Agencies like outsourcing scrum teams for the flexibility, but they continue to pass through legal, regulatory, and policy requirements to the vendor en masse. This is a mistake.
Author Archives: Waldo Jaquith
Org. chart chasms cause custom software project failures.
Decision makers are out of touch with key constituencies, preventing them from grasping the underlying need and from controlling the work being done.
Beyond the stoplight chart: How to perform Agile oversight at scale.
Overseeing software project requires replacing memos with demos. Doing that for a few projects is one thing, but a different approach entirely is required to scale that up.
Preventing lousy vendors from bidding on your custom software project.
Agencies can ward off lousy software developers and attract better ones by owning copyright, publishing open source, and issuing smaller contracts.
Publishing your agency’s software as open source puts you at a major advantage.
There are some enormously compelling arguments in favor of agencies preemptively publishing source code, which results in reduced cost, increased trust, and higher-quality results.
Budgeting for software projects in “scrum team years.”
Scrum-team years give program teams, budgeting, procurement, and oversight a common currency of understanding.
How an agency principal should oversee a major custom software project.
When an agency principal lacks the knowledge to understand and control major software projects, they are handing their control of the agency to some consulting firm’s project manager.
“Agile” versus “agile.”
When writing about Agile software development, I always capitalize the word. This isn’t an affectation, but instead an effort to communicate an important distinction.
The work before the work: what agencies need to do before bringing on an Agile vendor.
An Agile vendor team cannot be successful unless the agency has prepared for them.
“Customized COTS” is the worst of both.
It’s a tar pit, a way to pay for extensive renovations to software that you do not own, and now feel that you cannot leave, because the sunk cost fallacy is real.