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Is California Ready for Agile Development?

Experts agree that California lacks expertise and faces a culture clash, but officials have much to gain by moving forward.

One could argue that California is diving into the deep end in its attempt to use agile development instead of traditional “waterfall” project principles that are much more common in the public sector. Executives leading the Child Welfare Services — New System (CWS-NS) project are eager to work iteratively on small modules that can be put into the hands of state and county workers in a matter of months instead of the several years it takes for a “big bang” release. Project managers hope the approach will be less risky and more responsive to the changing needs of customers.

But agile development truly is a sea change for the state’s people and processes. California has completed hundreds of projects where every detail of a procurement is written and defined up front, and only then would system development proceed; meanwhile, the state has used agile processes — focusing on delivering workable products at the beginning — only in small pockets within a few departments and typically for smaller deployments. It raises a simple question: Is California ready to do this?

The answer — like those to so many complicated questions — is nuanced, and probably not a concrete yes or no. The state knows it needs to develop more expertise in-house on agile among the state workforce and is taking steps to make that happen. And the rules, regulations and processes that govern procurement in the public sector might be stacked against agile. But the fact that California is moving toward agile could be enough in itself, and a lack of skilled practitioners shouldn’t be an insurmountable obstacle, proponents of agile say.

“Does California have the people it needs to do agile? The answer is that they’re aware that they don’t, or that they don’t have enough of them,” said Dan Hon, the content director of Code for America, the national nonprofit that is advising California on how to implement agile for CWS-NS. “The only reason why they feel able to proceed is because a viable alternative has been presented to them with the appropriate level of support, reassurance and teamwork going on.” Hon is temporarily attached to the federal government’s Administration on Children, Youth and Families, which is assisting California on CWS-NS. The U.S. government’s 18F service delivery group also is advising.

“As an external observer, hardly any governments, California included, have enough internal capability right now to successfully execute upon [agile],” Hon said. “What I’ve definitely found is that there certainly are people who can execute this, but it hasn’t been required to be a core competency, so then you wouldn’t expect the capacity to exist in the first place."

The good news is state officials seem to be aware that California agencies and departments need to build competency and do so quickly. John Boule, director of the state’s Office of Systems Integration, said during a Dec. 4, 2015, bidder conference for CWS-NS that the state knows it needs to build skill sets and knowledge gaps within the government, and is working with federal partners at 18F to do that. The California Department of Technology recently began offering training courses on agile, lean development and scrum master certification for iterative development. “Competitive pressures demand that project teams use development methods that enable early achievement of value rather than the traditional approach that may require months or years before expected benefits are achieved,” the course description says.

California also knows it must adjust its contracting and regulatory processes. Alex Chin of the Department of Technology’s Statewide Technology Procurement Division said the state’s contract vehicles and terms and conditions were built for a waterfall methodology, so they must be changed. Chin said Dec. 4 there likely will be some stumbles and arguments along the way, but those contracts will be adjusted.

It’s a problem that’s not unique to California. “If you’re going to do these things really large, in an agile fashion, in a lot of cases the No. 1 blocker in government is the fact that their entire procurement model is based on a vendor-customer relationship when the lowest bid wins,” said Ryan Martens, founder and CTO of Rally, an agile development software provider.

Last winter Jim Butler, the state’s chief procurement officer, also said California likely will need to modify its rules for follow-on contracting in order to support new procurement and system development models.


This story appears in the spring 2016 issue of Techwire magazine.

Matt Williams was Managing Editor of Techwire from June 2014 through May 2017.