-
Forest Service: Six months in, checking our assumptions
on September 8, 2017
The Technology Transformation Services has been working with the Forest Service in an effort to move their permitting process online. In this post, we’ll focus on how taking a step back to check your assumptions can reduce the risk that your project will go off course.
-
Three small steps you can take to reboot agile in your organization
on October 25, 2016
This past summer, 18F held an agile workshop for the National Technical Information Service (NTIS), part of the U.S. Department of Commerce. An agency with roots going back to World War II, NTIS is facing a future that requires a strategic realignment towards open data and services.
-
The role of bot-bidding in Micro-purchase auctions
on August 9, 2016
The 18F Micro-purchase team recently introduced the ability to bid on an auction via API. This feature is part of our long-standing commitment to experiment and iterate towards the easiest bidding process for vendors. Like everything in the platform, we treated this feature as an experiment to learn how it would affect bidding behavior and the final price of auctions. Here’s what we learned.
-
When a micro-purchase doesn’t work out, we try to learn from it
on July 7, 2016
Two months ago, the 18F acquisitions team ran a public micro-purchase auction to find a vendor to develop a small new feature for 18F's cloud.gov, and for the first time after several successful micro-purchases for other products, the contracted vendor didn’t deliver the code on time. This was very interesting to us we’re early in the life of the micro-purchase platform, and we believe that failure is a great way to learn. In the spirit of experimentation and sharing our lessons, here’s how we went about analyzing this, and here’s what we learned.
-
The teams, they are a changin’
on April 18, 2016
To truly harness the power of agile practices, you need a stable team. But people leave under normal circumstances for a variety of reasons. While recognizing the need for stable teams, there are things our team does and should do to be resilient in the face of change.
-
How user story estimation helps my team deliver value
on January 25, 2016
At 18F, we believe that employing agile practices is the most effective way to build digital services. User story estimation is one of the most useful agile tools, and in this post, I’ll talk about how and why my team has been using it.
