Director of the IT Standards and Program Support Divisions, Office of the CIO, Department of Homeland Security
William Pratt exhibited outstanding leadership at the Department of Homeland Security by energizing and pushing through a departmentwide process for adopting agile IT development.
He planned, scheduled and implemented a streamlined systems engineering life cycle, which will help align all DHS efforts by eliminating the requirement for component agencies to maintain their own development life cycle processes. He also helped set agile and incremental software development as the default process at DHS.
All software development at DHS now must take an “agile first” approach — a significant change in direction that will save a significant amount of money.
Pratt established the IT Program Management Center of Excellence to promote best practices, provide tools and information, and coordinate assistance to programs and projects to maximize the successful management of DHS IT investments. He also manages the tracking of DHS performance measures for IT initiatives.
His goal — in collaboration with partners across DHS headquarters and component agencies — is nothing less than the transformation of how DHS acquires IT resources by transitioning from dated waterfall models to the latest state-of-the-art agile and DevOps techniques.
Pratt’s influence extends beyond DHS; he has also helped several other federal agencies kick-start their own agile software development processes.
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