Government’s biggest attempt to fix tech procurement was not a total failure, according to Eric Hysen, former Googler and former United States Digital Service official, in a recent post on Medium.
Hysen gives an engaging overview of how agile practices have been changing the world of government procurement, an insider’s view of the process of developing the agile contract vehicle Flexible Agile Support for the Homeland (FLASH), and the lessons learned from its eventual downfall.
From the article:
Some people are saying this is evidence agile development doesn’t work and government should go back to traditional waterfall development and massive contracts . . . These people couldn’t be more wrong. While FLASH was flawed, it showed the tremendous potential of running a contracting process that rewards excellence at designing and building working software, rather than competence in writing proposals and navigating bureaucracy . . . FLASH also got many innovative firms thinking about doing business for the government for the first time.
Read the full article: Lessons learned from the government’s biggest attempt to fix tech procurement | Eric Hysen, via Medium
NextGov coverage of this story: An insider’s take on what went wrong with DHS’ agile contract | NextGov
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