TYSONS CORNER, Va.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Octo Consulting Group (Octo), an award-winning provider of technology and digital services to the federal government, today announced that it has been awarded a contract by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to provide the agency with comprehensive agile training. The Enterprise Agile Training contract tasks Octo to assist CMS adopt and integrate agile methodologies across the entire agency to better manage and support the agency’s IT needs.
Over the past several years, CMS has assumed even greater responsibilities in providing access to affordable high quality healthcare and processing claims from a multitude of programs. As such, the agency began to see the value in leveraging agile methodologies to quickly build and deploy applications and systems to effectively respond to the rapidly changing healthcare landscape.
To address the need for an agency-wide adoption of agile methodologies, Octo will establish an Agile Center of Excellence (CoE) at CMS to facilitate the sharing of agile best practices, provide a strategic framework for adopting agile across CMS programs, and offer training and advisory support for the entire agency.
"By fully embracing agile and committing the entire agency to adoption, CMS is truly taking forward-thinking steps that few agencies have been willing to undertake," said Jay Shah, executive vice president, Octo. "While the benefits of agile are clear, most implementations within government agencies have been confined to small projects or programs. We're honored to partner with CMS to mature the agency's level of agility and assist them in effectively meeting their mission of strengthening the nation's healthcare system."
At the core of the CMS training engagement is the Octo Agile CoE which provides a mechanism for government agencies to mature their adoption of agile. The Octo Agile CoE helps agencies leverage agile methodologies through the incremental implementation of agile practices at the team, program, and portfolio levels. Octo will assist CMS's agile maturity by focusing on specific improvements on the agency's people, process, and tools by creating a series of action plans and trainings.
Agile is at the core of all of Octo's customer engagement. Octo has previously implemented its Agile CoE's at United States Patent and Trade Office (USPTO) and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and has had numerous agile engagements at other federal agencies such as the National Institute of Health (NIH), National Geospatial Agency (NGA) and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). Octo is certified to use the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for its agile development and training engagements, which is an industry recognized standard for agile methodologies, and is only one of three federal contractors with this certification.
After working with other health agencies such as the NIH and CDC for over ten years, the Enterprise Agile Training contract represents the first engagement with CMS for Octo. The period of performance for the contract is one year.
Octo is an industry-leading, award-winning provider of digital services for the Federal Government. Octo specializes in providing agile software development, user experience design, and cloud engineering services that address the government’s most pressing missions and modernization challenges.
Octo is one of only 23 private companies in the United States to have been appraised at CMMI® Level 4 for Software Development Maturity (CMMI-DEV constellation). In addition, Octo also maintains ISO 9001:2008, ISO 20000:2013, and ISO 27001:2013 certifications, and is one of only seven government contractors that is a Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Gold Partner: an industry-accepted framework for developing software applications using Agile development principles.
Headquartered in Tysons Corner, Virginia, Octo has additional offices in Alexandria, Virginia, Fulton, Maryland and Atlanta, Georgia.
