frese, Program Management Analyst at the Internal Revenue Service, is the organizer of an Inter-Agency Seminar whose purpose is to bring federal SDLC practitioners together so they can establish a network, learn about and share best practices and collaborate on new and innovative ways to support projects. Through the series of nine seminars he has worked with 33 other Government agencies fostering the implementation of agile in Federal IT. In his own agency, he brings 40 years of software development experience to his job the Senior Methodologist at the IRS.    

James Barclay, Senior Systems Engineer, NGA Architecture & Engineering Group National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Summary: Presenting a roadmap explaining engineering best practices, why it’s needed, supporting tools, level of effort to implement, and sequence for implementing.

21^st Century IT development requires building quality into our development practices yet many software teams fail to implement technical practices that are necessary for long term success. Practices like automated builds, automated tests, automated deployments, continuous integration, and continuous delivery are now considered essential for the success of any software development project. Without these practices, the quality of software goes downhill and teams can no longer sustain their initial high levels of productivity.

However, understanding and implementing the practices can seem daunting.  This session presents an easy to understand roadmap for implementing engineering best practices.  The roadmap explains what the practices are, the tools that support the practices, a recommended sequence to implement, and effort to implement.

Though this topic is about engineering best practices, attendees do not have to be technical to get value from this session.  The session gives a non-technical look at a technical concept and is great for any person in the organization managing, working with, or working on IT teams/programs.

Agile development is difficult. Teams can often miss their delivery goals; the unsustainable pace of development can result in fatigue; and technological bottlenecks can make it impossible to deliver a high quality end product. When done right Agile can enable your team to deliver a sustainable and consistent forward flow of features. To achieve this goal you must use technologies that discourages skill silos, are easy to work with and allow for the straightforward application of Agile Engineering Best Practices. JavaScript and Node.JS are the perfect set of technologies that can organically grow within your organization and existing code base utilizing a RESTful architecture. The web is the OS of this decade, and JavaScript is its native language. Creating a technology strategy that effectively utilizes JavaScript is essential to unlocking the full potential of your team and allowing for greater flexibility and reduced risk.

Join Scott as he discusses valuable lessons he has learned as an Agile Coach working with new agile teams on government projects. After several years on agile projects in the private sector the shift to agile in the public sector was quite a shock. Scott will discuss how the Japanese martial arts concept of ShuHaRi (roughly translated, it means first learn, next detach, then transcend) has helped him become a better coach when working on Agile transformations on government projects. Explore when the maxim “Let the team decide” is not appropriate and the technique of rationing tools and process to encourage engagement. Engage in thoughtful discussion about the stages of learning and come away with valuable guidance for managing the seeming paradox of self-organization and disciplined learning. This discussion provides a powerful message for agile coaches and scrum masters for teams just beginning an agile journey or just stuck in hybrid mode.

The term “coach” has become an overloaded and almost meaningless term in much the same way that “agile” has.  Many individuals are calling themselves coaches who have little or no practical experience with Agile in large enterprise organizations.  Organizations are similarly confused about who they really need to bring success to their Agile transformation, and thus, are advertising for the wrong skills.

Many agile initiatives suffer from a feeble launch.  As Aristotle once stated “Well begun is half done”.  Performing the activities associated with developing a sound charter can help increase the likelihood of success for a team or organization .  

Beginning with the end in mind, we use retrospective techniques to develop consensus around objectives, vision, and mission.  In this workshop we introduce the components of a good charter and how those components help focus the teammates toward a common goal.  In addition, the development of the recommended charter components ensures that key questions are succinctly answered during the kickoff of a team.

Participants will learn the various types of charters and their recommended content.  During the workshop activity teams will develop a complete charter based  team of their choice or a provided case study.

Your progressive and efficient agile program can go downhill fast, and agile can get a bad rap, if upper management begins to think that the answers they used to get in the "Waterfall world" are no longer available to them in an agile world. Executives assume the team is managed poorly if they can’t produce artifacts they are used to seeing like fully resourced project schedules. They get frustrated when they can’t get a “straight answer” to questions they are used to having answered like “what is the project schedule’s critical path showing,” or “are we staffed properly to complete all the remaining requirements by the end of the contract.” They become unhappy with the team and possibly even start to see that “agile doesn’t work for our program” if they are told that they can’t get that information anymore in agile, or it isn’t clearly explained to them how to ask for the information they are really trying to understand.

