US DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE – US FOREST SERVICE

HR Technology & platforms

CASE STUDY

practice area

Human Capital & Workforce Innovation

About USFS

The mission of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Forest Service (FS) is to maintain the health, diversity and productivity of the nation’s forests and grasslands, ensuring they meet the needs of present and future generations. To fulfill this mission, the FS relies on a workforce of 40,000 permanent and seasonal employees, including firefighters, forest rangers, biologists, recreational specialists, senior executives, presidential appointees and business operational staff.

United States Forest Service (USFS) Seal

our expertise

HR Operations & Technology

Challenge

In FY21, to align with COVID 19 restrictions and policies, HRES turned to our agile teams for help developing a streamlined enterprise-wide telework solution. Forest Service employees and supervisors are required to sign a telework agreement, but their existing Adobe form (AD-3018) was static, had usability issues, lacked integration with NFC mainframe, and was not robust enough to support accurate reporting by the data management team. There was also a need for a central agreements repository.

Solution

Through the duration of 11 three-week sprint cycles, Longevity’s program management team supported the USDA’s software team and iteratively developed an application that would support the processing of initiation, eligibility assessment, approval, termination and tracking of telework requests, and integration with EmpowHR, Paycheck8, and Enterprise Directory.

In collaboration with the CIO, our PMO teams took a human-centered approach – eliciting end users’ input in the user interface design (e.g., wireframes), product demonstration feedback, and testing to maximize user experience.

We completed small pieces of backlog one sprint at a time, using GitHub as our main source of tracking. Stakeholder engagement played a major role in the gathering, refinement, and validation of requirements. The product backlog for the telework agreement application consisted of 150+ user stories required for the solution to fulfill the needs of stakeholders and leadership. We often decomposed the larger user stories from the backlog and broke them down into smaller user stories called epics.

Business Impact

The impact was felt immediately. The app centralized and streamlined the request process, which meant more transparency and clarity around supervisor/employee decisions. With their new, robust platform, HRES collects accurate data throughout all levels of the organization including USDA reporting requirements.

Employees impacted

40k

User stories and acceptance criteria gathered, refined and developed

150+

Artifacts produced

60+

Forms submitted since app launch

39k

Executives trained on using the solution

200+

Testimonial

“Our PMO Team was the glue that kept the project flowing. Through consistent communications with the cross-functional teams, the PMO led with transparency in persistence to carry out the project roadmap.”