DITAP Reflections

It is October 1^st, the start of a new fiscal year. The Acquisition Office has finally completed all acquisition related events to close out the previous fiscal year. The Senior Leaders have begun to plan a thank you party to thank the acquisition office for all the hard work, effort, and hours devoted to ensure the execution of program tasks are completed. While showing their sincere appreciation and gratitude the Senior Leaders began to request feedback on ways, the acquisition office can improve for the next fiscal year.

Many of my peers have just finished the DITAP Cohort Course where we learned agile methodologies to apply to contracting. We all raise our hands expeditiously and began sharing ways we believe agile adoption can improve contracting as well as other areas in the agency as well. As many of the Senior Leaders are not familiar with the agile, we give a brief synopsis of what it is. The information we share is as follows, “Agile acquisition integrates planning, design, development, and testing into an iterative life cycle to deliver small, frequent, incremental capabilities to an end user.”

To further explain agile, we iterate that areas of improvement that we have identified that are beneficial to implement in our agency is as follows:

• Integrated government and contractor processes and partnerships
• Cross-functional teams
• Frequent capability deliveries
• Continuous user participation and feedback
• Evolving requirements

Senior leadership is intrigued at the informative information we are providing about agile. We further reiterate by stating that agile methodologies empower a culture of small teams that collaborate with stakeholders throughout product development. This is important, as the hands off waterfall, approach is no longer relevant in how the Government wants to do business or acquire Information Technology Services. We want to be involved in every step of the way to ensure the end user receives what they want.

Although, adopting agile may be a cultural shift for some individuals, requiring a disciplined process to ensure a rapid, iterative, dynamic development approach, especially in the areas of requirements, test, and systems engineering is important if we want to change the mindset of how we acquire technology that works.

At this moment, it appears we have senior leadership buy in. They ask what are the basic elements of acquiring agile technology. We state the following:

• The program is structured into small and frequent releases
• The value of agile is in obtaining a product that works rather than documentation
• Responsiveness to operations, technology, and budgets
• Active involvement of users throughout development to ensure high operational value

The above is implemented in the following methods:

• Release – Capability delivered to users, composed of multiple sprints
• Sprint – Priority capabilities developed, integrated, tested, and demonstrated (aka iteration)
• Daily scrum – Team synchronization meeting to plan activities and assess progress and impediments

Senior leadership is pleased with our knowledge from the DITAP course. We further iterate that agile will be a pivotal point in the future of our agency as we realize the government’s digital transformation mission. If we want to be an agency at the forefront of this change, Agile is the way to go. We also iterate that industry has already adopted these best practices and methods. Government should always align their practices to the commercial practices of the private sector. Senior Leadership has expressed that we have their buy in and they will implement agile and be an advocate for the adoption and implementation across the agency.

The recent DITAP course graduates celebrated upon providing the agile delivery pitch to Senior Leaders. We were amazed that we were able to be of influence to the senior leaders and also implement change in the agency. As recent graduates who just obtained the FAC-C-DS digital certification, the talents we obtained in this course will enable us to bring the goals listed above to our agency to fruition.

The image I chose for this story is agile methodologies integrated with change management. I chose this image because although agile is great to introduce into an organization, it requires a lot of change that is not necessarily addressed in the implementation of agile. Enterprise change management addresses those items such as:

• Gathering and prioritizing the most important features desired by the organization
• Handling request of training in a continuous release environment
• Ensuring customer team members are informed by the full breadth of stakeholders required for enterprise acceptance.

• Securing timely approval of new technologies that a team would like to leverage
• Addressing stakeholder discomfort with cultural, business, social or other non-technical changes related to software implementation.
• Managing personnel to ensure appropriate stakeholders are available throughout the course of a project.

References used to write this post include:

https://www.cio.com/article/2410953/an-agile-approach-to-change-management.html

https://www.mitre.org/publications/systems-engineering-guide/acquisition-systems-engineering/program-acquisition-strategy-formulation/agile-acquisition-strategy

FAC-C-DS is this for you?

FAC-C-DS is this for you?

As a COR this course has been informative and educationally enriching. Since the specialization in Digital Services (DS) will not transfer to the COR community this has been a letdown and a waste of my time being enrolled into this course.

