Agile is a set of principles that can be successfully applied to any environment, industry or sector. There are many examples of government agencies using agile to implement software projects, modernize service delivery and streamline operations in complex environments. We have helped government agencies develop agility through an incremental approach to agile adoption that focuses on “doing agile” (practices & behaviors) and “being agile” (mindset and culture). It is important to start with a clear goal and focus, learn through experimentation and then expand to other areas.

Government agencies are faced with increasing demand, changing expectations, and constantly evolving requirements. Agility is an organization’s ability to adapt quickly, run efficiently and deliver better outcomes to customers and stakeholders. Agility requires a change in the way that you think, lead and work. We help agencies achieve agility by adopting lean and agile principles, providing clarity to purpose and intent, engaging customers and stakeholders, defining measurable outcomes, limiting work in progress and creating feedback systems for continuous improvement.

The foundation for getting started is to gain leadership support for the change and to develop an understanding of the agile principles. Once that is in place, we recommend taking an experimental approach to agility. First, identify the driving challenge, define the desired outcomes and select one or two changes to implement. Then, use those initial change experiments to gather feedback, make adjustments and decide what to work on next.

Leaders are choosing agile to solve significant organizational challenges because agile is an effective approach for making change in complex environments. Agile reduces risk, delivers value incrementally, creates feedback loops and unleashes the power of self-organizing teams. Here are some issues we work with agencies to address through the adoption of agile:

• • Increasing demand requires more efficiency and productivity

  • Working in silos with too many hand-offs and dependencies

  • Too much work in progress and a lack of focus

  • Unable to get things done quickly

  • Lack of staff engagement

  • Changing expectations of clients and staff

  • Lack of clarity and alignment to strategy

Adopting a new way of thinking and working is a journey and can be very challenging. It takes time to embrace the principles, change behaviors, adopt new mental models and mature to the level required for high-performance. Based on our experience, we see the following common mistakes and missteps in adopting agile:

• • Leaders don’t understand or support agile principles and practices

  • Not having enough agile knowledge and expertise to support the change

  • Focusing on “doing agile” (practices & behaviors) with little to no focus on “being agile” (mindset and culture)

  • Adopting agile in a silo – one team or area starts making changes without clear communication and coordination with other groups that are impacted

  • Not defining a clear vision, goals or strategy for the change to agile 

We help government agencies address these issues by building leadership buy-in, defining a strategy for agility, identifying the root causes of challenges and using lean change management to create sustainable and lasting change to the culture.

While it is true that agile has its roots with software teams, the principles of agile apply broadly to all types of government agency teams. We have successfully worked with business teams such as policy teams, operations teams, leadership teams, training teams and administrative teams to adopt agile principles and practices. It has been our experience that these non-IT teams have realized some of the greatest gains and improvement in outcomes.