The US Air Force's Business Enterprise Systems (BES) Directorate faced significant challenges modernizing ARMS, a vital aircrew management tool enabling flight and jump supervisors to make informed resource allocation decisions. The system had become outdated, while the team supporting it was entrenched in waterfall management processes that impeded rapid delivery.
Years of slow development cycles had eroded stakeholder confidence. New team members struggled to integrate with existing personnel who held critical legacy knowledge. Government leadership lacked agile experience, and complex system constraints limited innovation. Most concerning, ARMS' reporting systems generated serious errors, with some reports returning hundreds of thousands of duplicate records that required manual fixes.
After fifteen years of unsuccessful modernization attempts, the Air Force needed a partner who could transform both technology and culture simultaneously.
Working with the Air Force's BES Directorate, Fearless implemented an agile transformation strategy that reimagined how defense technology teams deliver results.
When changing any team, it's not uncommon for new people to be out of step with existing members. To prevent this from happening on the ARMS project, we took a collaborative approach. While new team members brought fresh perspectives needed to move things forward, existing team members provided invaluable knowledge of the system and its constraints. By encouraging rapid team formation and knowledge sharing, we created a unified team that leveraged both innovation and institutional expertise.
When we first joined the ARMS project, our customer was new to agile. To help coach our Government Product Owner on agile practices, we co-located them with our team. They shadowed our trained agile practitioners to understand the approach firsthand. Our customer also ensured the team was empowered and didn't get lost in government bureaucracy. This mutually supportive relationship provided the buy-in needed to implement lasting change.
We demonstrated agile's effectiveness through rapid solutions to critical problems. When we discovered that ARMS' Jaspersoft server was generating reports filled with erroneous errors due to infinite database loops returning hundreds of thousands of duplicate records, we took action. The team rebuilt every join table to optimize performance while addressing other issues.
After identifying our minimum viable product, we released a fix at the end of just one sprint that significantly improved the experience before releasing additional enhancements the following sprint.