Here's a quick synopsis of what panelists said about the topic during the California Technology Forum on Aug. 11.
Demonstration Opportunities
State agencies and departments are wary of project failure and the scrutiny that can bring, and agile could help vendors show they are capable of producing working software in small chunks. Demonstrating a capability can help instill confidence."The opportunity [from agile] first, is to demonstrate the ability that the vendor knows how to build software and do it in an agile way. Also to understand specifically what the state's needs are in terms of, 'We want to know what our users want.' We can demonstrate as a vendor we know how to talk to you, we know how to get that information," said Elizabeth Raley, a certified Scrum master and creator of the Agile Government Leadership organization.
In July the California Health and Human Services Agency selected 11 vendors to participate in a prequalified pool of agile developers that are eligible to work on the Child Welfare Services/Case Management System replacement and other projects. In order to qualify, firms had to develop a working prototype of open source software.
Forming Partnerships
Peter Kelly, deputy director of Child Welfare Digital Services at the Office of Systems Integration, said the needs to build up its in-house knowledge base around agile, and he said vendors have a role to play."I think, unfortunately, the state has outsourced a lot of its expertise over the last 30 years in certain areas. And a partnership with vendors is important because you can't know everything, and you shouldn't be expected to. But if you don't have core competencies in the software development space, then you don't know when you don't know enough when to bring in the right vendor at the right time," Kelly said.
California has been partnering with vendors in various ways in order to ramp up its capabilities to perform agile. The state has hired consultants to assess its current policies and processes in order support agile, and Kelly's organization has asked the vendor community for feedback on recent procurements for agile development services.
Ongoing Performance Evaluation
The past few years the state of California has expressed interest in developing a "vendor performance evaluation scorecard" that would track companies and be used as a scoring factor in future IT contracts.The pool of agile developers the state convened might lend itself to evaluation, too.
"That, I know, is something that has been challenging in the past when you get in partnerships that are harder to get out of as well. Having a pool means you're able to look at teams side by side and see how successful [they are]. You can look at velocity reports and all kinds of things that really have an apples-to-apples approach of how successful different teams are," Raley said.
California officials say they intend to refresh the pool of developers every six to 12 months as developers work on projects and show their capabilities.
Listen to the full panel discussion in the audio player below.
