Leveraging Field Innovation to Support the NWS of the Future

The National Weather Service (NWS) is an agency filled with innovative ideas and initiatives with the purpose of better serving our communities, Core Partners, and ourselves as an “internal partner”. However, the unique and evolving needs of those we serve and the breadth of innovation across the agency present challenges to working toward common solutions. By working collaboratively, we've demonstrated success in bringing multiple cross regional efforts together to create a common prototype. Examples include the IDSS Briefing Builder, IDSS Threat Matrix, and IDSS GIS Dashboard, all of which currently solve local needs and have the potential to fulfill national NWS Core Partner needs through the IDSS Management System (IMS). We have evolved such efforts to make our agency more agile, where the communication between Operations and Development is more iterative and fluid. This is a new dawn for the NWS, and the much talked about IMS which will consist of a suite of IDSS tools. Having its foundations now set, IMS will be the agency’s first venture into an iterative, agile development practice. In this talk we will explore the mechanics of this agile engagement through the IMS’ future builds and will discuss how this may change future training by breaking lessons into smaller pieces.