Accelerating agile adoption
Summary
Before founding Skylight, Robert Read and Chris Cairns designed and facilitated an intensive agile workshop for the Social Security Administration’s (SSA’s) troubled Disability Case Processing System (DCPS) program. The three-day workshop used compressed “micro-sprints” based on the Scrum framework to demonstrate agile’s potential to a team of over 200 government and contractor personnel — contributing to the start of a successful turnaround.
The challenge
The SSA’s DCPS program was in trouble. A waterfall development approach had created a dysfunctional separation between the people building the system and the people who would use it. Feedback loops didn’t exist — developers worked in isolation from end users, and the resulting software failed to reflect actual needs on the ground.
Oversight bodies were increasing pressure on the program to course-correct. SSA leadership recognized that agile could offer a path forward, but the program team had no prior experience with iterative development. They needed more than a briefing on agile theory — they needed to see it work in practice, within their own environment, on their own system.
The solution
Robert Read and Chris Cairns designed a hands-on agile workshop tailored to the DCPS program’s specific challenges. Rather than lecturing about methodology, they structured the workshop around six formal sprints compressed into three days — “micro-sprints” based on the Scrum framework — so participants could experience agile firsthand.
During the workshop, a small subset of the DCPS team worked through the full Scrum cycle on their own system. Participants wrote user stories, prioritized and groomed a product backlog, and implemented the highest-priority stories in the system’s actual development environment — not a sandbox or simulation. They experienced standard Scrum ceremonies — sprint reviews and retrospectives — building familiarity with practices the broader program would eventually adopt.
For the first time, the workshop brought users and developers into the same room. This broke the separation that had plagued the program. Users could see their feedback translated into working software within hours rather than months, and developers could observe firsthand how people actually interacted with the system. The collaboration produced tangible results that neither group could have achieved alone.
The results
- Brought users and developers together in the same room for the first time in the program’s history
- Produced measurable usability improvements within three days, as confirmed by representative users working directly with the system
- Gave SSA leadership practical insight into agile’s value, demonstrating through hands-on results what no slide deck or briefing could convey
- Inspired a decision to accelerate agile adoption across the DCPS program, contributing to the start of a promising turnaround