April-20168GOVERNMENT CIO OUTLOOKOIN MYPINIONLeading the Digital Business Cultureigital Business arises from the combination of four major forces--cloud, mobile, social, and data--along with the rapid expansion of internet-connected devices. Digital business allows us to create new opportunities that blur the lines between the physical and virtual worlds. To take advantage of this rapidly changing environment, organizations have switched to techniques such as Agile development. Discussions, articles and conference sessions often focus on the techniques, theories, and practices of Agile development, often glossing over the cultural issues and barriers to success. In addition, speakers and discussion leaders often miss the context--how these approaches fit into the larger system of business, including strategy, planning, and program and project management. Leaders must continue to integrate Agile development into the larger context of program/project management, governance, security, and operations. To get the maximum benefit in speed, learning, and responsiveness possible with Agile development, leaders need to create a culture of safety and trust to allow teams to experiment, innovate, and learn. Leaders must learn to let go--embracing the culture where leaders exist at all levels of the organization.Organizations often start implementing Agile development in vacuum; that is, they take great pains to set up their development environment to ``operate with agile principles. While this is a radical shift, software development does not occur in a vacuum. Without changes in the supporting environments--project management, governance, security, and operations--the organization cannot make the cultural shift necessary to enable the velocity and quality gains possible with agile techniques. The organization will look like a small team of children trying to pull an obstinate elephant--there's just too much friction or too many roadblocks for agile development teams to deliver value across the organization.One example is project management. Traditional project management efforts develop a highly-defined scope of work for the effort. This rigid baseline generally requires months of detailed planning efforts to achieve the required specificity to support detailed cost and schedule estimates. Project managers manage this baseline with rigid change control focused on the triple constraint of scope, cost and schedule. Most organizations make the switch to Agile development because they cannot survive a planning period that takes up a third to half of their business cycle in traditional waterfall approaches. In Agile development, work begins after a few weeks of planning. In addition with Agile development (we'll use Scrum as an example) efforts are time-boxed, with the schedule and cost fixed for each short iteration, or sprint. The scope of each sprint can vary depending on the velocity Public sector agencies have traditionally decided on what digital services they will provide to constituents either on their own or with help from surveysChad Sheridan, CIO, USDADBy
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