Jeff Sutherland has a post about agile in the Department of Defense. Good stuff, but there are some issue with "going agile" in the Federal IT space. The first is for contracts over $20M require Earned Value Management, per FAR/DFARS flow downs and the OMB Part 7 guides for "FedCiv."
The second is the contract vehicles need to be adapted to how agile does things with requirements, changes, deliverables, progress payments, fee calculations. Here's the "tip of the iceberg" for integrating Scrum with Federal Acquisition. While Scrum is a wonderful concept and applicable to large majorities of projects, but it's not quite as simple as it might seem.
Here is a recent briefing on the top of agile in the federal procurement world is the focus of many organizations in and out of the government. Management Concepts is one source of training for agile in the Fed space, there are others. But in the end this is an acquisition issue.
Without changes in the FAR/DFARS clause flow downs that "put on contract" the behaviors mandated by the regulations of how software is developed, acquired, and put into service. While the agile community has many power tools to improve the problem in the federal government, they need come at this from a acquisition point of view for those benefits to be realized.
Here's some prior discussion
- Agile in the Federal Government
- Agile in the Federal Environment Webinar
- Big Program Guidance - A Caution to Agile
