This document discusses the adoption of Agile practices at the United States Office of Personnel Management (OPM) for the development of USAJOBS, the federal government's job board. It provides background on Richard Cheng and Alesia Booth, the authors and experts in Agile and federal hiring who helped implement Agile at OPM. Some key benefits of adopting Agile included delivering new features frequently using short iterations to better satisfy customer needs and respond rapidly to changes. The document outlines challenges faced and lessons learned in transitioning a large government agency to Agile.
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Agile at OPM: the USAJOBS Product Owner Perspective
1. Agile @ OPM: the USAJOBS
Product Owner Perspective
By Alesia Booth & Richard Cheng
2.
3. Richard Cheng
Principal and Agile practice lead at Excella Consulting
CST, CSM, CSPO, CSP, PMP, PMI-ACP
Founder and executive committee member for the Agile
Defense Adoption Proponents Team (ADAPT)
Performed Agile training, assessment, and coaching at
USAJOBS
3
4. Alesia Booth
20+ years of Federal HR experience
10+ years of Federal hiring policy and systems experience
Certified Scrum Product Owner
Acted as Product Owner for development of USAJOBS 3.0
Continuing to work on recruitment data standards and talent
management systems as the Program Manager for USA
Staffing®
5. USAJOBS – stats
More than 24M visits
More than 8M logins
More than 10k average daily job postings
Nearly 95M average monthly searches
Customer Satisfaction ACSI Score of 74
5
8. Agile Values
Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
Working software over comprehensive documentation
Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
Responding to change over following a plan
9. Agile Principles
1. Satisfy the customer through early and continuous
delivery
2. Welcome changing requirements
3. Deliver frequently, preferring a shorter timescale
4. Business & technical work together daily
5. Pick the right team and trust them
6. Face-to-face Communication
7. Working software is the primary measure of progress
8. Sustainable pace
9. Technical excellence and good design enhances agility
10. Simplicity, maximizing the amount of work not done
11.Best results emerge from self-organizing teams
12.The team regularly reflects to become more effective
24. Final Words
24
Agile Principle #12:
At regular intervals, the team reflects on
how to become more effective, then tunes
and adjusts its behavior accordingly.
Notas do Editor
In 2010, the decision was made to move from the Monster provided platform and in source USAJOBS by creating an OPM solution.
Allow easier interconnection with vendor and government talent acquisition solutions
Allow greater flexibility and control to respond to agency customer enhancements
Provide access to the underlying data about recruitment, the talent pool, and agency staffing practices
Short period to develop the solution (August 2010 – August 2011)
Lack of well documented requirements and no context (i.e., user stories)
Better processes for capturing agency stakeholder requirements and incorporating them into the solution quickly, immediate feedback capture
Rich
Rich
Rich
The good:
On time, on budget
Moved 4.3 TB of data from legacy to new system with very few errors and no data loss
All 11 interconnected systems successfully passed data back and forth with no errors
The bad:
Users were required to reset their passwords
Capacity issues caused system delays and outages for weeks before a cloud solution could be put into place
Search configuration was incomplete due to acceptance testing with only a small data subset
Our agency customers stood by us because of the tight integration between OPM and the integrated project teams and the communication provided by OPM leadership to the CHCO council.
Our talent acquisition system customers stood by us because of the ease of integrating and the responsiveness of the team to their requirements/questions.
Our applicants eventually returned the customer sat score to where it was before launch because their expectations were met.
Now let’s talk about what we learned.
Government challenge – self-organizing teams, team makes process improvement decisions. Very different from usual government hierarchy.
Leadership must trust the team. The team must be transparent to leadership.
Share the story: Misunderstanding of the term “backlog”
Our requirements were in the form of user stories and our CIO’s shop was not familiar with the format. When they came to do an SDLC audit, this caused confusion and concern. Eventually, all became familiar and realized the requirements were more thorough than waterfall.
Agile – colocation, however, PO team was in DC, Dev team in Georgia. Communication became difficult/challenging. Use of VTC, IM and phone were not enough. Face to face is critical.
Dev -> QA Test -> Acceptance Test -> Security/508 testing? -> release
We are planning based on forecasts
Got to be ahead of the developers with stories prioritized and ready for sprint planning, otherwise, time gets wasted figuring out user stories during sprint planning.
Easier, faster, and cheaper to re-prioritize
Story of Pathways functionality
Learning agile once isn’t enough, continual process improvement needs to also include reinforcement of good Agile practices
Forecasting, mentoring, removal of impediments are all too important to struggle with a bad scrum master.