Compared to waterfall development, agile projects are far more likely to deliver on time, on budget, and having met the customer’s need. Despite this broad adoption, industry standards remain elusive due to the nature of agility—there is no single set of best practices.
The purpose of this playbook is to educate new adopters of the agile mindset by curating many of the good practices that we’ve found work for teams at Booz Allen. As we offer our perspective on implementing agile in your context, we present many “plays”—use cases of agile practices that may work for you, and which together can help weave an overall approach for tighter delivery and more satisfied customers.
We’ve come to these themes as software practitioners living in the trenches and delivering software on teams using increasingly modern methods, and in support of dozens of customers across the U.S.
Government and the international commercial market.
- Agile is a mindset. We view agile as a mindset—defined by values, guided by principles, and manifested through emergent practices—and actively encourage industry to embrace this definition. Indeed, agile should not simply equate to delivering software in sprints or a handful of best practices you can read in a book. Rather, agile represents a way of thinking that embraces change, regular feedback, value-driven delivery, full-team collaboration, learning through discovery, and continuous improvement. Agile techniques cannot magically eliminate the challenges intrinsic to high-discovery software development. But, by focusing on continuous delivery of incremental value and shorter feedback cycles, they do expose these challenges as early as possible, while there is still time to correct for them. As agile practitioners, we embrace the innate mutability of software and harness that flexibility for the benefit of our customers and users. As you start a new project, or have an opportunity to retool an existing one, we urge you to lean to agile for its reduced risk and higher customer satisfaction.
- Flexibility as the standard, with discipline and intention. Booz Allen Systems Delivery uses a number of frameworks across projects, depending on client preferences and what fits best. We use Scrum, Kanban, waterfall, spiral, and the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), as well as hybrid approaches. But we embrace agile as our default approach, and Scrum specifically as our foundational method, if it fits the scope and nature of the work.
- One team, multiple focuses. Throughout this playbook, we explicitly acknowledge the symbiotic relationship between delivery (responsible for the “how”) and value (responsible for the “what”), and we use terms like “delivery team” and “value team” to help us understand what each team member’s focus may be. However, it’s crucial to consider that, together, we are still one team, with one goal, and we seek a common path to reach that goal.
- Work is done by teams. Teams are made of humans. A team is the core of any agile organization. In a project of 2 people or 200, the work happens in teams. And at the core of teams are humans. Just as we seek to build products that delight the humans who use them, we seek to be happier, more connected, more productive humans at work.
- As we move faster, we cannot sacrifice security. According to the U.S. Digital Service, nearly 25% of visits to government websites are for nefarious purposes. As we lean toward rapid delivery and modern practice, we must stay security-minded. Security cannot be a phase-gate or an afterthought; we must bring that perspective into our whole team, our technology choices, and our engineering approach.
Booz Allen provides a full-stack enterprise systems delivery capability and provides high-performing, cross-functional agile teams. We engage and lead across the full lifecyle: from user research and human-centered design through technical implementation and help-desk support. We employ over 3,500 software development staff across a variety of disciplines.
We approach agility with responsibility. Booz Allen maintains a current Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) for Development (CMMI-DEV) Maturity Level 3 appraisal rating for its IT Team Development Organization. Initially achieved in September 2005 through an appraisal led by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) (now known as the CMMI Institute), this rating was most recently refreshed in October 2014 by an external appraiser. The firm has completed 16 consecutive successful CMM/CMMI appraisals.
