Agile in the Federal Government: Scrum and Beyond

The trend of increased Agile usage, including within the federal government, is undeniable and ongoing. The private sector has been at the forefront of Agile adoption. Here, competency with Agile has been adopted in a progressive manner, starting with technical teams and flowing down to the business side and eventually the entire organization. For the most part, the federal sector has followed the private sector's pattern of adoption with the primary exception being its bypassing Agile Engineering practices such as XP and relying predominately on SCRUM. The private sector learned that SCRUM by itself would not effectively support scalability to replicate the success of one project across the entire organizational structure and adopted scaling frameworks such SAFe. Similarly, it realized that Scrum was not necessarily appropriate for all types of work and looked for alternatives, most notably Kanban. We predict the government will follow the private sector's path towards Agile maturity and will be applying both SAFe and Kanban where appropriate. As the private sector continues to gain Agile competencies, new challenges will be uncovered and new techniques and solutions will popularize as a reaction. We anticipate the government will follow suit and benefit from solutions already tested and amended in the private sector using a structured framework for adoption.