Bill Rinko-Gay

DSNY has to schedule the activities of 6,000 personnel six days each week. SMART was designed to allow them to do this scheduling with full, real-time oversight and reporting. DSNY replaced a system of physical boards, a mainframe application, and telephone calls with a web-based GUI that planners and supervisors could access in collaboration.

SMART had been in development for three years and had failed UAT. DSNY decided to re-launch with internal consultants. I was brought in to manage the project and to teach the team Scrum. Our first MVP was delivered in 14 months. Over subsequent months we implemented DevOps, microservices using containers (Rancher), and shift-left QA processes.

The final phase, SMART 3, was implemented as an independent development contract. This was NYC’s first fully Agile contract with bi-weekly deliverables and invoicing. I acted as project manager and scrum master, responsible for resource management, budgeting, scheduling, risk management, and release planning. Smart 3 was initiated and successfully deployed in 11 months.

I managed a team of 15 developers, business analysts, testers, and product owners to switch from one underlying technology to the other with a critical LaunchPad product. The look and feel had to match the old technology, but the architecture was from the new.

I showed the product owners how to create and manage a backlog. We worked out the MVP and the acceptance criteria. I then coached them in working with their scrum team to achieve success.

I guided the scrum team to create a definition of done to include all testing. We split the product backlog into sprints, then implemented sprint planning, daily scrums, sprint reviews, and sprint retrospectives to ensure we would deliver. We also implemented a continuous backlog refinement activity. I had to show several techniques to the QA team to allow them to test user stories within each sprint.

At sprint reviews, we demonstrated potentially releasable software and achieved sign-off from the product owner.

At the end of the project, we received authorization to train the other teams in Scrum. I became the agile coach for five scrum teams and provided guidance for the support team to set up a Kanban process.

The purpose of Common Intake was to allow businesses to fill in company information once. This database of information could be used to apply for the certificates (such as a certificate of occupancy) and permits (such as a permit for an outside eating area) to any agency with which we were integrated.

When I began, the development agency had a history of being late with incomplete requirements. I used my IT knowledge and problem-solving skills to deliver our projects according to plan.

When I first started, I learned that the development team was developing in architectural layers. This meant that each release was an all-or-nothing deployment. Using Agile principles, I taught the team to develop one group of certificates or permits at a time so that we could show them for UAT in a phased manner to simplify testing. This also led to improved quality and a better relationship with the agencies we were supporting.

At one point in the project, the Mayor’s office insisted that public-facing City software start accommodating translations in six languages. After the scope of one of our releases was already agreed to, I used an agile collaborative approach to implement a section of our software supporting the six languages.