But, since I’m involved in drafting SOW and SOO, the additional knowledge and insight gained will enable me to speed the development of these documents. Also it helps presents a different lens on how to execute new contracts in the enterprise. Yet this could have been achieved by attending other training events, involving less time (this training event took about six months). 

Digital services agency advancements.

If an agency does not take advantages of the tools, such as open source software, big data, X-a-a-S, cloud, and other services, the agency will end up wasting time, resources and at the end of the day tax payer’s dollars. Everyone has a part to play to help move the big bureaucratic beast forward embracing the new tools and process in the environment. Without everyone playing their part, change will be even slower and may fail to take hold.

CMS as an agency is making great strides moving forward in implementing and developing the agency digital services footprint. First they are introducing a number of open source software packages to the enterprise. Second they moving into the world of DevOps and agile development to speed the delivery of code to the enterprise. Finally, there is a move to educate the various stake holders about digital services. The steps are all key to ensure that the agency moves forward allowing for incorporation of digital services.

The first steps have been taken and moving forward will not be easy. There will be always be the naysayers or compliancy with the current processes. The agency is moving slowly embracing digital services and the momentum must continue to push forward. Everyone must works together to ensure the momentum does not stop. At the end of the day there must be change and it is for the better.

Putting Us in Our Systems

Have you ever wondered why employees that use internal administrative systems are not asked what they need from the system or even better want they want from it.  I wonder about it a lot and fortunately I find myself in a position that I can influence change.  Even better, I am about to complete the DITAP course and now I know how I can influence change.  At my agency, it seems internal systems used by employees are built based on what the administrators of a program need and what they think the users of the system need.  The requirements from the program administrators are communicated to developers via lengthy requirements documents.  They think they know everything the system needs to do and even try to predict the future as to what the system will need to do two years after implementation.  The system is implemented never to be thought of again until changes are made to laws, policies, or statements made by leadership.  I wonder what life at my agency would look like if rather than using a lengthy waterfall approach we used a more agile methodology and put a minimal viable product in the hands of users and adjust based on user feedback.   There is plenty of focus on public facing IT systems my agency provides and the different ways the public interacts with the services.  The internal systems used by employees every day that always seem to be forgotten.  

So how do we go about influencing change?  I truly believe the IT development team knows there is a better way to put great products in the hands of the end user, products that are simple and intuitive that meet their needs. I plan to modify the way we think about developing our systems by educating them on the digital services playbook and ensuring they adhere to plays 1, 2, 3, and 4 of Digital Services playbook.  We should focus on these plays every time we are asked to create a new system or modify an existing system. My real challenge is getting buy in from non-IT professionals within the program office.  We need to transform the way we do business and identify a true product owner that focuses on how well the service meets the needs of its users. They need to be educated that lengthy requirements documents are a thing of the past and that perfection should not get in the way of releasing working code.  Let’s face it, releasing a system that meets their needs and never thinking about adding or removing features is a lot easier.  Let’s stop letting statements made by leadership in a meeting determine changes to our administrative systems, let’s hear from actual users and release features and improvements throughout the year based on their feedback.  We need to start looking at metrics and user stories to identify pain points in the current way users interact with the system and prioritize them to help influence change. Let’s use the voice of the many so we can put products in the hands of the users that are simple and intuitive enough that users succeed the first time, without a 50 page user manual.  Let’s face it, the average employee can’t find the user manual and if they do, who has time to read a 50 page manual especially when it’s likely outdated with old screen shots that create more confusion.

The first step is getting a product owner that realizes these are OUR systems, the employees that use them every day, and they should have a say in them!

The Evolution of Digital Services and Jelly Beans

“You can tell a lot about a fellow’s character by his way of eating jellybeans. ”

