Sustainment plan

18F // Forest Service: timber permitting sustainment plan

Overview

In anticipation of the day when 18F transitions off of this project and hands all product work over to the Forest Service entirely, this plan lays out goals, signals, and tasks for the team to aim toward in order to ensure that the work is easily sustained after 18F is gone.

This plan is a work in progress and will likely grow and change over time to keep pace with changes to the team and the product.

The vision

The 18F team has departed the project, and the USFS product team fully owns the management and development of the TIM modernization effort. The team is empowered and capable of driving work forward to onboard a vendor and create a permitting solution that meets user needs in an iterative, open, and human-centered manner. This includes all aspects of the program, including design and research; software development and devOps; integration of other systems; and program communications and customer support.

What does success look like?

The USFS team members regularly attend sprint ceremonies with their staff developers and vendor(s); provide product, technical, and design guidance to the vendor team(s); regularly demo progress to a wide group of stakeholders; are capable of leading the team to scale the application to onboard new forests and permit types; and plan for and research future procurements. The FS or vendor team has built a production application and has improved it in several significant ways in response to user feedback and usability testing.

What might failure look like?

After 18F left the project, the USFS product team was not able to move forward with staff and contractors in developing the firewood permitting application. Additional contract and USFS talent was not identified or fully committed to the project, and as a result, contractors didn’t have the capacity to develop quality work and/or they didn’t receive adequate feedback, so the product they delivered did not meet user needs. Additionally, operations were not conducive to pushing changes to production because of security and compliance concerns. As a result, momentum was lost and eventually, the project stalled and software never made it into production.

Sustainment plan: goals, signals, and tasks

1. Goal

Forest Service is bought in to taking smaller steps toward long term goals and remains flexible and adaptable.

Signals

• Forest Management leadership is scoping work with iterative structures
• Forest Management understands what an investment in a 6 month contract w/ post-award mgmt by 18F will get them and is willing to make that investment

Tasks

• 18F demonstrates new ways of working and how they help get Forest Management closer to their goals
• 18F and FS regularly share and present progress and engage stakeholders
• Deliver product roadmapping training
• FS product folks maintain the product roadmap and understand why/how to revisit it and update it frequently

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2. Goal

• Forest Service can craft a vendor solicitation with some good user stories, and select a promising vendor.

Signals

• FS has dedicated, assigned team members as PO and or other roles who understand the user needs and USDA/USFS contracting processes who can help structure and select a vendor

Tasks

• 18F shares an acquisition "red flags" reference with Forest Service team members
• 18F delivers 2:1 coaching with the contracting officer on the existing contract (1 hr weekly)

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3. Goal

Forest Service can thoughtfully consider the tradeoffs of feature requests from users and turns to user research and the team's research, design, and engineering expertise to make a decision.

Signals

• Forest Service documents interviews and direct observation with frontliners, district offices, and users (members of the public) buyers, and factors what they learn in to product decisions
• Forest Service has a place to track requests user that is transparent to the product team
• Forest Service has a mechanism to get feedback from multiple disciplines / functions on a new feature request
• Forest Service makes feature requests visible by adding them to a product board so that they're discussed, and prioritized by the product team (and maybe removed from the roadmap)

Tasks

• Forest Service has a product board and backlog that is socialized among stakeholders
• 18F pairs with Forest Service on grooming the product board
• Forest Service runs sprint ceremonies

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4. Goal

Forest Service defines any work to be done by user need.

Signals

• New work is written up as user stories
• Forest Service asks for a story if one is not provided/tied to work
• Forest Service presents to it's leadership about the user problems they're solving

Tasks

• Forest Service helps write user stories after a round of research
• 18F delivers training to Forest Service on writing user stories
• Forest Service sits in on another agile product team’s sprint ceremonies

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5. Goal

Forest Service runs their own sprints and ceremonies.

Signals

• It is clear to everyone on the product team who is on the team and what their responsibilities are
• Meeting invites come from a Forest Service product person
• The Forest Service maintains an up-to-date, well groomed backlog
• The Forest Service documents retros and implements improvements on a sprintly basis

Tasks

• Have a Forest Service PO (or others) run one ceremony each sprint
• The project repo lives on USDA’s instance of GitHub.com

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6. Goal

Forest Service has the skills and tools to recognize a bug and push a fix to production with little to no system downtime.

Signals

• Forest Service uses a bug tracking tool like Github Issues that is accessible to the whole team, (and to the public? E.g. for reporting new bugs)
• A development environment is well documented and configured with code, e.g. Docker
• Forest Service has a mature Code Review process as part of every commit
• Forest Service has a baseline (perhaps 90%) of test code coverage
• Forest Service uses monitoring and alerting to know when there are problems with software
• A Continuous Integration (CI) pipeline that is well documented and configured with code builds the project, runs tests, etc. on every change
• A Continuous Delivery (CD) process automatically deploys new versions of software to cloud environments when the CI pipeline completes successfully. Target environments include pre-production
• There is a known and documented process for updating and re-approving ATO documentation

Tasks

• Compose thoughtful documentation alongside code; treat documentation as a first-class citizen
• Investigate virtualization platforms like Docker
• (Continue to?) Invest in Continuous Integration capabilities
• Invest in deployment automation, aiming for Continuous Delivery

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7. Goal

Forest Service understands fuelwood permitting data flows in order to de-risk TIM legacy integrations.

Signals

• Forest Service has a map and understands the landscape of systems, and where fuelwood permitting data exists in them
• Forest Service understands the reasons for, and the methods by which fuelwood permitting data moves around the map
• Forest Service understands the context around the systems like owners
• Forest Service has informed options for moving forward with the encasement pattern

Tasks

• Continue to communicate across silos in order to understand the full context of proposed changes
• Continue to push further into the systems connected to TIM (like FMMI) in order to learn specific implementation information

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8. Goal

Forest Service can recognize good / bad user research when they see it.

Signals

• Forest Service identifies questions and recognizes what Qs can't be answered without user research
• Forest Service understands popular user research methods and what type of research to ask contractors to perform
• Forest Service suggests 1:1 interviews with real users and stops relying on expert user groups/panels and focus groups with regional stakeholders as a way of understanding user needs
• Forest Service is using the research it conducts to write new user stories and inform and change design hypotheses
• Forest Service knows what types of methods to use to answer different types of research questions and when and how to plan field research or remote usability testing

Tasks

• Forest Service members have seen research in action
• 18F delivers training on user research heuristics
• 18F delivers training on user research basics

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9. Goal

Forest Management product team has UX research/design skills at the table in every sprint at every program increment planning session

Signals

• Forest management product personnel identify UX design issues and raise questions for UX research/design
• Forest management product personnel seek out training in UX research/design
• Forest management employs UX designers under the ACIO office part-time
• Forest management hires a full-time UX designer

Tasks

• Forest Service has access to UX skills during every sprint
• We help Forest Service write a job description and job posting for a UX designer
• We help Forest Service review UX design candidates

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10. Goal

New features / software is accessible for all.

Signals

• Forest Service uses the latest US Web Design System
• Forest Service designers document accessibility and inclusivity considerations from the beginning
• Reviewers / QA follow an accessibility checklist
• The product team conducts automated and manual accessibility tests on each feature

Tasks

• 18F documents and discusses accessibility considerations when reviewing designs with the team
• The product team creates and follows an accessibility checklist when reviewing work
• The product team recruits and tests with diverse populations of varying abilities and access