USA Staffing is the U.S. Office of Personnel Management's hiring software solution for Federal agencies.

USA Staffing positions agencies to acquire, assess, certify, select, and onboard qualified candidates precisely, efficiently and cost-effectively. It provides the up-to-date tools agencies need for strengthening the foundation of great government - your workforce. Created by OPM and based on the experience of more than 50 Federal agencies, USA Staffing is an off-the-shelf software solution for automating staffing and assessment. It combines core and advanced features in a user-friendly, web-enabled software solution. USA Staffing is compliant with Federal hiring regulations and meets Federal Information Technology (IT) security requirements.

http://www.opm.gov/services-for-agencies/technology-systems/usa-staffing/

As the program that addresses the hiring of nearly all Federal employees, the USA Staffing program in a major program in the US Federal government. Starting with one Scrum team in August of 2012 to using Agile across all the program teams, the USA Staffing program is committed to Agile concepts and methods as it rebuilds and updates the USA Staffing IT systems.

In looking at key lessons learned during this transformation, one of the keys was creating strong Product Ownership on the USA Staffing program. In Federal programs, Federal Product Ownership is often underserved, but with the USA Staffing program, there was a concentrated focus on ensuring effective Federal product ownership.  

This includes:

1. Creating effective Product Owners for individual Scrum teams
2. Scaling Product Ownership teams with a Super Product Owner

By doing the above, it allowed the USA Staffing program to:

1. Create great collaborative working relationships with the USA Staffing stakeholders and customers
2. Enable a collaborative and self organizing culture across the distributed teams on the USA Staffing program
3. Allow USA Staffing to scale its program across all the Scrum teams in its program.

Through lecture, group discussions and Q&A, this session will offer practical techniques for cultivating Product Ownership within Agile work environment in government when teams are organizationally and geographically separated. We will also detail how we worked with customer and stakeholder organizations to help them adapt to a rapid development cycle.

This session is presented by Bridget Dongarra, a Federal employee and Product Owner on the USA Staffing program and by Richard Cheng, an Agile coach and Trainer. Bridget will bring the Federal perspective into the session while Richard will help address Agile specific nuances in the Agile @ OPM implementation.

We've all see Project Charters.  Project Charters usually state the vision, mission, roadmaps, and is hand top down to the teams.  However, how many of us have Team Charters in place.  Team Charters are one of the most powerful tools a team has when it comes to being able to work effectively together.

This workshop explores the dynamics of creating a team charter, the definition of ready, and the definition of done and how all this works together to create software that is ready for review, to potentially shippable, to released into production.

Situation A: Your team is great. You’ve met all your sprint goals and your Product Owner is pleased with the results to date. Yeah!

Situation B: Your team sucked. Zero story points completed last sprint. Team members are complaining and blaming each other for the failures.

These two situations demand two very different retrospectives. The right retrospective can make a good team great and turn a bad situation into a learning opportunity. A bad retrospective can set a team back and create a non-safe working environment.

In this session, attendees will explorer retrospectives techniques and examine the pros and cons of the techniques. The workshop will then explore scenarios and examine how to effectively run retrospectives across a variety of scenarios.

Coming out of this sessions, attendees will have an understanding of applying the right retrospectives based on the state and needs of the team and projects.

Agile based methods have been proven successful in commercial companies.  From small startups to large companies, the patterns for Agile methods have been established.  However, can these concepts work in the Federal government?  In a world that revolves around oversight, governance, hierarchy, traditional management, and risk aversion, can Agile work? Should the government try and would it make a difference.

In this talk, we explore Agile efforts in the Federal government.  From the Office of Personnel Management to Department of Defense, new Agencies like Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and established Agencies like Census, we’ll explore:

• Why are Federal agencies trying Agile?
• What are the benefits realized?
• What are the biggest issues and pitfalls?
• How do Federal agencies manage and govern these programs?
• What does the future hold?

At the end of this session, attendees will have a sense of how Agile is changing and could change the way our governments delivers on their missions.

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).

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.