February Meeting with Bill Pratt of DHS on streamlining IT acquisitions
The NCMA DC Chapter is grateful to Bill Pratt, Strategic Technology Management Director with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), for speaking with us at our February dinner meeting. He spoke on the topic of streamlining IT acquisition to be faster, cheaper, and better for the mission and DHS’s new enterprise agile adoption strategy. Given the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act (FITARA) and the Presidential Management Agenda (PMA), among other initiatives, cross-functional disciplines have been tirelessly collaborating on improvements to policy, governance, and acquisition guidance to facilitate agility, flexibility, and innovation.
DHS began an Agile pilot program in 2016, specifically to address programs delivering late or over budget, low levels of transparency, poor requirements development and traceability, and long timeframes to deliver. They collected lessons learned and best practices, created and drove 18 specific Action Plans that were endorsed by the Under Secretary of Management (USM) and CXOs, all of which met their near term definition of done and were closed. Today they’re continuing to implement FY20 improvements and complete longer term items. Results have included reduced cycle time, reduced risk, and improved business and mission value. To update and change policy and guidance, a Lean Six Sigma tool to map and cross-walk each paragraph and requirement of existing templates was utilized, redundancies and areas for streamlining the process were flagged, and there were 66 repetitive touch points identified. Acquisition decision events were modified, language clarifying how programs are to work with financial officers on early funding access for pilots and prototypes was inserted, and roles and responsibilities for Agile acquisition programs were clarified.
In support of Agile development as the preferred development approach for IT projects, DHS developed the Streamlined Software Acquisition Process (SSAP) for use by software development programs. The SSAP is intended to be an Agile approach (though specific methodology-agnostic) to acquiring IT capabilities through software development for programs following the Systems Engineering Life Cycle (SELC). Additional details of the process included tools DHS is leveraging, metrics the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) now requires to provide information on planned incremental delivery of functionality via the Investment, Evaluation, Submission, and Tracking System (INVEST), and agency requirements for programs to report their Agile core metrics each month via INVEST.
To support programs, DHS has established a number of communication outreach and training initiatives. And stood up the Information Technology Program Management Center of Excellence (ITPM COE), a cross-functional team to identify and promote best practices, provide tools and information, and coordinate assistance to programs and projects to maximize the successful management of DHS IT investments; and the Agile COE, who provides guidance, governance, and resources to DHS IT development programs and projects, as well as IT professionals in efforts to increase their understanding and successful execution of Agile IT software development.
Because our meeting was so close to Valentine’s Day, we ended the evening with a small token of our appreciation for our members, giving everyone in attendance truffles from The Chocolate House (they deliver)! Thank you to our speaker, our wallflower winners, and to everyone that joined us. We hope to see you again soon.
