CDW’s Federal Agile Successes Hinge on Human-Centered Design
CDW Government has used HCD to drive several successful agile development efforts in the federal space.
We’ve coordinated multiple teams for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, all working with a common roadmap guided by priorities coming from the program level. This helps ensure development moves forward steadily, while agility adds the ability to iterate and evolve to deliver the right outcomes in support of the mission.
Another project involved helping an agency transition to Login.gov, a secure service used by the public to sign in to participating government websites. Here, CDW Government combined agile software engineering with agile product management, bringing together cross-functional with different expertise to work together.
We’ve had similar successes supporting the National Archives and ramping up the Small Business Administration’s certify.sba.gov site, a portal that makes it easy for small businesses to validate their status.
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CDW’s Take on the Agile Method Means Predictability for the Agency
Agencies need to think about how they’re going to apply agile approaches in their environments to be effective, which will likely involve incorporating best practices around DevOps and embracing a culture shift toward continuous improvement and incremental delivery of value.
Contracting comes into play here as well. It’s important to write contracts that point to specific goals: These are the requirements and the goals to be accomplished. One benefit to this approach is stakeholder engagement. When contracts incorporate an agile mindset, people tend to be more trusting and collaborative as they work toward well-documented outcomes.
In the federal space, CDW’s agile methodology is laser-focused on predictability. Agencies need to know what they are getting and when. To that end, detailed discovery sprints help to align everyone on specific user needs, and product requirement documentation provides further clarity.
We conduct iterative prototyping so that everyone knows what the end product is going to look like. Agencies get the predictability they need in both outcomes and timelines.
Moving forward, agile projects will get bigger, and artificial intelligence will help accelerate those efforts. CDW will continue supporting government as it looks to embrace the enhanced productivity and operational efficiencies inherent in this powerful methodology.
