Adopting agile principles has allowed the writers and editors at USA.gov to more quickly shift focus and resources that address team challenges to deliver timely content.
Discussing the efforts to streamline content development in a blog entry, Jessica Milcetich (product owner of USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov) touches on the way the team transitioned from a traditional newsroom, or "beat," model that didn’t allow everyone to support all projects to a flexible methodology more closely resembling Scrum and its approach to volatile requirements.
The team now takes all requests in the queue — from UX, analytics, contact center, marketing, content, etc. — and grooms them, addresses competing priorities in the backlog, holds biweekly sprint planning meetings and retrospectives and pulls people as needed to address bottlenecks, silos and user needs.
"If it’s tax season and we need to make major updates to our tax content, we can now more easily pull anyone from the team to support that effort," said Milcetich. "We’re able to balance resources to match priorities and work in a more proactive, rather than reactive, manner."
The entire blog can be read on the USA.gov blog site.
