<story><title>How a two-day sprint moved an agency twenty years forward</title><url>https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/09/how-a-two-day-spring-moved-an-agency-twenty-years-forward/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>kzhahou</author><text>Does anyone see value in the huge emphasis on the &amp;quot;sprint&amp;quot; term?  Advocates promote the word as a new way of working, but I see it as just adding confusion for the audience it&amp;#x27;s trying to reach.  That is, if I&amp;#x27;m a person entrenched in government and want to learn about this new way people are working, and I see the word SPRINT everywhere, I might assume it&amp;#x27;s some complex new idea.  But it&amp;#x27;s not -- it&amp;#x27;s just a time period with goals.  Those have existed forever.&lt;p&gt;The real win in this short project came from having a cross-functional team in the room, in a working session with a clear short-term goal.  So just say that.</text></comment>
<story><title>How a two-day sprint moved an agency twenty years forward</title><url>https://18f.gsa.gov/2015/09/09/how-a-two-day-spring-moved-an-agency-twenty-years-forward/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>_kst_</author><text>&amp;quot;The handbook consists of four five-inch-thick binders containing printed and photocopied pages. These binders are replicated and distributed across numerous regional and local offices. The handbook also exists as online PDFs, where each chapter or subsection is published as its own PDF. With these two options, investigators don’t have an easy way to quickly access and search for much-needed information that helps them complete investigations, particularly when they’re working out in the field.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;If I were working in that environment, I&amp;#x27;d concatenate the multiple PDFs into one so I could search the entire set from any PDF reader. It&amp;#x27;s probably not as convenient as a web interface with a more sophisticated search facility, but it solves &lt;i&gt;part&lt;/i&gt; of the problem fairly quickly.&lt;p&gt;To concatenate multiple PDFs:&lt;p&gt;&lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;    gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH - \
       sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=ALL.pdf *.pdf
&lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt;
Adjust the paper size and the order of the input files to taste.&lt;p&gt;(&amp;quot;gs&amp;quot; is the Ghostscript command.)</text></comment>