Mitigation mechanisms informed by Agile principles were put into effect to address a risk that could have impacted a system overseen by Program Executive Office Enterprise Information Systems that works to provide an enterprise training capability to the U.S. Army.
According to a feature article posted Thursday on the PEO EIS website, the Army Training Information System program encountered an issue involving the ATIS system’s inability to exchange data with the Army Training Management System, a problem that could have resulted in data duplication.
For leaders within EIS, one of the best practices for risk management involves making continuous risk assessment a part of program increment — or PI — planning. As part of the ATIS program’s Agile Release Train process, risks are put up on a PI planning board for monitoring by development teams, which work to determine if they can resolve the risks on their own or if the risks need to be elevated to the ART team.
The ART team itself has its own tool called a Resolved, Owned, Accepted, Mitigated board, which it uses to monitor and, if necessary, elevate risks to the program level. The use of a ROAM board is part of the recommendations under the Scaled Agile Framework, which PEO EIS had adopted.
The issue ultimately had to be elevated to the program level, and using Agile methods, the ATIS team was able to implement a remedy that has resulted in a near-complete resolution.
David Bridges, a contractor and ATIS operations and risk manager, said, “First it was a critical risk, but now it’s a low to moderate risk, improving every day and unlikely to happen because it is tracked at the program level.”
Prior to the adoption of Agile, the issue’s near-complete resolution would have taken over a year. With the help of Agile, it took six months.
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