Finally, the Federal Government pledges official support for Agile
While the private sector has been benefiting from Agile thinking for at least the last 10 years, the Australian Federal Government is now officially backing the use of Agile to reduce the risk of "catastrophic" IT project failures.
Minister Bill Shorten champions the INVEST model for government projects, underscoring the benefits of smaller, self-sufficient initiatives. By focusing on projects within the single-digit million cost bracket, the government can rapidly achieve a minimum viable product, ensuring faster returns on investment. Shorten's approach contrasts with previous high-cost, high-risk IT endeavours, emphasising early testing and technology reuse to speed up value realisation.
The first idea is not always the best idea!
To integrate some tangible, core principles that elevate government projects , we’d like to highlight actionable steps that can be taken to support Agile methodologies early in our discussion - and trust us, despite what you and your team might want to happen, the first or most popular idea is not always the best idea.
1. Develop government agency strategies based on evidence of the customer/citizen experience and goals of the departments. This aligns with Shorten's view that for a project to be successful, it must be rooted in a strategy informed by data insights, regardless of the number of vendors involved.
2. Encourage divergent creative thinking: Allowing a mix of stakeholders to engage in the ideation process will ensure a complex mix of solutions that can be reviewed and considered. By breaking projects into manageable discrete units, there's a greater chance of success and innovation.
3. Invest in a framework that supplies seed funding at early-stage discovery, before funding alpha and beta products. This means small packages of investments can drive the early testing before big bang funding, echoing Shorten's emphasis on early testing and technology reuse.
4. Ensure the project and product teams align their work to an evidence-backed strategy and that they report on progress, success measures, and benefits. Ensuring we reduce operational costs of our government departments resonates with the goal of achieving more with less financial risk.
“We can’t afford any more IT failures in Government”
We agree, Bill. We simply cannot afford to have “catastrophic” fails when delivering solutions in government. Given that almost all government agencies would have engaged with Agile via external consultants and contractors, gaining ‘buy-in’ is not likely to cause a disruption.
And it would almost certainly reduce reliance and lock-in to proprietary vendor ecosystems – which often comes with a hefty price tag (e.g., Licence fees for comprehensive software stacks which are only being used to solve one organisational challenge). But if we want to support an emphasis on interoperability, we must first find a compromise between spending an entire IT budget with one or two vendors, and breaking projects into such tiny components that we are unable to click the journey map back together.
The proof is in the data
A true Agile purist will tell you that for Agile to work, you must be almost sanctimoniously devout to the methodology.
Where it gets difficult is changing the mindsets of those individuals who do the work. In theory, we know that to master anything, we need to break the challenge up into chunks. But the concept of learning through failure makes people uncomfortable. In reality, we humans just want to see the pretty, and importantly, finished thing.
So how do we reconcile utilising Agile to break projects down and make it easier to produce an MVP, and provide a seamless end user experience without compromising connected service experiences?
At Arteri, we say you achieve it by providing demonstrative and traceable proof from the horse's mouth – government ‘customers’. The staff who interact with the solutions provided, and the community that benefits from government services. These are the perspectives that need to govern the end-to-end customer experience – not greater investment in point solutions, which silo solutions and do not create reusable components for swift deployment across government. For this to work you need a holistic view of the challenge.
Shorten’s announcement also clarified “We should be able to deliver [projects] earlier or later than planned, or indeed cancel it without adverse effects on other projects”. Pivoting because of changing circumstances is not a fail, rather a reflection of business acumen and respect for taxpayer money. Recognise when the solution we have chosen isn’t going to be fit for purpose, aligning the strategy with the real-life problem, instead of a method, an ideal or a technology solution. The problem doesn’t change – the response does.
How do we empower agencies to meet challenges successfully?
In his statement, Shorten said “People fall in love with a particular form of technology, and then we spend the rest of our time reinvesting in that tech as opposed to the original problem it was solving or the original benefit that we were seeking.”
Again, we couldn’t agree more. Arteri’s focus on empowering agencies with data and skills supports Shorten’s reimagined view that the government should have the technology skills to run delivery and execution.
In an earlier blog post we unpacked the concept that those accessing government services should be viewed as government ‘customers’. This way of thinking leads us to treat a government customer the way a company treats their customer – as intrinsically valuable and essential for success. With many of the most successful companies on the planet deploying quickly and often, it is a smart decision to use Agile with 'in-house' teams, but one that comes with a caution.
The method used to deploy a solution should never inform the solution. It is only by collecting real data from real people and analysing the challenges they face that government services can hope to have life changing impact on their customers.
