Scaling Beyond the Pilot in Public Sector Organizations
How do you, as a large organization, undertake an agile transformation while maintaining the autonomy of each team? How do you build the momentum that creates successful, lasting cultural change? Which problem do you tackle first, and which metrics should you strive to impact? How do you scale and create governance for this new way of working?
VMware Tanzu Labs (formerly Pivotal Labs) has over 30 years of experience helping organizations delve into answering these questions and successfully transforming their software delivery practices. We do this by partnering with our customers to deliver a small but meaningful outcome (a pilot), then enabling them to incrementally build on the success of their pilot to shape the organization's culture and adapt to their constraints.
Since 2017, Tanzu Labs has partnered in over 250 government engagements that have become models of the modern public sector software factory, providing better services to constituents. Customers are now building better software, delivered by thousands of productive (and happy) engineers, engaging millions of users.
Organizations that successfully scale are able to increase their code quality, ship value faster, and get better software outcomes. However, those successes are not without challenges. Scaling the success of one product team to multiple can be daunting, yet is worth the return on investment. Here are the three phases of transformation we've seen our governmental customers experience, and what to watch out for along the way.