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12 JOURNAL OF GOVERNMENT FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT

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Agile Project Management on Government Finance Projects By Chris Kraft, CGFM, PMP, PMI-ACP

W

hile agile software development is not new, there are many assumptions made about what constitutes agile. Many of the early applications of agile were focused on product development. These were later adopted for software development and have led to the evolution of many different agile methodologies. There are many benefits to using agile over the more traditional, sequential waterfall approach. These benefits can be leveraged on federal projects to deliver increased value, reduced risk, enhanced visibility and greater adaptability. Agencies looking to implement or expand the use of agile should evaluate their specific circumstances to determine what approach will work best.

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Agile Iterations Requirements, design, development, and testing

Requirements, design, development, and testing

Working Software

Requirements, design, development, and testing

Working Software

Requirements, design, development, and testing

Working Software

Release

Working Software

Waterfall Phases Milestone

Requirements

Software delivered at end of process

Milestone

Design

Milestone

Development Test

WHAT IS AGILE? Most people are familiar with the concept of agile, but that does not mean they understand it. Some associate agile with a form of anarchy where everyone does whatever he or she wants.1 Harvard Business Review found many executives do not really understand agile, and they manage projects in ways that undermine the effectiveness of agile teams.2 Agile methodologies have been used in different forms for decades. While most people today associate agile with software development, there is a long history with product development. In 1986, Hirotaka Takeuchi and Ikujiro Nonaka published an article in the Harvard Business Review that looked at how companies were moving away from a sequential to more holistic approach to developing products.3 The article looked at the six characteristics of this holistic approach as “built-in instability, self-organizing project teams, overlapping development

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phases, ‘multilearning’, subtle control and organizational transfer of learning.4 Companies applying this holistic approach were able to implement flexible processes for new product development. The authors used an analogy of rugby, where you pass the ball with the team as the unit moves up the field.5 The arguments made by Takeuchi and Nonaka, including the need to implement approaches to product development that included speed and flexibility, have influenced the software development community. In 2001, a group of software developers got together to discuss lightweight software development methods. They shared best practices, identified common themes and developed a common purpose for agile practitioners.6 The result was the Agile Manifesto.7 While agile methods existed before 2001, this manifesto has become a foundation for agile software development. This manifesto includes four values and 12 principles of agile software development.

The group that put together the Agile Manifesto was “uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.”8 They outlined the things they have come to value, presented in the form of things valued over other things. The four values below have come to define agile. The first value is individuals and interactions over processes and tools. This highlights a preference for personal communication. While processes and tools are important, it is more important to focus on personal communication. Teams should seek to abandon assemblyline mentality in favor of a fun, creative environment for problem solving.9 The second value is working software over comprehensive documentation. This value focuses on applying effort where it will deliver the most benefit. Delivering software to the customer is more important than delivering comprehensive documentation. This does not mean agile is against producing documentation. It simply means

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working software is valued over endless documentation. The belief is the team can learn faster by seeing results of working software and getting it to the customer for feedback.10 The importance of experimentation also underlies this idea of delivering working software. The third value is customer collaboration over contract negotiation. A key element of agile is to integrate the customer into the project. This integrated team that fosters collaboration can be much more responsive to the business needs and better suited to developing working software that meets customer requirements. The rapid prototyping and frequent review cycles help better align the work done by the team with the business value sought by the customer. Contract negotiation is still important, but customer collaboration is more valued. The final value is responding to change over following a plan. The Agile Manifesto values the ability to respond to change over rigid adherence to a plan. As most people

have experienced, plans, especially those for multi-year projects, encounter change. Agile values the ability to respond to change. This responsiveness allows the team to better align to the needs of the organization and the customer. As the organization changes and requirements evolve, the team can adapt. It is still important to have a plan, but more value is placed on those tasks that do not change by the time they are executed.11 These four values are supported by the following 12 guiding principles: nn Customer satisfaction nn Welcoming change nn Trusting individuals nn Frequent delivery nn Daily interactions nn Face-to-face conversation nn Working software nn Sustainable development nn Technical excellence nn Simplicity nn Self-organizing teams nn Regular reflection

These values and principles work together to provide an overall methodology for agile software development. One common theme is the importance placed on empiricism. The team is encouraged to try new things, stop, reflect and improve.12 Other common themes include focus on business value and customer satisfaction. As we will see, there are many different types of agile methodologies that all build on the Agile Manifesto.

