Potomac Forum:
Agile and EVM Training Workshop Review

David Scott 08-14-2012

A few weeks ago, I had the opportunity to speak at the Potomac Forum workshop entitled "Agile and EVM Training: Putting the Pieces Together in the New Modular IT Development World". The conference was very well attended and included numerous presentations about implementing EVM on Agile development projects. If you are interested, head over to the event page and you can see exactly what went down at the workshop.

Throughout the conference, a couple of ‘ah hah’ moments occured to me that are worth sharing:

Federal Agencies and Agile Development

First, and this is becoming a hot topic - more and more Federal Agencies are using an Agile development methodology for large software development projects and other kinds of capital investment projects. One Navy contractor was using Agile on an entire ship building project.

Federal vs. Commercial Deployments

Second, Federal Agile projects are different then commercial organization deployments primarily because of the constraints related to OMB appropriations and the FAR. They span the spectrum between Civilian Agency level of effort and ANSI EVMS compliant DOD projects. The former has high level customer requirements, budget, and only plans 1 sprint at a time; the latter has very well defined customer requirements, plans all sprints, and ‘locks down’ requirements for 6 months at a time. However, they all have a common challenge in the need to measure long term productivity, forecast costs, and satisfy OMB/FAR reporting requirements.

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