From Waterfall to Agile: Lessons Learned During the NOAA/NESDIS/OCS Journey to Expedite Transition to Ops in the Cloud

Historically, the transition of research to operations within NOAA’s National Environmental Satellite, Data, and Information Service (NESDIS) has followed the Waterfall Methodology, which emphasizes a linear, sequential transition from beginning to end, with project phases that do not advance until a phase receives final approval. Development activities took place on prem and several handoffs occurred throughout an algorithm’s lifecycle. In FY21, NESDIS adopted the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe®) methodology to develop, deploy, and migrate algorithms/services into the NESDIS Common Cloud Framework (NCCF). Now, two years later, NESDIS is approaching its 13th Program Increment (a 3 month planning cycle). This presentation looks at the lessons learned along the way and challenges and improvements through adopting this new process, while providing a high level overview of the differences between Waterfall and Agile project management, information on the NESDIS Product Generation (PG) agile processes, and future plans for improving the agility, structure, and flow for all aspects of the research to operations process.