―  Ronald Reagan

The most anticipated and often dreaded moment had finally arrived.  I had woken up on Easter morning and been allowed that elusive glimpse of my colorful and candy-filled holiday basket.  The thrill of the unknown filled my cells and I squirmed up on my toes to get a better look at the basket on top of the buffet.  Which one was mine of the four?  The one with the Barbie, or the one with the coloring books?  Each had an identical thick molded chocolate bunny that I knew would take me over a year to finish as it got stowed away in the deep freezer of our basement after the holiday, but really, who cared?  Everything from my vantage point looked good so my hopes were high.  Reluctantly I went to eat my cereal and then get ready for Easter Mass.  Only after we all got back from church and the grandparents were safely ensconced on the sofas could we sisters take a deep dive into candy paradise under the indulgent eyes of our family.  It seemed like hours until I was able to dive through the plastic rainbow colored grass to seize the prizes buried beneath.  What is that one?!  Oh!  A Malted ball which quickly transforms itself into a white lipstick once licked and applied to my mouth.  Leaving the sticky licked off outer shell on the side I plunge my hand back in again and come up with…oh no…please no.  The dreaded jelly beans.  Plastering an oh-so-thankful look on my face, I turn my white malted-ball smile up at my parents and pretend ecstasy as I pop three plump jelly beans in my mouth and chew.  I continue to peruse my basket with the coloring books and happily see that the rest of it contains more chocolate than jelly and a new box of crayons.  Perhaps next year I’ll get a Barbie like my sisters, but for now I bite off the ear of my solid chocolate bunny and covertly hand my Dad a handful of jelly beans.

I’ve shared this story with you while I pop Starburst jelly beans into my mouth knowing that you’ll wonder what metamorphous happened to change the child who hated jelly beans into an adult who willingly eats them.  Scratch that.  SCARFS them.  Well it’s simple really.  Gallstones.  Diagnosed a month ago, I now have to forgo fatty foods, fried delights and chocolate.  So, I’ve turned my attention to gourmet jelly beans in the hope that it can replace what my taste buds yearn for…chocolate.

Just don’t make me eat the boring ones!

Very similar to my career as a contracting official in the federal government, the evolution of the jelly bean has been slow to come to fruition.  You could say that I had to live a lot of different career lives to get to where I am now, and you can say the same for jelly beans.  Essentially the same item at its core, a jelly bean has evolved from a low-cost penny candy confection to a gourmet obsession.  They come in all kinds of flavors and have had a remarkable history just like my career life and the evolution and life of digital services, for example.

Right now I’m at the tail end of my digital services training and believe that my skill-set has improved by the information I’ve gathered during the course.  I’ve already started mentoring and sharing information about digital services with a confidence that I didn’t believe was possible.  I jump into procurements using agile methodologies and easily explain how to approach the decision on whether waterfall methods are more appropriate for a procurement, or if agile is a better fit.  I can talk someone through a two-phase approach and share examples to help them understand its applicability.  I know that my agency will use more digital services in the future, but that more importantly, it will apply them with intelligence and test, test, test.

Back in the mid-1800’s a Boston confectionery owned named William Schrafft started selling jelly beans, a small bean shaped sugar candy with a thick gel interior.  In 1861 he urged people to send his jelly beans to soldiers during the Civil War, and the small candy rapidly gained in popularity.  It was not until July 5, 1905, that jelly beans were mentioned in the Chicago Daily News. The advertisement publicized bulk jelly beans sold by volume for nine cents per pound, according to the book The Century in Food: America’s Fads and Favorites. Most historians contend that jelly beans were first associated with celebrations of Easter in the United States sometime during the 1930s due to their egg-like shape.

In United States slang during the 1910s and early 1920s, a “Jellybean” or “Jelly-Bean” was a young man who dressed stylishly but had little else to help him impress the world, similar to the older terms dandy and fop.  When Beatle mania broke out in 1963, fans of The Beatles in the US pelted the band with jelly beans similar to fans in the UK who threw the British candy Jelly Babies at George Harrison who reportedly liked eating them.  He later wrote a letter to fans which was published in a London paper, begging them to stop.

For those of you who like Jelly Belly beans, which were introduced in 1976, the original eight flavors were Very Cherry, Root Beer, Cream Soda, Tangerine, Green Apple, Lemon, Licorice and Grape.  Personally I’m a huge fan of Bubble Gum and Tootie Fruitie but my older sister would walk on glass for Buttered Popcorn which I think is disgusting.  Today the jelly bean has become both a gourmet snack and retains the popularity of yesteryears via the cheap bags on grocery store shelves or dollar stores.  Those bags make me shudder and quickly walk away in case they jump into my basket and make their way back to my house.  Give me Sour Patch or Starburst jelly beans and I’ll be happy, but please, don’t ask me to eat an old-style jelly bean, especially a licorice flavored one.

