IT – Resource Library

When the 17 founders of the Agile philosophy met and agreed upon the values and principles of what has become the Agile Manifesto, they brought with them a wealth of experience, skill, and knowledge on developing, testing, and deploying software in private and commercial industries. But very few of the founders had much experience in developing software within the environment of government. As a result, the Manifesto reflects this limited background and does not align with governmental software projects.

Chad Sheridan serves as Chief Information Officer for the Risk Management Agency (RMA) in the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Here is our Federal Spotlight interview:

The government spends approximately $80 billion on Information Technology (IT) acquisitions. That equates to a lot of contract actions affecting the criticality of IT systems affecting our national health, security, and economy.

The likelihood that you will encounter procurements that have IT considerations at some point in your contracting career is high. So, how do you plan for these types of IT acquisitions, and how do you make decisions about your IT spending?

For Federal HR professionals and managers planning their staffing, there is good news to help you ensure that highly-qualified employees fill key government positions. As of this month, the 2011 spending cap that the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) placed on the 3Rs—recruitment, relocation, and retention incentives—has been lifted. Previously, agencies were required to ensure that any 3R spending did not exceed calendar year 2010 levels. This guidance expired at the end of 2015.

A common source of project failure over the past two decades has continued to be the management or mismanagement of project requirements. We are not going to discuss project failure, but only to show that a clear understanding of some of the management concepts for project requirements is crucial to the dismantling of this frightful statistic of poor performance. One such understanding is the difference between requirement verification and validation: a concept in its current state of confusion that in our experience continues to provide a level of misapplication of requirements, management techniques, and practices. This is especially true of Information Technology software-oriented projects.

Tag: IT