Case Study

An Agile Mindset in Military Acquisitions

Overhauling procurement technology streamlines buying, cuts costs

One government office develops and maintains the applications that support a massive procurement operation: The Technical Management Directorate manages and directs acquisitions of warfighter systems and products for 80,000 U.S. military buyers.

The problem? Its procurement technology portfolio had ballooned. The program office had inherited a large number of disparate, siloed applications that sat across many servers using incompatible technical stacks.

Booz Allen’s technology experts developed a tailored, enterprise-wide Agile software development lifecycle to tackle this massive challenge, ultimately earning the agency a 168 percent return on their investment.

“Booz Allen's Agile software development approach cut deployment time from months to weeks.”

The Challenge

To modernize, the acquisition government program office needed hardware. It needed software. It needed a full range of infrastructure engineering, design, implementation, and integration services to support its rapid software development mission.

The program’s stakeholders demanded quicker responses, more frequent delivery, the flexibility to respond to change, and more involvement with the development process.

The Approach

Working with the Technical Management Directorate, our experts replaced the program office’s traditional waterfall development process, where development moves sequentially from step to step. The project plan must be set from the outset and there’s no room for change or error. We implemented a new software development lifecycle, with a tailored blend of Scrum and Department of Defense (DOD) Instruction 5000.02 software development practices.

This approach balances transparency, quality, and rapid delivery more effectively. It also incorporates user feedback throughout the development process while maintaining critical governance activities.

From launch, it took only 10 days for our team to seamlessly assume responsibility of the IT services, including transitioning five systems in the development phase.

Transforming the technology portfolio also meant guiding the program stakeholders, over the course of 6 months, to an agile mindset, in which developers work on the project design in smaller increments or sprints—reevaluating, testing, and incorporating feedback along the way.

The Solution

Booz Allen deployed more than 10 development changes and 32 application-level releases, with DOD 5000 processes and reviews also incorporated, to address both security patches and changes in functional requirements to multiple applications.

The Agile software development process reduced the “requirement to deployed solution” timeline from months to weeks. The number of defects found decreased by an average of 58 percent, enabling delivery teams to respond to changing requirements quickly.

Adopting Agile reduced risk and shortened the timeline for application enhancements while ensuring 2,500 end users were trained prior to deployment.

In support of the Agile process, we also implemented an open-source cloud solution to keep licensing costs down and avoid locking in vendors. The physical server footprint was reduced by 83 percent, maintenance downtime was cut by 75 percent, and the agency reduced annual infrastructure costs by 37 percent—earning a 168-percent ROI.

The Future

Looking to modernize and transform your organization? Booz Allen’s technology experts are up to the challenge. We help government leaders think through their mission challenges strategically, developing leading digital solutions to meet them.