Much can be said about the evolution of digital services compared to jelly beans.  You have your old-school fans of waterfall methodology and the millennial wave (or pretenders like myself) who happily jump on the agile wave.  Similar to my abhorrence to the regular jelly bean, many contracting officials would rather not have to test agile methodologies and will cautiously sit back to wait until the contracting world at large embraces it before they too jump into the fray.  How will I help?  Simple.  I will stash a bag of Jelly Belly’s in my purse and make an appointment to chat about my agile testing results.  Don’t like that Toasted Coconut flavor?  Try the Green Apple instead.  Trust me…it’s the same thing, just a different perspective.

How to Learn Things the Hard Way

I learn everything the hard way! My most valuable lessons are born out of mistakes. Everything I do now is a little bit better because I did it a little bit worse the first time.

How do I know that dishwashing soap is not a viable substitute for dishwasher detergent? Because I experienced a kitchen full of suds! How do I know that paying attention to NAICS codes and coordinating with the SBA are important? Because I had the SBA cancel an award leading to a contractor flying to CMS from Texas trying to figure out how to restate their earnings. And on top of that, I had to find a replacement company that was 8(a) qualified under the appropriate NAICS codes.

Another great example is knowing that evaluation factors should be tailored to the needs and requirements of the program office. I now know, understanding such a thing is done by talking to program office counterparts and learning about what I am buying. I know this well now because I once used stock evaluation factors and the technical evaluation panel expressed that they could not evaluate the things that actually made a difference. All this catch up work because I used a one size fits all solution.

Like a young child’s curiosity stemming from new found awareness you may ask…Where do lessons come from?

Let me provide several possible resources:

·         GAO decision precedent

·         Good old-fashioned experience

·         Talk to other people

Valuable mistakes have been documented in GAO decisions. Thousands of useful precedent decisions provide us a bountiful harvest of lessons. Like a peach tree in summer these lessons are weighing down the branches of the internet just waiting to be plucked and consumed.

Sometimes the experience of digging in and getting dirty are the best teachers. Lessons from actual mistakes and real experience are the lessons that are truly grasped and remembered becoming valuable tools moving forward.

Human interaction is a good stop in any research you are doing. If you have not done something there is probably someone who has that you can talk to or read about. They can give you insight into the mistakes they have made and how to fix them so you can benefit from their learning experience.

We are all able to help our agency become a learning organization. Continuous learning cycles improve any process and can make acquisitions better each time. Having the patience to learn things the hard way is something to strive for as I implement the lessons learned through experience and share the methods and resources to learn quickly through mistakes.

Live the Future Today

When Walt Disney opened Disneyland on July 17, 1955 he gave the world a great gift, a brand new one of a kind park where children and adults could have fun together.  He had a dream and never veered from accomplishing his goal.  It went in unexpected directions over the course of many years but in the end he achieved his goal. 

“Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world.”

— Walt Disney

Within his park Disney developed five different themed lands.  These included Main Street USA., Adventureland, Frontierland, Fantasyland, and Tomorrowland.  Disney wanted to capture his futurist views by showing park guests what the future could possibly look like.  In a way he was educating the public about the great advancements of mankind and showing them what could be coming in the near future.

“Tomorrow can be a wonderful age. Our scientists today are opening the doors of the space age to achievements that will benefit our children and generations to come. The Tomorrowland attractions have been designed to give you an opportunity to participate in adventures that are a living blueprint of our future.”

— Walt Disney

I believe that this is something that we should all strive for in every aspect of our lives, and that includes our careers. The training that has been provided in the Digital IT Acquisition Professional (DITAP) program has been about changing the way we do things.  Don’t be afraid to try something new as it could have tremendous results in the future.  I hope to be my own personnel Walt Disney as I progress in my career in a post DITAP world. We discussed in the last classroom session what a future state could look like and they were all very good ideas, maybe a little over zealous at time. But if we follow the lead of Walt Disney that has to be only the beginning.  We cannot accept a world where nothing is changing as the future is always in motion.  We have to grab ahold of the changes and do what we can to help usher them through.  

