Government Agile/Lean Listserv

[Logan Powell]

Dearest advocates for more effective and efficient government services: 

• Are you looking for ways to reduce the accumulation of risk in your projects as a manager, PM, team lead?
• Tired of seeing "pet projects" draining scarce resources without any validation of customer/market/citizen demand?
• Trying to implement agile within your agency/organization, but are - inevitably - running into impediments of a bureaucracy?

We're creating a new listserv to discuss topics in an deepening and widening pool of thought and experience in government for how to incorporate lean business practices and agile product/service delivery methodologies.

For those unfamiliar with these terms, don't worry. If the salutation is apropos you're probably a good candidate, but here's the skinny:

• LEAN: The core philosophy of lean is to maximize customer/user/citizen value while minimizing waste... creating more value with fewer resources. A lean organization has a strong grasp on who their customers are, what their needs are and what value they - as an organization - are providing them, then focuses the organization's key processes to continuously increase that value.
• AGILE: Agile methods are a project/product management implementation of the lean philosophy, which reduce the amount of time before the first product or service delivery (prototype or pilot respectively) and between successive deliveries to increase the exposure of that product/service to the harsh realities of customer feedback. This is done so that assumptions of customer/user/citizen need can be validated or invalidated (aka "little fails"), thus systematically reducing the risk of a "big fail" brewing behind closed doors.

This listserv will cater to the specifically to agile and lean advocates working intimately with and within government.

Anyone with a .gov or .mil email address can join by emailing list...@listserv.gsa.gov, the message should have no subject and the body should say "subscribe agile-lean-cop."