The answers are still there though the tools and methods are likely different. We need to be able to translate the questions being asked and help upper management understand how to better ask the questions to get what they are really looking for. Executives are responsible for ensuring the health of the program, that sufficient progress is being made, the program is within budget, the contractual requirements are being met, etc. Agile methods can leave executives uneasy because answers to questions regarding these can be “squishy” since user stories can be added and removed, they can use relative sizing techniques for estimation instead of specific hours, priorities can shift, and the customer’s needs drive much of the process decisions. By understanding what upper management really needs in order to be successful themselves, and how to extract that information using our agile toolset, we will be able to give them the data they need to continue managing the program and communicating its health to their leadership and customer counterparts. The goal for this session is to provide you insight into what is really being asked, to help your leadership better ask the questions “in an agile way,” and to deliver impactful answers derived from our agile toolset that allows for strong communication of the health of your program.

Creating an approach for change is difficult. There is a fine line between imposing an Agile adoption and creating a Transformation where people are collaboratively working together for the change. Based on my experience and in large US Federal Government organizations where imposed adoptions seem the norm, I’ve been working on combining many concepts into a transformation model that can work for large organizations that have ingrained cultures. This starts by helping the organization’s people take ownership and personalize what Agile means to them. Believe it or not, this can work.

Intended for senior executives and their immediate staff (and the coaches that help them), the Taking Flight approach presents the importance of culture and how creating an organizational aspiration will help guide people. For large organizations, culture has been built up over decades and changing this is of the utmost importance to have an Agile Adoption stick. There are 3 main points I’ll address:
- how to get people ‘onboard’ with a cohesive direction that they accept by collaboratively building their aspiration
- how to develop and select strategies for incremental improvement towards the aspiration
- how to realize changing from old routines into new ones aligned with the aspiration

To help establish cohesive direction, I use an Aspirational model (your Guiding Star) to help organizations develop the direction they want to go. I show how the differences between an Aspirational model and an End-State. I explain that aspirations are inspiring and allow for a mindset change by not expressing the final state in terms of structure our expected metrics. From there, I discuss different techniques for assessing the current state of the organization and its people and developing strategies and actions for the necessary change management to move towards the organizational Aspiration; this is where the concrete steps come into play. Throughout this portion, I have the group try out various techniques for building an aspirational model and how to build the backlog of work to undertake the transformation. I introduce the Power of Habit as a means to help the organization undergo the necessary behavior changes. I close with a discussion to help the audience think around limiting change-in-progress and how to grow capacity to become more responsive to change.

In this, you’ll get exposed to a few of many hands-on techniques that can be used to develop your Aspiration and execute on it. These are:

• KrisMap
• Business Model Canvas
• Habit Loops

“Being agile” is a mindset change.  You can’t “be agile” just by following agile processes.  Agile practices have intended benefit which you likely will not achieve if you just “do agile.”  Assessing the processes and practices to understand why they have been put in place, and what they are trying to achieve, will help you start to see how you can produce the intended value agile is meant to bring.  When you and your team can see the intended value of the practices then you can perform better as a team, deliver more accurately and more frequently, and please your customer and users much more consistently.

We will explore agile practices such as the Scrum ceremonies, WIP limits, specific information radiators, etc. to assess what they are really trying to achieve.  Agile processes derive in part from psychological attributes and needs.  Humans execute agile delivery and to come together better as a team, keep our customers and upper management comfortably informed, produce what our customers and users really want, and consistently deliver high quality software, we need to fulfill our psychological needs and address our human factors.  This session will help you to understand what the intended goals are in these practices, what mindset changes may be necessary, and how you can ensure that your team achieves the value.  If your team is just “doing agile” then your project will likely wind up as another one that “was not well-suited for agile” in the eyes of your team, upper management or customer.  If your team can ”be agile,” then upper management will celebrate your success and your customers will applaud the efficiency by which your happy team routinely delivers the precise features they are looking for.

In large Government and Commercial organizations with many interacting systems, architecture is necessary to collaborate effectively across disparate entities and systems. Traditional command and control approaches to architecture are often ineffective and cause great tension, especially when Agile efforts are part of the portfolio. We will discuss two principles, Vision and Partnering.  These principles provide insight and get results for both architects and Agilists; and present tools and approaches on how to effectively engage architects and architecture.