This future state would be a place where we are completing our acquisitions in a much quicker manner.  We would be working smarter and not harder.  We would have accurate data which leads to fewer and quicker meetings.  If the data is correct we won’t have to spend as much time explaining the results.  The requirements are not placed on the vendors, instead they are telling us how to get to our Tomorrowland.  This represents our own personal dream of a Disneyland.

“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”

— Walt Disney

This sums up perfectly where we find ourselves after participating in this training for the last 6 months.  We have talked about what the changes could mean but now it’s time to start implementing them.  The agile methodology is very intriguing and has been proven over and over again, yet we get pushback when we first bring it up.  We need to present this idea to our customers as an untapped potential.  Using sprints to complete work is in many ways a much safer way to complete work then the old waterfall method.  The Walt Disney Company applies this today with their ride development.  Whether it is in the total design of a new ride or in the updates made over the years to existing rides.  They take it one step at a time, and when that step is completed in a satisfactory manner they move on.  If we take our planned future state, or Tomorrowland, and break it up into small manageable chunks we will be able to achieve our desired results.

“When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionable.”

— Walt Disney

I hope to be a real beacon of light when it comes to leading this change.  The biggest problem that occurs when you are trying to bring about change is to become discouraged.  When this happens we tend to back away from the proposed change and just accept that the change is too difficult and that the current way of doing things is good enough.  We can’t allow ourselves to fall into this trap going forward.  We have to be willing to push forward and sing the praises of the agile process.  We must always present the wins that have occurred as a result of the change.  Presenting the wins that have occurred in our agency will be even more effective.  If the snowball starts to roll and we are willing to support it as it goes then there is nothing that can stop the momentum as it makes its way to its next stop, Tomorrowland.

Our next stop is Tomorrowland, where our organization has evolved into a better tomorrow.

Evolution

My capabilities working for the Government has evolved over the years. I transferred to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) from the Department of the Army in 2010. I went from buying mass amounts of IT hardware to purchasing IT development services. Initially it was difficult to understand what I was purchasing, but as the days, months, years went on it started to click. I learned about agile development in 2013 from a CMS program office in charge of website development. I was supporting a significant amount of their contracts as a contract specialist and became aware of some of the agile development concepts. I also became aware that our contracts were not successful and costing the Government millions of dollars.

We had a time and materials contract for website development that included a statement of work. The statement of work was not written well and we were constantly required to modify the contract to add more resources to support the ongoing development. The contract exploded, the quality of the deliverables were declining and it was clear the contract had to be structured and managed differently.

When I became a contracting officer in it was time to re-compete many of their requirements. I began to work with the program office to structure our contract to better support the agile development services. We moved from drafting statements of work to drafting statements of objectives. The contracts that were previously time & materials or cost reimbursable were now structured as firm-fixed-price per sprint.

We also began to procure the services differently. I remember as a contract specialist sitting in the lobby waiting for offerors to deliver their proposals. Hard copies, often 12 binders a piece, thousands of pages to review. Nightmare. We transitioned to reducing the amount paperwork requested from offerors and breaking the requirements into two phases. We also incorporated a design challenge as a key evaluation factor. We became more efficient. The evaluation panel was able to see the offeror’s approach in real time rather than reading about it in a binder.

The resulting contracts were a success. The contract we awarded was structured to support the work rather than get in the way. I think back to the previous contracts and all the time we spent making modifications to the statements of work and “patching holes”. In the first couple years of the new award we only had to complete a contract modification once! It was a success.

We applied our knowledge and lessons learned to other programs. I was put in charge of competing and awarding an agile development BPA in the spring of 2016 which was a huge success (so successful that they assigned me to compete and award another similar BPA in 2019). We were able to modularize our requirements and rapidly execute orders for development.

Over the years I have talked with many of my colleagues about some of the concepts and lessons learned that I have experienced applying digital service methodologies. I often receive requests for examples or templates. Each time I look them I find mistakes or identify areas that can be improved in the future. There is plenty of room for improvement.

The DITAP Certification program has further solidified and advanced my understanding and knowledge. As individuals continue to take this program, the Agency will benefit and progress. We will all be able to work together and build off of our experiences to help support the Government’s digital transformation mission. We will evolve.

Iteration 5A: Blogging Activity Change Challenges Kristopher Cyrus