Unprecedented federal budget problems are creating a new reality for the software development operations of government IT units.
The days of the big, lumbering, multiyear government IT projects are likely coming to an end as more and more federal IT managers turn to Agile development methodologies to speed up software projects so they can quickly demonstrate the value of new systems.
Government agencies, which spend about $80 billion a year on IT, have regularly faced possible shutdowns and budget cuts in recent years. The latest threat is the so-called sequester, a package of automatic spending cuts that will go into effect next month unless Congress can come up with a long-term plan to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion.
Government agencies, which spend about $80 billion a year on IT, have regularly faced possible shutdowns and budget cuts in recent years. The latest threat is the so-called sequester, a package of automatic spending cuts that will go into effect next month unless Congress can come up with a long-term plan to reduce the deficit by $1.2 trillion.
On top of that, agencies have been operating on short-term IT budgets since 2010 because lawmakers haven't passed an annual budget.
"This lack of budgetary stability makes it very hard to plan and, I think, extremely hard to plan well," Robert Hale, comptroller and chief financial officer at the U.S. Department of Defense, said last month at the Brookings Institution in Washington.
The uncertainty has forced many government IT managers to seek new ways to develop software, said Kris van Riper, managing director of consulting firm CEB.
"Planning out multiyear projects where you don't see the deliverables for extended time periods in a traditional waterfall method really isn't going to work," said van Riper.
The Agile development methodology's iterative format features short development cycles designed to produce incremental deliverables on an ongoing basis. It emphasizes collaboration among developers, managers and users -- anyone with a stake in a project outcome, he said.
"If you can show results sooner and more effectively, the chance that you won't be defunded goes up," said Lawrence Fitzpatrick, president of Computech, a software services firm.
The Department of Veterans Affairs was a relatively early adopter of the Agile methodology. "We are huge fans of Agile and are using it in our most critical programs," said Roger Baker, the agency's CIO.
Baker says user involvement in the Agile process has been the key to the methodology's successful implementation at the VA.
"We get the customer deeply involved in the program, defining what the system must do, how it should do it, what the workflow must be, and how the [user interface] should look," Baker said. As a result, "the end users are always happy with the end product. They feel like it's their system, not ours."
"We hit 80% of our milestones in 2012," he added.
The VA currently has about 200 development projects under way, but it's not yet using Agile in all of them. "I'd insist on Agile in all programs, but I don't think we yet have the breadth of expertise to draw on to do so," Baker said.
Agile was embraced early on by private-sector defense and intelligence contractors, which "need to rapidly adapt to new situations," said Bob Payne, a vice president at Agile consulting firm LitheSpeed. In recent years, the methodology has spread to other industries as companies deal with the recession.
