The role of technology to successful law enforcement, significantly changed since the proliferation of telephones and two way radios in the early twentieth century. From 1995 to 2003, the federal government invested in more than 1.3 billion to equip 4,500 law enforcement agencies’ fighting technologies such as mobile data centers (MDCs), automated field reporting systems (AFRS), record management systems (RMS), computer aided dispatch systems (CAD) and automated fingerprint identification systems (AFIS). Since then, adoption of information technology (IT) such as web applications, desktop applications, websites and business intelligence solutions steadily increased, improving crime prevention.
Law enforcement and IT
In using IT to introduce innovations in law enforcement, agencies developed risk classification tools, threat assessment protocols and bullying identification tools. Applications to prevent identify theft and data privacy, tools for monitoring the location and movement of at-risk populations were also developed. In fact, the use of IT in law enforcement have so been successful that 41.6% of agencies from the study conducted by Byrne and Marx reported the implementation of web and desktop applications for key systems such as record management and systems for arrest and booking, crime analysis and mapping.
The pain-points
However, not all web development projects in law enforcement end up successful. The fact is, when a police officer graduates from the academy, managing IT projects are the least of their concerns. In effect, managing web development projects in law enforcement takes a lot of organization, understanding of business requirements, stakeholder management and systems integration.
Most police administrative managers often end up dealing with a lot of web development issues such as scope creep, missed deadlines, cost overruns and frustrated police officers. Scope creep or the tendency of some agencies to keep on adding new scope, significantly deviating the web development project from its original requirement, plagues most agencies and is a top contributing factor on missed projects. In fact, average project statistics showed that 43% of them are often late, over budget or with few features that users actually find useful.
If your agency is also experiencing challenges to effectively manage scope on web development projects, here are the top three things that you can do:
First, take a step back and recall the objective of the web development project
Return to the approved business case and see what is the initiative’s intended purpose. Is the web development project supposed to cut down costs or improve performance of a lagging key performance indicator (KPI)? Or, is the project supposed to introduce a new capability from bottom-up requirements gathering from police officers? If your web development project is geared towards improving an already existing capability; or aims to introduce a new way of doing things in the agency, it is best to control your scope based on the objective as defined in your baseline document. Maintaining baselines to effectively manage the scope is a best practice as defined by the Project Management Institute (PMI). Baselines should be regularly revisited most especially if you encounter frequent changes that move the schedule 5-15% away from its original completion date.
Second, implement modern scope management approaches such as design thinking
A lot of times, IT decision makers in the agency, scope and design web applications and sites depending on what they believe will be useful to police officers. However, what directors believe as useful are often times different to what the end-users really need. In the end, because requirements mismatch becomes prevalent, requests keeps on changing leading to a seemingly non-ending cycle of scope creep.
Design thinking is a creative strategy that allows project owners within the agency to match the web development requirements to what actually the police officers need. It follows a five stage process:
- Empathize – understand the users who will use the application. Do this through observation, interaction and immersion;
- Define – from your empathy work, process and synthesize your findings and define the scope from a user point of view;
- Ideate – explore a variety of solutions that can address these problems; think outside of the box
- Prototype – create a tangible form of your idea and interact with them; during the process learn more about your users and iterate; and
- Test – Gather observation and feedback from the users based on these prototypes and further refine your original point of view.
Third, adopt an agile scope management approach in web development
Remember, design thinking and agility goes hand in hand; though admittedly, doing this successfully is easier said than done.
A lot of times, the agency’s understanding of what they need are just limited to capabilities and features. Perhaps, you know that you just need a crime analysis web application that aggregates data from various sources such as crime reports, arrests reports, police calls to identify emerging patterns, series and trends. But, you do not know specifically how to break down these features to fit in a full software development life cycle (SDLC) requirement such as: data model, operating model, web pages, modules, business logic, workflows, integration requirements, etc.
If this scenario is no longer new to you, then its better to shift your scope management approach from Waterfall to Agile, such as Scrum. Unlike the more traditional “big-bang” approach to scope management, Scrum allows you to focus on delivering the most important capabilities and features of your crime analysis application in an incremental and iterative process. This means that your web development team will prioritize working on the features that you immediately need, finish an increment that you can already use in a 20-day time-box and regularly solicit your feedback (i.e. daily) so that scope management and quality is built-in every single day.
Remember, effective scope management does not only determine project success but also can deliver solutions for agencies that can help not only police officers, but the general public. When faced with scope creep, it is important to take a step back and see the bigger picture. Start to pivot by implementing more creative and agile approaches to solution development. It is crucial as well to find a partner that can deliver IT projects using the right framework, tools and techniques. Contact DVG Interactive to learn more.