TYPES OF AGILE Agile really refers to a group of software development methodologies based on interactive development. When implementing using agile, you will leverage one of many different methodologies. Some of the most popular methodologies are scrum, kanban and extreme programming (XP). Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, the founders of scrum, derived the methodology from Takeuchi and Nonaka’s work,

The Agile Manifesto — a statement of values

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Individuals and interactions

over

Process and tools

Working software

over

Comprehensive documentation

Customer collaboration

over

Contract negotiation

Responding to change

over

Following a plan

JOURNAL OF GOVERNMENT FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT 15

Agile

Waterfall

Business Value

Waterfall

Agile

Risk

Agile Agile

Waterfall

Visibility

applying the rugby metaphor to software development.13 Scrum has become one of the most widely used agile project management methods.14 Scrum uses time-bound sprints that typically range from two to four weeks. There are defined planning sessions at the start of the sprint, review sessions at the end of the sprint and retrospectives to look for areas to improve. The team is self-managing and comprised of cross-functional members. Kanban is another methodology that focuses on workload management and change management. This is often used to manage IT support and maintenance, where priorities can change as frequently as hourly or daily. Work in progress (WIP) is limited to allow the team to focus on completing the highest priority items. Kanban boards are used to visualize workflow and show what tasks are planned, current and completed. This board helps manage flow throughout the lifecycle. XP is a software development methodology based on the

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core values of simplicity, communication, feedback and courage. The strength of XP is the ability to perform rapid analysis, coding and testing cycles within short iterations, typically one week in duration with a collocated team.15 A key differentiator is the technical discipline and sophistication of testing that is highly automated.

WHY AGILE? Organizations are making the shift to agile to leverage many benefits over the classical, linear waterfall methodology. Agile can increase business value, improve project visibility, decrease risk and enable adaptability. Projects managed using agile incrementally develop software and deploy to production as work is completed. This ability to more quickly deploy working software provides

Waterfall

Adaptability

business value much earlier in the process when compared to waterfall. Agile also provides more visibility into the project versus the traditional waterfall approach. With waterfall, users are typically engaged early on and then again during testing and training. In agile, users are part of the core team, and they are regularly engaged through ongoing collaboration. Waterfall projects tend to have a lot of risk throughout the life of a project. Agile helps to mitigate the risk by using a shorter feedback loop. Issues are identified must faster, and they can be corrected quickly. Waterfall has a higher risk throughout the project given the amount of work done independent of customer reviews and delivery. Agile projects are better equipped to adapt to changing business requirements. The increased visibility, customer

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collaboration and time-boxed delivery iterations provide the opportunity to reevaluate priority on a regular basis. Agile provides a number of additional benefits, including increased team productivity and employee satisfaction.16 Redundant meetings, repetitive planning sessions, excess documentation, quality defects and low-value products can be minimized.17 Improved visibility results in greater customer engagement and satisfaction.18

