Driving Standards to Improve Information Technology Modernization Program Outcomes for U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Utilities Service
Challenge: The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Rural Utilities Service (RUS) was engaged in a multiyear effort to modernize and consolidate its systems for administering grant and loan programs into Salesforce when new requirements from the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and Farm Bill created an urgency to enhance and extend the solution. The program’s new requirements and looming application deadlines drove RUS to add new delivery teams quickly within the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). This change strained the capacity of shared services teams (such as quality assurance) and forced staff into key roles, particularly the Product Owner (PO) function. These staff were often new to SAFe and had limited bandwidth.
The rapid ramp-up—combined with limited amounts of initial training—increased stress among the POs and inhibited their ability to meaningfully contribute to key PO functions, such as backlog refinement, which led to frequent delays in acceptance testing. These delays contributed to the late discovery of defects either during User Acceptance Testing (UAT) prior to release—sometimes weeks after the sprint in which the defect was introduced—or after release to production. This lag diminished the user experience, increased help desk contacts, and de-prioritized new features to fix issues that might have been found earlier in the process.
Solution: Summit’s team performed an assessment of the processes, practices, and resources that enabled the Product Owners supporting IT modernization within RUS to identify and remove impediments to the consistent execution of PO duties program-wide. Through interviews, document reviews, and observations of recurring and ad hoc meetings, Summit applied expert knowledge of Agile principles and best practices to identify opportunities to improve program and project outcomes and enhance PO competency. Summit’s analysis persuaded both RUS leadership and RUS Program Services program leaders to pursue immediate changes with Summit’s support. These changes included the introduction of a revamped quality assurance testing process and the creation of a comprehensive resource library (including job aids, training videos, and presentations) aimed at improving Agile proficiency among Product Managers, Product Owners, and supporting staff. Beyond these reference materials, Summit also conducted live training to advance key Agile concepts and practices, including a mock sprint ceremony for backlog refinement.
Further, Summit helped RUS address multiple emergent circumstances requiring urgent, high-visibility Agile support. These circumstances included ad hoc requests to prepare RUS executives to participate in a critical end-of-year Program Increment Planning session; an effort to capture, analyze, and prioritize post-award communications requirements with a focus on process improvement (while also anticipating long-term feature needs); and a comprehensive user guide to help system users transition away from the legacy authentication platform to Login.gov. Summit’s contributions achieved their intended outcomes—greater executive participation, more forward-looking requirements, and fewer user support calls.
Result: Summit’s support led to sustainable, long-term improvements in Product Owner performance and successfully enabled just-in-time RUS requirements. Our quality assurance process improvements and support eliminated the backlog of sprint-level acceptance tests and enhanced the clarity, brevity, and accuracy of UAT test scripts. It also increased the efficiency of engagement with the business as a part of UAT. Our catalog of knowledge resources established standards for PO activities within RUS and accelerated the onboarding of new POs. Ultimately, our coaching and training support helped the POs perform their roles with greater independence and confidence and ensured the timely reporting of defects within the sprint, enabling earlier triage, prioritization, and remediation of those defects before they reached UAT or production. The result was shorter UAT test cycles, fewer delays in releasing new features to production, and a higher quality product requiring less rework to address preventable issues downstream.