Social Security Administration

Since September 2019, Ariel Partners has been working with the Office of the Inspector General of the Social Security Administration (SSA OIG). Ariel is designing an audit program for large-scale Agile projects and delivering a comprehensive training program covering all aspects of large-scale Agile software development. Ariel is providing the following training courses to SSA OIG:

1. Fundamentals of Agile
2. Human Centered Design / Design Thinking / Customer Experience/CX
3. Team-Level Scrum
4. Team-Level Kanban
5. Scaling Scrum (LeSS, SAFe, Nexus, Scrum@Scale, DAD)
6. Scaling Kanban / Scaling Scrum with Kanban (Kanban Flight Levels, Multi-Team Flow)
7. Agile Requirements: Rolling Wave Planning with User Stories
8. Agile Estimation, Forecasting, and Metrics
9. Test Automation: TDD, ATDD, BDD
10. DevOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code
11. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) with Version One and Atlassian
12. Agile Architectures: Microservices, Testability, Manageability, Instrumentation, and Hexagonal Architectures

The SSA is currently executing a large (>$100M) Agile project to replace the mission-critical disability system; a complex system that interacts with 54 state-based systems (including Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa). Ariel is helping SSA OIG to identify better practices for forecasting, planning, DevOps, and reporting and to flag poor practices such as using non-normalized Story Points and assuming that cycle times follow a normal distribution/bell curve when constructing schedule forecasts.