Case Study: How a Long Serving DOJ Employee Became a New Agile Practitioner

Case Study: How a LongServing DOJ Employee Became a New Agile Practitioner

(Adapted from 18F’s blog post, “Building product management capacity in government part 3,” written by Lalitha Jonnalagadda and Bill Laughman)

Background: The Justice Department (DOJ) needed to find a better way to intake the 100,000-plus civil rights reports it receives every year. Due to the dozens of reporting pathways for the public, the process was “confusing and inconsistent” for those who tried to file potential violations, 18F said.

“Without clear guidance and expectation setting, many people submitted reports that required extensive follow-up to collect missing information, or submitted reports that fell outside the purview of the Division altogether,” 18F said in a blog post.

Working closely with 18F, a tech and design consultancy within GSA, in June 2020 the division launched a new and improved portal with the help of Agile processes.

Here’s the story of the experience for one DOJ employee, the portal’s product owner*, who evolved from an Agile skeptic to Agile champion over the process.

Who? Bill Laughman, DOJ Civil Rights Division

“I’ve been with the Civil Rights Division for about 20 years serving various roles, with my latest role in leading complaint intake and processing violation reports for the Administrative Management Section. I’m the primary correspondence liaison for Division-wide report triage. I also serve as the main point of contact for congressional inquiries to the Department.”

After → ← Before

* A product owner is the “voice of the customer,” the person who is accountable for ensuring business value is delivered in a product (GAO Agile Assessment Guide).

JANUARY 2019

18F submits recommendations for modernizing intake process using Agile

Laughman’s initial thoughts:

• Wide-eyed! Initially, these concepts seemed great ideologically, but we didn’t know what practical implementation would look like. • So many acronyms! I was hesitant to ask what the terms meant because I didn’t want to seem unqualified. • Skeptical! We asked for some previous projects that 18F had successfully implemented so that we could collectively set expectations. • Not having a project plan or an anticipated output or timeline was

confusing and daunting!

“Once you buy into the Agile methodology, you have to sell the rest of your team on it as well. Momentum increased as we continued to incorporate user feedback into our development. Our end users are empowered throughout the development process and now recognize the value of an Agile approach.” - Laughman

How his perception and comfort changed over time

Validation:

Shorter feedback cycles with the general public, intake teams, and development and design teams helped us validate our progress, which was huge! Our notion of a team is redefined. Our team now included end users invested in making the portal useful and valuable.

Roadblock:

After developing on an initial tech stack for about two months, we hit roadblocks preventing us from progressing further. We revisited the vision, conducted a risk/benefit analysis and decided that investing in a new stack would allow us to be scalable and resilient for years to come. Although it was a tough decision, our stakeholders weighed the consequences of developing further on a legacy stack and decided to pivot toward a modern tech stack even after spending significant development time and effort.

Validation:

Overall uptick in morale! Our division worked as a collective team rather than individual sections. The 18F team established open communication and transparency while sharing information at all times, which helped build trust among internal DOJ teams, stakeholders and 18F teams.

Skills Laughman learned as a result: JUNE 2020

New civilrights.justice.gov launched

Decision-making Empathy Empowerment

Technical complexities