The goal I want to achieve is a payroll system for the federal government. That's where I stay focused as a leader. Then the team comes and they say they're going to try it with these 10 people, and I say, “Great. Tell me how it goes.” Then they say, “This is a problem”, and I say, “Let's clear that out of the way for you. Now go and do another 90 days.”
The increments in agile projects are often done in a two-week period, but where we actually release something of value is usually in 90 days. In a 90-day window, I would do the same kind of thing for the government that Cisco did. I would have multiple projects running in parallel, and they would sync up on the quarter. The other thing that happens in IT is that there are a whole bunch of projects that are prerequisite and co-requisite. You start doing these projects and you find out you need the Shared Services server for all of these. Well, then, the Shared Services server project needs to move up to the top, because it's the constraint. Then you start to move. So the quarterly sync, if I can call it that, is extremely important.
I don't want to get into the weeds here. The important thing at this level, this committee, is the leadership style and approach that agile represents, and the agile principles that you would find in the deck in terms of JTF2. JTF2 is right inside DND. They did that because people are dying, and they need to save their guys as much as possible. It's a small, cross-functional team. They're empowered. They get a plan when they go in, but the plan is that the guys will probably be shooting from the north. If there are guys shooting from the south, there's no plan for that. In the field those guys have to be ready; they have to adapt and make their own plan. They have to be capable of doing that. That's what the government needs to do. It needs to become adaptable.
The other thing that's major here is the cyber-threat piece. The cyber-threat people are adaptable. They're agile and they're adaptable. They're small teams. They're moving away from government in their capability. They're accelerating.
So we're falling behind, and that's scary.