Agile and USAJOBS Product Ownership
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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 leaders in implementing Agile at OPM. Some key benefits of adopting Agile included delivering features frequently to satisfy customers and welcome changing requirements. The document outlines obstacles encountered such as security compliance, remote team members, and scope creep, and lessons learned for training, defining requirements, and selecting an effective Scrum Master.
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Agile and USAJOBS Product Ownership
- 1. Agile @ OPM: the USAJOBS Product Owner Perspective By Alesia Booth & Richard Cheng
- 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
- 7. Why Agile?
- 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
- 10. Scrum
- 11. Need Iterative & Incremental Approach
- 12. Outcome
- 14. Obstacles & Lessons Learned http://www.flickr.com/photos/7821771@N05/4679360979
- 15. Mindset 15
- 17. Requirements 17
- 18. Distance 18
- 20. Get Shovel Ready 20
- 21. Scope Creep 21
- 22. Train and Reinforce Agile 22 Training Mentoring Coaching
- 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.
Editor's Notes
- 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.