Case Study: Government Agency Boosts Agility With Modern Planning

In our personal and our professional lives, technological innovations keep coming at an increasingly rapid rate. However, if you’re involved with technology planning and funding in a large government agency, you may likely feel as though you’re stuck in the 1990s.

In many ways, teams in government agencies are still working with a traditional capital planning and investment control model that emerged when client/server computing was all the rage. These legacy approaches are inefficient and wasteful and are fundamentally misaligned with the modern technologies and realities of today’s public sector agencies.

In my role, I get the opportunity to work with leaders at many of the largest government agencies. I’ve seen first hand the challenges that legacy approaches have been presenting, and I’ve also seen how a new team-focused approach to planning can yield impressive results. In the following section, I’ll outline one recent example.

How one agency enhanced agility, advanced modernization

In recent years, I’ve worked with technology leaders at a large government agency that provides a range of entitlement services to citizens. Today, the agency has 60,000 employees.

The leadership team has embarked on an ambitious, agency-wide effort to modernize and optimize its technology investments and usage. Since 2016, the organization has scaled its agile development, moving from having 10 teams to more than 50. As part of this move, they’ve made the transition from having a project focus to focusing on products.

They reoriented their approach, and started using products and product management in everything they did, including their investments, how they did their work, and how they were organized to do work. This approach is well-aligned with Agile. 
In addition, the organization has also started to employ a planning approach that is centered on teams rather than projects.

They’ve looked at modernization in a holistic way, and people have been a big part of their focus. They’ve built funding and plans around teams. This approach changed how teams view their work, and ultimately enabled them to operate more effectively. Now, rather than taking a project or technology view, they’re focusing on key outcomes.

By aligning around products and focusing on funding teams rather than projects, the organization has made significant strides in its modernization initiatives.

Conclusion

Virtually everything about technology has changed in recent years. Everything it seems, except the way teams in public sector agencies plan and manage investments. By employing a modern, team-oriented approach to planning, your organization can begin to align funding approaches with modern agency and technological realities. In the process, you can achieve significant improvements in organizational agility, efficiency, and performance.

To learn more, be sure to review our white paper, Three Pillars of Successful Public Sector Planning, released in 2024. Read this paper and find out why this new framework is now so vital, learn about the three pillars of success, and get practical tips on getting started.