This seems well done. And although it probably sounds pedestrian to most of us, this seems like an awfully big step coming from the U.S. government. Now the question is whether or not any agencies will actually follow any of this sage advice.
As a snarky aside, it would be nice if the Obama administration would themselves follow rule #13, and "default to open".
The key thing is, there are 3 bazillion developers and techies sprinkled all throughout the US Govt. This playbook provides all of them a common base form which to start. For that reason, it's really valuable.
That's why this is actually important: when the President of the United States announces a major push to improve government IT and publishes a policy guide like this, it creates a shelter for all of the people working on the inside who want to do things differently. Nothing is going to improve until the environment changes so that departmental CIO has to justify sticking with waterfall, overpaying for servers, delaying projects rather than using a different approach, etc.
It does make more sense as instructions from the US CIO to Departmental and Agency CIOs, because those are the people preventing anyone from operating on anything as modern as they describe. My agency's Washington Office fixers have us on IE8 for the foreseeable and I'm not allowed to use ssl without a tech approval.
"Be sure and have a Budget Officer at your meeting!"
Oh, believe me, I can relate. The difference is that now I can see the waterfail faction starting to realize they need to change. Once you get a few data points for comparison, it becomes hard to maintain that the status quo is maintainable.
The trick is really to turn it into an economic argument. Figure out how to get the budget officer to start asking why project Y requires servers + staff at an order of magnitude greater than project X and the pressure starts shifting.
https://github.com/WhiteHouse/playbook/blob/gh-pages/assets/...