"[Agile development] is about getting us into the 21st century, but it was a huge change for us and a huge learning curve," says Kate Goodrich, director and chief medical officer at the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services.
As agencies move away from traditional waterfall development frameworks and seek to embrace agile methods, there are a few steps they can take to maximize success.
The retrospective is a meeting during which an agile team constructively embraces failure to achieve continuous improvement -- but self-critique is a hard skill for some to learn, especially in agencies where the concepts of agile processes are new.
For the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), one key strategy has been the creation of cloud implementation team that brings individuals from security, applications and network teams to identify the most pressing issues.
DevOps is used to incorporate new learnings into operations solutions in an automated and repeatable manner, but it can be challenging to implement DevOps within legacy systems.
Providing a strategic framework for agile adoption for the entire agency will help the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services better address the agency’s changing IT needs in the evolving health care environment.
GCN reports on a preliminary survey released by the National Association of State Chief Information Officers and consulting firm Accenture, which shows the positive results state CIOs are seeing from agile methods.
The state's agile prequalified vendor pool was created to give state agencies access to vendors who demonstrated their ability to use CHHS application program interfaces to access data and meet user needs.
Given the critical and long-term nature of many public services, agencies should embrace a converged approach that integrates all layers of technology.
As CIOs work to modernize the government IT environment, agile methods are gaining traction and security is becoming a top concern, according to a survey of government IT executives by Grant Thornton.