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The Need for IT Transformation in Government
Over the last two decades, key market forces including the pandemic have accelerated digital transformation for the future of government resulting in a shift from an era of static technology to one that is more fluid. Governments are now challenged to respond to future crises and customer expectations at speed and at scale by enhancing agility and resilience across applications, people and processes. State and Local Governments need to proactively approach today’s transformation initiatives with greater connectedness and agility in order to deliver sustainable change.
Since 2001, Agile methodologies have helped revolutionize software development. Agencies are faced with constantly changing requirements, many new technology options, and the need to collaborate both externally with the public and internally with other agencies to enable resilient communities and provide their constituents with impactful experiences.
Effective IT transformations depend on end-to-end connection to improve operations, become more data driven, avoid unnecessary investments and deliver greater impact. The iterative development framework of Agile focuses on continuous improvement through small and frequent product releases. With Agile, public agencies are empowered to make improvements and offer new features faster – opposite to the long development cycles of the past.
Agile vs Waterfall
Before Agile, much of the public sector used the Waterfall approach to software development and testing. This methodology was process and documentation heavy, and followed a defined sequence of steps from start to finish. Waterfall was not adaptable, and any changes (in customer demand or market requirements) required a complete analysis, updated requirements, series of approvals, etc.
This linear, sequential waterfall approach has proven unsuccessful on many public sector development projects by going over budget, causing major delays and missed deadlines and by simply not meeting the project requirements.
Unlike Waterfall projects that are limited by process and documentation, Agile projects can output higher quality products on time while easily adapting to the change in stakeholder needs. Due to its flexible and collaborative approach, Agile minimizes risk while delivering a better and more relevant product. Agile iterations happen in time-boxed sprints that result in a working product and new features at the end of each sprint.
The stats are in and they all point to a high success rate with Agile.
One such 2022 article shows that:
- Agile projects are nearly 1.5X more successful than waterfall projects.
- Around 80% of federal IT projects have chosen to adopt Agile.
- Agile projects have a 64% success rate, whereas projects under the competing methodology known as waterfall only have a 49% success rate.
- After adopting Agile, companies have experienced an average 60% growth in revenue and profit.
Why VIP (Visionary Integration Professionals)?
At VIP, our personal mission is our customers’ success. Since our inception in 1996, we’ve been at the forefront of integrating technology solutions to optimize business performance. We’ve seen the transformations and evolved ourselves to align to market and customer needs.
VIP’s proven Agile/scrum approach allows mission critical technology solutions to be implemented within an accelerated timeline. VIP evaluates each opportunity as unique and has teamed with a variety of software partners on more than 1,300 government projects to:
- Implement solutions to maintain and adjust functionality to meet ever-changing business needs.
- Implement solutions to fulfill time-sensitive legislative State mandates.
- Replace a legacy system with a new one.
- Consolidate multiple legacy systems and business processes into a single workflow.
Our systematic and repeatable system integration process, coupled with our time-tested delivery methodologies ensure we successfully deploy applications that meet our customers’ performance expectations.
Our guiding framework, VIPDeliver, aligns with modern implementation best practices to reliably deliver projects on-time and within budget. The methodology fosters collaboration between project stakeholders to identify and mitigate project risks, while supporting timely and accurate communication and decision-making throughout the engagement.
VIPDeliver is a proven, robust, and flexible methodology. It’s tailored for government projects, whether a full system upgrade/ replacement or a module add-on, to help maximize project success and deliver measurable results. VIPDeliver includes five stages for iterative development:
For public sector and technology leaders striving towards greater business agility and performance at scale, VIP delivers purposeful integration resulting in digital transformation and sustainable change.
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