Bringing Agility to Social Security
Weight of a nation
The Social Security Administration (SSA) is focused on delivering social security and disability benefits to citizens across the United States. The agency touches the lives of every man, woman, and child born or naturalized in the nation. That’s a big responsibility. To handle this responsibility effectively, SSA is home to numerous mission-critical technology solutions that enable employers, other Federal agencies, and citizens to access Social Security data in a timely manner with minimal downtime.
Venturing into the unknown
SSA has worked in a waterfall project management paradigm for most of its life, and due to the large number of technology solutions deployed across the agency, had to be careful with if and how the agency would go about making a structural change to delivering new technology. In 2014, as a response to the growing divide between business-as-usual at SSA and industry best practices for delivering technology solutions, SSA’s Chief Technology Officer decided to bring the agency into the 21st century through an org-wide Agile Transformation that would fundamentally change how its nearly 7,000 technologists deliver value to the American public.
Enter Iteurm
Iterum’s certified agile coaches and subject matter experts were brought in to enable the Agile Transformation effort by providing executive, project, and product team coaching and support. We worked closely with executives to help them realign their value-streams and understand the requisite organizational culture and behavioral change management that would have to take place in order for the Agile Transformation effort to be successful. We also worked hand-in-hand with product teams in ideation workshops to help them innovate around challenges that hampered progress. Additionally, we develop strategic and product roadmaps and tied them to sprint execution to ensure that strategic goals set by executives were addressed through initiatives designed by Product Managers and tactically executed by the newly formed agile teams. To top it off, we worked with the agency to enable technology adoption through designing and delivering VersionOne, Product Owner, and Agile team trainings.
Everyone wins
Through our Agile Transformation efforts, the client was able to release new and pre-existing solutions to their integration environment in one-quarter the time, realize a higher level of engagement and accountability on behalf of their employees, and supercharge the learning and development of their workforce. Employees were previously categorized as Developers, Testers, and Analysts, among other functions, that siloed their output. Through our technology adoption training efforts we helped train these employees to recognize themselves as capable of doing more than the specific job function that they were titled as, ultimately enabling employees to branch out and learn about other functions. This enabled employees to become truly cross-functional team members capable of plugging in to a myriad of tasks that they previously shied away from. Additionally, while many teams look at velocity to determine successful adoption and maturation of agility within their organization, we measured progress through proprietary and standardized agile maturity assessments as well as the rate of how many new project teams voluntarily elected to use the agency’s agile method over the previously prescribed waterfall method. All of this came together to demonstrate the impact that was made not only on how quickly technology solutions were delivered, but on the workforce that was delivering them as well.