Comments on: Government IT process review petition update http://blog.robbowley.net/2010/03/04/government-it-process-review-petition-update/ adventures in extreme programming Wed, 25 Aug 2010 06:23:32 -0700 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: Anna Shipman http://blog.robbowley.net/2010/03/04/government-it-process-review-petition-update/comment-page-1/#comment-11255 Anna Shipman Wed, 10 Mar 2010 13:39:27 +0000 http://blog.robbowley.net/?p=1246#comment-11255 When working for a previous company I worked on one of these large, late, over-budget, bad press projects for a government department. In addition to the budgetting issues that Nick Oostvogels raises, a major problem was that the actual end users of the system were not involved anywhere in the design, and while there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on the design during the design phase, the application was presented to the actual users as a fait accompli and surprise, surprise, didn't meet their needs. I don't think Agile will necessarily solve this problem either - in government departments they have people who are in charge of IT, so your "customer" may well be completely uninvolved in the day-to-day usage of the system. What is going to be another hard sell to government is having end users work with what they will see as an incomplete system. When working for a previous company I worked on one of these large, late, over-budget, bad press projects for a government department. In addition to the budgetting issues that Nick Oostvogels raises, a major problem was that the actual end users of the system were not involved anywhere in the design, and while there was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing on the design during the design phase, the application was presented to the actual users as a fait accompli and surprise, surprise, didn’t meet their needs.

I don’t think Agile will necessarily solve this problem either – in government departments they have people who are in charge of IT, so your “customer” may well be completely uninvolved in the day-to-day usage of the system. What is going to be another hard sell to government is having end users work with what they will see as an incomplete system.

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