Disciplined Agile Applied

Software is at the heart of every modern organization. Before COVID-19 you likely heard the phrase "software is eating the world" and certainly COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation efforts of organizations that were still in the process of coming around to this philosophy.  But what does this really mean?  I believe that there are several important implications to consider:  

1. The majority of organizations are really software organizations (whether they know it or not). For example, a bank is a software company that makes money providing financial services to you. A grocery chain is a software company that makes money selling food to you. An insurance company is a software organization that makes money selling insurance to you. And so on.  None of these organizations would be in business today without sophisticated software-based systems. This has a profound implication for your organization’s processes – if your enterprise is a software organization, then to be successful your organization must be effective in the creation and operation of software that provides real business value to you and your customers. If your products or service offerings are mostly intangible in nature then you're a software organization.

2. Software is critical in non-software organizations too.  There are still organizations that deal with mostly physical things.  For example, consider a construction company that builds houses, office buildings, roads, and other tangible things. They use computer-aided design (CAD) software to capture their architectural plans, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to manage their organization, project management software to organize their projects, and many more.  Even if they are “merely” purchasing commercial packages to do this they still have important integration, both technical and people-oriented, to perform. 

3. Other aspects of your organization are still important. Having said all this, no organization is completely focused on software.  There are still sales, finance, vendor management, legal, and many other important functions performed within your organization. These functions must fit together and can always be improved upon.  

4. It’s really about “software plus”.  Although a properly functioning heart is certain critical for your wellbeing, there’s more to you than just your heart.  Similarly, although software is at the heart of your organization you need to address far more than that to be effective in today’s environment.  This is why many of the process blades of the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit, the hexes in Figure 1, clearly address non-IT issues.

Figure 1. The Disciplined Agile tool kit.

This is why the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit is more sophisticated than the agile software development frameworks you may be familiar with.  With DA we choose to address the actual challenge that you face, not just the IT part of the challenge.