Disciplined Agile Applied

I recently wrote an article for PMI's ManageIndia magazine entitled Going Beyond Remote Agile: Are You Ready For Your Next Change? In the article I argue that coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a “black swan event” that has forced most organizations to scramble to figure out how to do their work remotely. Many agile teams are struggling to work remotely, this being particularly tough for some agilists who had mistakenly convinced themselves that they needed to be co-located to be agile. Most teams now are well on the way to adopting common solutions to this challenge. 

But what about next time? I work through five important points to lead you to organize your work smoothly and what you can do the next time you need to identify a new way of working (WoW):

1. Recognize that remote agile isn't new. Others have already dealt with the challenges that you face.
2. Geographic distribution is only one of several scaling factors that you face. You may need to address other, even harder, challenges in the future. 
3. Choice is good. If you know what options are available to you, it's easier to choose your WoW to meet the context that you face.
4. You don't need to work everything out on your own. The Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit provides consumable, proven, agnostic, and pragmatic options.
5. We need to do better than "fail fast." You can fail a lot less often with a bit of help that we call guided continuous improvement (GCI).

We live in interesting times. The article Going Beyond Remote Agile: Are You Ready For Your Next Change? goes into detail and should provide valuable insights. You can download the full issue of PMI's ManageIndia April 2020 as a pdf.