Team Six Blog

Having managed dozens of projects over a period of 20 years, it is the opinion of the author that a there are two basic realities that must be embraced to fully benefit from Agile: “Something has to give” - Planning is important, but all successful projects leverage opportunities for elasticity, collaboration and resilience.  “Sharing is caring” - Sharing objectives and risk between a vendor and a client usually facilitate “win/win” relationships leading to great software. We believe that the best way for the Government and vendors to appropriately share risk under an Agile Development framework is to move away from a Fixed Firm Price/ Fixed Firm Scope system altogether, and instead move towards a model where Government buys fixed capacity in advance from a company (i.e. a team of a fixed size) and then assigns that team with tasks as projects arise. Read more in our new white paper  - A Discussion of Agile ProgramProcurement. 

Introduction Agile processes like Scrum, XP, SAFe, and Kanban have proven to be very effective at delivering software in a more collaborative, transparent, and predictable fashion than traditional waterfall processes. However, Agile practices, by themselves, are not sufficient to address the risks that impact most medium-to-large software projects, and in particular are often not well suited to delivering on federal government projects, which often have a structure - such as fixed scope and delivery timelines - that is not easily or naturally accommodated by Agile. To fill the gap between what Agile does well at the team level, and the risk management requirements of medium-to-large projects, we have developed the Agile Risk Management (ARM) Framework . Read the white paper here http://media.wix.com/ugd/badbdf_0de889d755cb48b18cd4cd414702e0ff.pdf