McKinsey & Company – March 2016 – From waterfall to agile: How a public-sector agency successfully changed its system- development approach to become digital, Martin Lundqvist and Peter Braad Olesen.

“Government agencies around the world are under internal and external pressure to become more efficient by incorporating digital technologies and processes into their day-to-day operations. For a lot of public-sector organizations, however, the digital transformation has been bumpy. In many cases, agencies are trying to streamline and automate workflow and processes using antiquated systems-development approaches. Such methods make direct connections between citizens and governments over the Internet more difficult. They also prevent IT organizations from quickly adapting to ever-changing systems requirements or easily combining information from disparate systems. Despite the emergence, over the past decade, of a number of productivity-enhancing technologies, many government institutions continue to cling to old, familiar ways of developing new processes and systems. Nonetheless, a few have been able to change mind-sets internally, shed outdated approaches to improving processes and developing systems, and build new ones. Critically, they have embraced newer techniques, such as agile development, and succeeded in accelerating the digital transformation in core areas of their operations. The Danish Business Authority is one of those organizations. This agency is charged with registering corporations that do business in Denmark. With the world economy teetering in 2009, it decided it could no longer maintain a largely manual registration process. It believed that replacing paper forms sent by mail with a simple online process was crucial to keeping the country economically vibrant. Specifically, a new digital- registration process would show both domestic and foreign companies that it was easy to do business in Denmark, help track money laundering, and better identify companies that didn’t report their income or pay taxes on it. The Danish Business Authority set a goal of completing the specifications of a digital-registration system by 2011 so software developers could begin their programming efforts and formally roll out the streamlined process by 2014. In the first two years of the initiative, the agency used the traditional “waterfall” approach to design and development. But the effort stalled for a number of reasons, including ever-changing systems requirements and slow decision making…”