The Technology Transformation Services (TTS) Agile Guild is a community that fosters agile methodologies within government so that our work will deliver more value to its users.
The agile guild, an open and voluntary group, helps foster a committee of professionals in a specific subject area. Benefits include:
- Improving overall productivity through sharing of knowledge
- Spreading agile practices throughout our organization
- Bringing together different parts of organization with different methodologies, varying experience, and varying understanding of methodologies
- Having a single, specific resource to turn to for support in a given area
- Giving more seasoned team members opportunities to share their expertise with less experienced team members
- Giving less experienced team members opportunities to become better in their roles in an environments away from their chapters and engagements
- Creating energy and have fun!
Thanks to the writers of these articles as well as others for ideas and inpirations for developing guilds.
From July 2018, we determined our focus areas for the next several quarters will be making the guild a place for learning as well as creating tools and artifacts to memorialize what we learn as we go along.
We make the guild a place for learning by hosting discussion, debates, inviting guest speakers, and checking in with our partners to learn what is and isn't working for them.
As much as possible, we will document our learnings as we go along so we can share them with others. This will include expanding the agile guide, summaries of our guild meetings, training materials, and blog posts.
Originally focused on work at 18F, guilds began in 2015 as a forum where team members can come together based on discipline areas. For more information on guilds and working groups, see the TTS Handbook.
Our work is informed by ongoing collaboration with TTS project teams as well as individuals elsewhere in and outside of government with experience in the agile disciplines of XP, Scrum, Lean Startup, Lean UX, as well as the relevant design disciplines of Human Centered Design and Design Thinking.
We believe that agile implies Human Centered Design and works best when cross-discliplinary teams work together throughout the development cycle.
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