Improving Delivery and Customer Satisfaction with Agile and DevSecOps

USAJOBS.gov is a Federal career portal providing a talent pipeline for over 500 Federal agencies and a multitude of smaller organizations. In May 2010, USAJOBS began a complete system redesign to increase capacity of the website. After the initial release of this new site in 2011, poor performance led to dissatisfied users and a decline in the website’s American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). The USAJOBS Program Management Office (PMO), which provides the operation, maintenance, and support of the USAJOBS web platform, partnered with Excella to enhance the site’s program and project management. Our experts quickly identified opportunities to improve the PMO’s strategic planning, design, and stakeholder communications process. By also working with USAJOBS Agile teams, we helped them adopt automation throughout their DevSecOps development, delivery, and support processes. This drove them to establish a mature and transparent approach to planning and focus more heavily on their user’s needs, improving both the site operations and user-friendliness.

Because of their Agile transformation and improved strategic planning, USAJOBS become the most recognized component of the Federal hiring program, with over 80 million visitors to the site over the last 12 months. Read this case study to learn how the PMO reduced their feature release cadence from twelve weeks to just four and increased their ACSI to an all-time high.

The PMO improved customer satisfaction through refined planning and enhanced agility by introducing:

• New planning and communication practices in the Agile PMO to support change and increase transparency
• Product Backlog refinement and Design Thinking to improve problem-solving
• Agile best practices for DevSecOps development, testing, and support to increase automation, reducing product delivery batch sizes and shortening the release cadence

A word from USAJOBS Program Manager Michelle Earley:
“Excella continues to support USAJOBS’ evolution through robust, transformative practices…these practices successfully allow USAJOBS to
provide value in meeting customer needs and expectations.”

Curious about the benefits of DevOps? Read our latest fact sheet, DevOps: Creating Better Outcomes.