The Business Enterprise Systems (BES) Directorate manages a portfolio of critical applications and programs for the US Air Force (USAF), serving more than three million users. The Aviation Resource Management System (ARMS) is one of these applications, and it enables flight and jump supervisors to make informed resource allocation decisions.
But ARMS had become outdated. Its team was using a waterfall approach, which made it hard to deliver value quickly. To regain the confidence of users and stakeholders, the application needed to be modernized. And this meant shifting the way the team worked.
On this project, Fearless worked to do exactly that. We iteratively improved ARMS’ functionality to make it more efficient and effective, while also helping implement the agile transformation needed to make a lasting change.
We brought together the old guard and the new. When you’re changing up any team, it’s not uncommon for new people to be out of step with existing team members. In fact, sometimes, each group will fail to see the value the other brings to the table. And this can lead to clashes that hinder forward progress.
To prevent this from happening on the ARMS project, we took a collaborative approach. While new team members brought the fresh perspectives needed to move things in a new direction, existing team members were just as vital. Their knowledge of the system and its constraints allowed the team to stay grounded in reality. By bringing these two groups together and encouraging them to form and norm quickly, we were able to support knowledge sharing and collaboration between all team members in a short amount of time.
We empowered our customer and our customer empowered us. When we first came on to the ARMS project, our customer was new to agile. To help coach our Government Product Owner (PO) up on agile practices, we co-located them with our team. They then shadowed our trained agile practitioners to better understand the approach.
And while we supported our customer wherever we could, our customer also supported us, helping ensure that the team was empowered and didn’t get lost in the shuffle of Government. This mutually empowering relationship was vital to the team’s success, providing the support and buy-in needed to implement true agile transformation.
We proved the value of agile with quick and iterative delivery. Thanks to this work, the team is now able to deliver value faster than ever before — a fact that was made clear by a series of quick fixes. When we learned that ARMS’ Jaspersoft server was generating reports filled with erroneous errors, we resolved to get to the heart of the problem. We discovered that an error during setup was causing infinite loops on the database and returning hundreds of thousands of duplicate records. To solve this, the team rebuilt every join table to optimize performance, while also addressing other issues.
We then began focusing on the report data. As it turned out, a previous policy change hadn’t been accounted for in the system, resulting in dozens or even hundreds of pages of erroneous errors that required line-by-line edits to resolve. After identifying our minimum viable product, we released a fix at the end of just one sprint that significantly improved the experience before releasing another the following sprint.
This announcement was published independently of the US Air Force. This release does not constitute or imply an endorsement by the USAF or the United States Government of the product, process, or service, or its producer or provider. The views and opinions expressed in any referenced document do not necessarily state or reflect those of the USAF or the United States Government.