An Agile Mindset in Military Acquisitions

One government office develops and maintains the applications that support a massive procurement operation: The Technical Management Directorate manages and directs acquisitions of warfighter systems and products for 80,000 U.S. military buyers.

The problem? Its procurement technology portfolio had ballooned. The program office had inherited a large number of disparate, siloed applications that sat across many servers using incompatible technical stacks.

Booz Allen’s technology experts developed a tailored, enterprise-wide Agile software development lifecycle to tackle this massive challenge, ultimately earning the agency a 168 percent return on their investment.

To modernize, the acquisition government program office needed hardware. It needed software. It needed a full range of infrastructure engineering, design, implementation, and integration services to support its rapid software development mission.

The program’s stakeholders demanded quicker responses, more frequent delivery, the flexibility to respond to change, and more involvement with the development process.

Working with the Technical Management Directorate, our experts replaced the program office’s traditional waterfall development process, where development moves sequentially from step to step. The project plan must be set from the outset and there’s no room for change or error. We implemented a new software development lifecycle, with a tailored blend of Scrum and Department of Defense (DOD) Instruction 5000.02 software development practices.

This approach balances transparency, quality, and rapid delivery more effectively. It also incorporates user feedback throughout the development process while maintaining critical governance activities.

From launch, it took only 10 days for our team to seamlessly assume responsibility of the IT services, including transitioning five systems in the development phase.

Transforming the technology portfolio also meant guiding the program stakeholders, over the course of 6 months, to an agile mindset, in which developers work on the project design in smaller increments or sprints—reevaluating, testing, and incorporating feedback along the way.