In March, the team of writers and editors at USAGov adopted
some agile principles in an attempt to streamline our content development
process.
We hoped operating in a more agile manner would help us
address some of the challenges we were facing as a team:
- Being
asked to support many new projects
- Competing
priorities
- Bottlenecks
and silos
It was a big change in the way we work. Our previous model
had been based on a newsroom-style operation where people were clustered
together around specific areas of content or “beats” to use the journalism
terminology. The newsroom model works really well for media outlets with bigger
teams of people, but for a small government content team, it wasn’t the best
fit because it didn’t easily allow people to support projects or user needs not
on their “beat.”
Operating in a more agile manner lets us shift resources to
whatever user need is most pressing at the moment. 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. We’re able to balance resources to
match priorities and work in a more proactive, rather than reactive, manner.
We’re not following any specific agile methodology by the
book, but the way we operate now more closely resembles Scrum than Kanban. We
spend time grooming our backlog of requests, we hold bi-weekly sprint planning
meetings and retrospectives and we use a board to track our work in progress.
We don’t hold official daily stand-ups, but we regularly
communicate about the status of work and roadblocks to keep things moving.
While our process isn’t perfect, and we’re certainly still
learning as we go, operating in a more agile manner has helped us focus our
priorities and deliver content that will help our users accomplish their tasks.
Jessica Milcetich is the product owner of the websites
USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov managed by GSA.
This
blog was re-published by the permission of Victoria B. Wales, Digital
Innovation Specialist, USAGov | victoria.wales@gsa.gov
