Making government procurements agile
Summary
The Agile Acquisition Framework is a comprehensive approach that helps government program teams shift from decades-old acquisition practices based on waterfall to modern acquisition practices based on agile, resulting in faster delivery of value, higher quality, and lower costs.
The challenge
Government program teams needed a new management model for transitioning from traditional acquisition practices to agile acquisition practices, but no proven model existed.
The solution
To address this need, Chris Cairns and Robert Read, as members of 18F, pioneered the Agile Acquisition Framework, the government’s first full-lifecycle approach for executing agile acquisitions.
Starting with an initial version, Chris and Robert iteratively refined the framework through first-hand experience helping multiple acquisition programs adopt it successfully.
The framework’s design combines proven practices from multiple disciplines — such as user-centered design, lean startup, agile development, agile project management, evolutionary architecture, open source, performance-based contracting, and modular contracting — into a unified approach.
To scale adoption of the framework across government, Chris and Robert provided training and coaching to more than a dozen professionals, who went on to apply it successfully to their own acquisition programs.
The results
- Adopted by more than a dozen federal, state, and local programs, including Treasury’s Digital Accountability and Transparency Act (DATA Act), Department of Defense’s Military OneSource, Social Security Administration’s Disability Claims Processing System, Environmental Protection Agency’s Electronic Manifest System, Navy’s Ready-2-Serve, and the State of California’s Child Welfare System
- Helped avoid hundreds of millions of dollars in unnecessary technology acquisition costs