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DSDM Improves Productivity in Govt
DSDM has been used in a large government department to successfully implement a business change lifecycle, integrating existing approaches to project management, programme management and risk management. The result was the creation of a new delivery environment based on fitness for business purpose which allowed all departmental targets to be met whilst at the same time showing measurable productivity improvements within project teams.
The department recognised that it needed a more structured approach to delivery. There was no framework for business change, and there was no measurement to ensure that products being delivered were fit for purpose. Although there was already a lot of skill available in various project management disciplines, such as PRINCE2 for project management, MOR (Management of Risk) and MSP (Managing Successful Programmes), something else was needed to bring these together.
“The idea of the Business Change Lifecycle was to bring together the different aspects of project management and introduce the idea of a delivery lifecycle,” says Peter Measey, Operations Director of RADTAC who was also the Business Change Lifecycle project manager. “Nearly all changes include an IT element, so delivering software is closely aligned to delivering business change. Working with the client we used DSDM as the basis of the whole delivery framework, and integrated PRINCE2 with DSDM to create the Business Change Lifecycle.”
The DSDM framework makes it possible to manage a project in the way best suited to getting the best results. It provides the inherent flexibility needed to enable a project to be run either in stages as a waterfall project, or in many iterations, which is what it was designed for. Importantly, the framework does not dictate the style of development and caters for whichever combination is appropriate for a project. The Business Change Lifecycle is based around RADTAC’s own way of implementing DSDM called ‘Pragmatic Agile’, which exploits the way in which DSDM integrates agile with existing practices.
Having put a framework in place which pulls together project management, software delivery, and all the other complex processes that have to be followed by government projects, measurement becomes possible. This department was able to meet all its targets, in particular one relating to productivity. In trials after the Business Delivery Framework was introduced, IS project team productivity increased by an average of 27% over six months.