6. Project Guidance

Agile development methods are recommended for AAM projects. There are several key differences between the agile approach to project team organization and the traditional project team approach described in the BPD Roles and Project Organization Guide, dated 24 Sept 2018. Agile teams are "whole teams" that have sufficient skills within the team itself to perform agile AAM contracts successfully. The implication is that the AAM agile development team has the requisite development skills, language skills, user interface skills, integration skills and testing skills and does not rely on external experts or teams of experts to perform development sprints.

There also has been significant training on SAFe for Government in HI which is still ongoing. This SAFe training is optimized for government organizations applying lean agile practices in a government project context and the training applies to the Full SAFe framework Portfolio, Large Solution, Program, and Teams organization principles. Organizations adopting the Full SAFe for Government agile contracts require a significant amount of training, which is out of the PMO’s personnel training budget.

Since not all PMOs would be amenable to paying for the needed SAFe training, in this AAM Playbooks section we drill down to the AAM project organization structure required to execute small and large AAM agile contract projects and describe the project functional roles in a less prescriptive PMO friendly manner that can be incorporated into a PMO’s AAM agile contract acquisition PWS. In addition, we summarize the AAM project phases and work items that the PMOs can use for PWS Section 3 Requirements to populate the description of required activities and tasks. We then present typical risks to look for in an AAM project.