| | November 20168CIOReviewIT Transformation at EPAThe government is full of smart, talented people who have chosen to forego the potential financial rewards of the private sector because they believe deeply in public service and the mission of their agency. We often criticize government employees for their inability to get things done, while failing to recognize the tight bureaucratic constraints that they must work within. This article will discuss some of those constraints and the way EPA is using agile development practices to deliver transformational results. The adoption of agile practice and the associated changes to EPA's development culture have enabled EPA's IT teams to deliver solutions that meet user needs faster and at a lower cost than with traditional methods.Software development in much of the government still follows a model that has proven ineffective at delivering quality results or low cost and, as a result, has been losing favor in the private sector for a while. This is the classic `waterfall' software development model: In this model we define all of our requirements up front and, in the government, typically hire a contractor to build exactly what was defined. The product is built, tested and delivered with little stakeholder or customer interaction. This methodology is ineffective because it's virtually impossible to know everything we want and all the issues that might be encountered in a complex system before we even start building that system. We end up spending too much time making plans that may be meaningless shortly after development starts, paying the vendor too much to cover the cost of uncertainty and taking too long to deliver a solution that rarely meets user needs. Highly defined processes, enforced by a number of oversight bodies, have prolonged use of the waterfall model. Waterfall has also persisted for so long because government procurement processes require a complete plan years before a line of code is written. It takes substantial will to move away from a model that is reinforced by every control in place in the system in which you work. The prevalence of waterfall has been perpetuated by an extremely risk-averse working environment. It is ironic, that our government, an enterprise whose creation was the ultimate risk, has become so risk averse. But it is not surprising. As oversight has increased, so has the perceived cost of failure and, therefore, our desire to know exactly what we're building and what it costs up front. We IN MYBy Ann Dunkin, CIO, U.S. Environmental Protection AgencyOPINIONAnn Dunkin
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