Often it's the things you never think about can really hit you. You've seen all of those U.S. Postal Service labelled sacks, trays, boxes, wheeled containers, etc. All of those are ordered from the postal service, some 230,000 orders each year. Large companies and more than 1,800 postal facilities place those orders. Those were handled by people sitting at desks shuffling emails and picking up the phone. There was no tracking of orders. No way to have visibility into costs. It was a mess. USPS had wanted to automate the archaic system for years. But they were always told it was too expensive to do.
Enter Agile. From an interview with USPS Vice President for IT John Edgar.
USPS again brought the problem to its IT shop 18 months ago, and this time the department created a cost and timeline based on an agile approach that incorporated fast deliverables and daily scrum sessions between IT officials and customers to ensure parties were always on the same page. In waterfall approaches, "IT goes off and builds something that 12 months later might not meet the customer's expectations," Edgar said, noting that in times of austerity and rapidly changing technology, that approach rarely makes sense."The intent was to find a way to deal with changes where we could be more responsive to changing customer expectations and raising the visibility of what we were doing throughout the development's lifecycle back to our business partners," Edgar said. "We wanted to better partner with our business organizations, and maintain a more consistent and visible engagement between teams where we could prioritize requirement building so we get the most important things done first."
And the results? 90 percent fewer support calls. That' s on more than 25,000 orders adding up to more than a quarter of a billion dollars. Not bad. Especially for a project that was too expensive to do with waterfall.
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