CASE STUDY Many accounting and finance projects involve large enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) products. These projects tend to be very large and high risk. Stakeholder engagement is often low, and stakeholders tend to be

disappointed with the results. Using a waterfall approach, there is a limited opportunity for customer engagement, primarily during the requirement and design phases of the project. Development often occurs in a vacuum, with little or no opportunity to adapt to changing circumstances or customer feedback. A federal shared services provider (FSSP) recently evaluated using agile for a system enhancement project. The agency was implementing a new enterprise reporting solution using a waterfall approach. There was a desire to leverage an iterative delivery approach to decrease risk, increase customer engagement and provide additional value. After comparing

the traditional and agile methodologies and evaluating them to the project, there was consensus agile would be a good fit. The project manager researched agile methodologies and recommended using scrum. The project was restructured to operate using scrum. Moving to agile allowed the FSSP to decrease the time required to go live on the new reporting solution by six months. Once deployed to production, the FSSP was able to almost immediately start deploying additional functionality in the sprints. The sprints are two weeks long and include planning sessions at the start of the sprint,

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JOURNAL OF GOVERNMENT FINANCIAL MANAGEMENT 17

daily scrum meetings, review sessions at the end of the sprint and an overall retrospective with each sprint. Customers are now more engaged and have the ability to provide the FSSP with additional feedback. While the team is still experimenting to determine how to best leverage agile to deliver value, the shift to agile has been very successful.

IMPLEMENTING AGILE Agile does not work for everything. It does work well for complex problems where the solution is initially unknown, product requirements will most likely change, work can be modularized and close collaboration is feasible.19 Research has shown the most successful introductions of agile usually start small.20 Success in one area will help create organizational advocates to deploy agile in other areas. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a 2012 study of effective practices and challenges applying agile.21 The study found organizations should start with agile guidance and put together an adoption strategy. They should look for impediments at the organizational and project levels that may be impacting the adoption of agile. Another recommended practice is to obtain stakeholder and customer feedback frequently. Progress also needs to be tracked and made visible.

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GAO found several challenges in the federal environment, including struggles with procurement practices, trouble committing staff and unclear guidance on agile. Teams also had difficulty collaborating closely and had problems transitioning to self-directed work. The hope is many of these challenges are addressed as federal agencies continue to expand their use of agile methodologies. Agile usage continues to grow as organizations are able to realize improvements over traditional waterfall methodologies. While used initially for product development, agile is now associated more with software development. The Agile Manifesto and other initiatives have continued to expand on the general understanding of agile and its application to software development. The benefits to visibility, risk, business value and adaption continue to provide incentives to use agile. This includes the use in the financial management space to manage ERP and COTS projects. Before moving to agile, make sure you evaluate the benefits given your organization and the project.

Endnotes 1. Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, and Hirotaka Takeuchi, Embracing Agile, Harvard Business Review, May 2016, available at https://hbr.org/2016/05/embracing-agile 2. Ibid. 3. Hirotaka Takeuchi & Ikujiro Nonaka, The New New Product Development Game, Harvard Business Review, January 1986, available at https://hbr.org/1986/01/thenew-new-product-development-game 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. Rachel Alt-Simmons, Agile by Design, 2015. 7. Kent Beck et al., Manifesto for Agile Software Development, 2001, available at www.Agilemanifesto.org 8. Ibid. 9. See Endnote 1. 10. See Endnote 1. 11. See Endnote 1. 12. Jason Fair, Agile versus Waterfall: approach is right for my ERP project?, available at https://www.pmi.org/learning/library/ agile-versus-waterfall-approach-erpproject-6300 13. See Endnote 6. 14. See Endnote 6. 15. See Endnote 6. 16. See Endnote 1. 17. See Endnote 1. 18. See Endnote 1. 19. See Endnote 1. 20. See Endnote 1. 21. U.S. Government Accountability Office (2012, July), Software Development, Effective Practices and Federal Challenges in Applying Agile Methods (Publication No. GAO12-681), available at http://www.gao.gov/ products/GAO-12-681

Chris Kraft, CGFM, PMP, PMI-ACP, CSM is a project manager at the U.S. Department of the Interior, Interior Business Center and a member of AGA’s Northern Virginia Chapter. He has almost 20 years of experience implementing and managing financial systems in the commercial and public sectors. He is a PMI agile certified practitioner and a certified scrum master.

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