How to Go Agile in State and Local Government: Scrum vs. PMBOK

In the past few years, as state and local governments sought to modernize and release more digital services to meet the needs of citizens during the coronavirus pandemic, they have embraced an agile approach to government service delivery.

In some cases, government agencies have partnered with nonprofit organizations such as Code for America to become nimbler in their development of government services.

“Adopting agile, iterative technology can solve some of government’s biggest challenges and have a transformative impact on people’s lives — building more equitable systems, improving outcomes and reducing the poverty gap,” Alexis Fernández Garcia, a senior program director of Code for America's social safety net portfolio, writes in a StateTech blog.

Agile methodologies have been on state and local governments’ radars for several years. A 2021 report from the IBM Center for the Business of Government explores how agencies have been using agile not just for software development but for a wide range of use cases.

Those include project management, human resources management, policymaking, and contracting and procurement. Agile builds and tests iteratively to ensure that what is developed is what the organization wants.

As agencies look to improve their development and delivery of government services to be more responsive to citizens’ needs, they will increasingly — but not exclusively — need to rely on agile approaches and frameworks such as scrum, experts say. At the same time, they face cultural and organizational hurdles to adopting agile methodologies.

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Diego Lo Giudice, vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says it’s important to align with the Agile Manifesto, or the statement of principles that make up the agile methodology, when thinking about how it could apply to government and how scrum fits into that.

For example, in agile, the highest priority is “to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software,” according to the Agile Alliance.

Another key principle is that agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.

Within agile, scrum should be seen as a framework geared toward change, Lo Giudice says. Scrum is a way for software development and other teams to execute and adhere to these principles.

“Scrum is about the way that a software team or a blended cross-functional team operates tactically” in day-to-day operations, says Mike Case, director of growth and delivery operations at Nava, a consultancy and public benefit corporation that works to make government services simple, effective and accessible. “How do they figure out how they’re going to prioritize and divvy up the tactical work at a task level?”

Scrum involves several key concepts, Lo Giudice and Case note, including ceremonies such as quick stand-up meetings to check in on the progress of work and ensuring that updates are focused on what team members need from each other and what the key impediments or blockers there are to progress.

Additionally, scrum is focused on autonomy for teams and delivering value for the business or agency. “It privileges communication between people” rather than one person writing a document that is handed over stating what the person requesting a project wants. In a traditional “waterfall” approach to project management, another person would read those requirements.

“Scrum says, sit down and work directly — face to face or through collaboration tools — and communicate,” Lo Giudice says. “It’s communication over contracts.”

Another key element of scrum is to focus on making progress in increments, or sprints. In a sprint, Case says, teams focus on “dividing projects up into smaller chunks so that you don’t have this one giant deliverable in four months; you have a lot of different two- or three-week sprints to break up the project and also assess your progress as you’re going along.”

During that cycle, teams will go through the analysis, design, coding and testing, operating in a fashion of continuous iteration and continuous delivery. This allows teams to start delivering features that are valuable instead of the full product, Lo Giudice says.

“Instead of thinking about the full product, they start thinking about smaller features that can be delivered and added over time to build the product,” he says. “Instead of taking four months and having a big deliverable after four months, you start delivering every two to four weeks.” 

In contrast to scrum sits the Project Management Institute’s Project Management Body of Knowledge, a project management framework that is more prescriptive than scrum. PMBOK emphasizes a significant amount of upfront planning and a high level of detail early on in the development process.

PMBOK defines roles more clearly, Lo Giudice says. It also emphasizes documentation as well as the role of the project manager, who is tasked with maintaining and updating project schedules. In scrum, there is no similar organization and updating of project schedules because teams are self-managed.

In the PMBOK approach, project managers interface with the business and stakeholders and report on the project status. The scrum approach is more transparent and everyone tends to know what is going on because they can look at the progress being made on sprints.

There is no one-size-fits all approach to government service delivery, Case says. In cases where there are strict timeline constraints mandated by a legislature, it may be more difficulty to apply a scrum framework. “You have to pick and choose depending on your requirements,” Case says.

Most government agencies have not full adopted scrum or PMBOK, Case says, “so, even if you’re fully committed to agile, you need to be able to translate and connect that to other methodologies being used in other dependent agencies or systems so that you’re not totally separated.” 

In government, where the creation and launch of new services has historically taken significantly longer than in the private sector, agile approaches allow government software developers, project managers and program specialists the opportunity to iterate more quickly, pivot on projects and get new services out to citizens faster.

Case says it lets them “see the progress, not hear theoretical updates about percent complete, but to see, ‘What does that front-end user interface look like today? OK, we understand it’s not done, but great, you’re heading in that direction. We expect you’re implementing user research that we hadn’t considered. Great, keep going.’”

Agile allows government officials involved in policy creation to get involved in the development of services and make comments that can be easily incorporated into software or service development, Case says. “And if you’re waiting until the end to see working software, you’re more likely as a policy or program expert to hear, ‘Well, that would be too hard now to change or implement,’” Case adds.  

Lo Giudice says that with agile, government officials “will find out sooner rather than later” whether services are shaping up as expected. “You can make mistakes. And the mistakes that you’ll make are much smaller because you’re breaking the problem of it to sub-problems,” he adds. “You won’t find out six months later that this is not what the business wanted.”

LEARN MORE: Find out about how state and local agencies are moving forward on agile.

While state and local government agencies have made progress in adopting agile methodologies and frameworks such as scrum, they face obstacles to doing so, Lo Giudice and Case say.

One major impediment is the structure of government procurement, where contracts tend to adhere to the PMBOK approach for project delivery. Requests for proposals tend to be anti-agile, Lo Giudice says. A better approach might be to, for example, break up a $2 million contract into 10 $200,000 contracts so that the process can be more flexible. “It’s crucial to change how the work is given out to the vendors,” he says.

Doing so is difficult, Case acknowledges, since changing contract development processes that have been in place for years is institutionally difficult. But, Case says, it’s crucial to fund and “make the space for these different ways of working and let new good habits form in those spaces.”

Another big challenge is changing government agencies’ cultures to embrace agile, according to Case. “Doing organizational change like this can be a pretty massive undertaking,” Case says. “And to do it successfully, I think you have to scale it back and start small.”

Government IT leaders who want to implement agile should start small by identifying the most valuable opportunities where they can experiment, whether through procurement circumstances or having the right personnel in place. 

It’s important to not go all-in at first, Case says, and instead try agile on a small scale. “If it’s successful, we’ll introduce this new concept,” Case says.

Cultural changes and changes in the way teams collaborate pave the way for the introduction of new technologies and project management tools that can make approaches like scrum easier to implement. “I think you have to start with the culture and the intent and the change management of processes,” Case says.

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