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Agency Maturity for Agile

Summary

  • Use this to evaluate and correlate a requiring activities' organizational maturity in adoption of digital service techniques to the resulting contract action.
  • For use by Contracting Officers and Specialists in acquisition strategy phase.
  • Requiring Activity” is the office, program, or agency that is providing the requirements and funding for the purpose of conducting an acquisition.

Digital Service Maturity Determination

When planning an acquisition strategy for iterative development contracts, such as agile software or human centered design, it is critical for the contracting professional to be able to increase the chance of acquisition success by identifying and mitigating potential performance risks. One method of doing this is to understand the organizational maturity of how culturaly ready for digital service implementations the requiring activity is in order to develop an acquisition strategy that aligns appropriately.

Why does it matter?

An organization that has never worked with these kinds of services might find it difficult to jump right to running a complex coding challenge as part of a solicitation, awarding a large multiple vendor IDIQ/BPA, or knowing how to track and measure success of contract performance in a way that corresponds to delivering the best business value to the end users. Likewise, a mature digital service government team can define and evaluate solution providers to find the kind of company they want to build a solid team and relationship with instead of just finding a company that can hire to projects well.

This Digital Service Maturity Determination tool is one way to understand how ready the organization is and how to apply that knowledge.

The attributes below are representative of the culture, practices, and behaviors of a model digital service organization. In a solicitation the government should be able to be able to openly communicate, not only internally within organization but also externally to offerors, where they are in alignment to these attributes to ensure that th

Instructions

  1. Select your answers

    For each attribute, read the description and select the rating that most closely matches the current state of your requiring activity

  2. Complete the assessment

    After completing all 9 attributes your score will be totalled

  3. See your range

    Your score will put your organization in one of these three ranges:

    Novice: Lack of structure or practice of the attributes, relies on tried and true methods such as waterfall, management and practitioners are interested in change but not yet executing on adopting the cultural and technical changes necessary (9-18 points)

    Intermediate: Begins implementing changes to governance and culture to adopt of model attributes as repeatable processes, starting to qualitatively track metrics and apply lessons learned (19-36 points)

    Expert: Embodies the model attributes, continually refining and optimizing team efforts, proactively building and investing in continuous delivery with end users (37-45 points)

  4. Learn more in the Digital Acquisition Strategy Guide

    After you complete this assessment and get your range, reference the Digital Acquisition Strategy Guide for best practices to set a solictation and acquisition strategy that optimizes the requiring activity's level of expertise.

    Download Digital Acquisition Strategy Guide

Assessment

  • Transparency & Openness

    • Provides a protected “space” (physical location or attitude) for innovation to happen

    • Intensive and frequent communication with the customer and/or end users of the system

    • Team members take responsibility for their area of project but understand the entire project ecosystem

    • Demonstrated ability to foster efficient communication in multiple forms among the teams and the stakeholders

    • Demonstrates willingness and capacity to learn and communicate how lessons are applied

    • Tracks and measures feedback openly and honestly

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