Disciplined Agile

Mark Lines and I edited a special issue of the Cutter Business Journal in 2018 entitled A Disciplined Agile Approach to Business Agility which can be downloaded free of charge.  It contains several articles.

Itamae, the Agile Organization, and You by John Hogan

Hogan shares some insights on delighting customers. He argues for a customer-focused organizational structure, with Agile teams supported by Agile leadership. Hogan describes the importance of goal setting to focus on delighting customers, supported by incremental planning and delivery to do so. He works through the implications for:

1. People who face the customer. These people need to understand what customers need and then fulfill that need.
2. People who face each other. They need to identify their internal customers, collaborate with them, and bring business value to them at the lowest possible cost.
3. People who face suppliers. These people are effectively customers to that supplier and must collaborate with them as transparently as possible and should expect to be delighted.
4. People who are managers and leaders. They must be customer-focused and empower your teams.

The Agile Enterprise and the Division of Labor by Gene Callahan

Gene Callahan has some great advice for building awesome people. Beginning with the idea of the division of labor, Callahan walks us through the history of how traditional organizations find themselves as a collection of specialists who struggle to be responsive to the changing marketplace. He then examines the need for people who are generalizing specialists (people who can collaborate effectively and learn from one another).

The Necessities for Successful Enterprise Agile Transformation by Matthew Ganis and Michael Ackerbauer

This article describes how to build awesome teams. You want to be Agile (of course!) and adopt Agile practices. Awesome teams have the skills and resources to fulfill their mission and include the right mix of personalities. The authors argue that the organization is really a “team of teams” that needs a shared purpose and way of working to make the abstract concrete. According to them, awesome teams build on a common foundation based on the concept of Breakthrough Thinking/diversity of thought.

Business Agility: A Roadmap for the Digital Enterprise by Jaco Viljoen

In his discussion of the five levels of a digital business ecosystem (DBE), Jaco Viljoen explores the idea that“choice is good because context counts.” The five levels, each with its own set of capabilities that build one on top of another, are: waterfall/traditional, hybrid Agile (a combination of waterfall and Agile), regular delivery, continuous delivery, and continuous exploration. The five DBEs provide insight into which process-building blocks to apply. Viljoen also discusses using a frame- work to achieve business agility at scale.

Case Study: Linking Business Workflows and Agile User Stories in an SOA Environment by Gill Kent and Robin Harwood

Gill and Robin provide a case study about linking Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN) workflows and user stories. They focus on the importance of initial modeling during what they call the Discovery phase of a digital trans-formation project. In their example, they followed a pragmatic, Agile approach to modeling the business and their host systems to gain important insight into the enterprise transformation scope and a vision of the required system change for their endeavor. This enabled them to establish a business/stakeholder vision that captured a clear scope for the following phases. With an initial technical strategy/architecture identified, the team was able to name a backlog of architecturally relevant stories, mitigating the risk of late identification of system integration requirements and the potential for significant rework. In short, a pragmatic investment in initial modeling and planning paid off in huge divi-dends for their Agile team.

The Wizard of OSS: Follow the Open Space and Sociocracy Road to Enterprise Agile Transformation by Jutta Eckstein and John Buck

The principle of enterprise awareness appears in several of the articles, and Jutta Eckstein and John Buck walk us through an enterprise-aware approach that helps optimize the process flow of value streams. The authors show how to apply “Open Space” and “Sociocracy” to support enterprise Agile transformation. Open Space is a technique where everyone is invited to put forward ideas that they’re passionate about; if there is enough interest in the idea people will get behind it and make it happen. Sociocracy is a form of democracy for use in organizations, building feedback mechanisms into the organizational structure itself that ensure every voice is heard. Both strategies promote enterprise awareness, increasing collaboration between people in what would normally be disparate parts of the organization and helping optimize flow as the situation evolves.

Core Thinking Patterns for Lean/Agile Organizations by Srinivas Garapati

This article explores important philosophies and the mindset behind Agile and Lean. He starts with the thinking patterns required to be successful and then considers the nature of an Agile organization and finishes with strategies for organizational design.

The results of the 2018 State of Agile survey (StateOfAgile.com) have just been released.  This survey, while not particularly scientific in its approach, is a widely read and frequently quoted survey of what people are actually doing on a variety of agile topics.  It is good to see that Disciplined Agile continues to grow in popularity, up from 5% marketshare to 7%, behind only  SAFe which commands a 30% market share and is the clear leader (Scrum of Scrums is ahead of DAD, but it is just a practice, not a method).  While we are very pleased that people are finally starting to understand what DA is and how it can help them, I am not particularly fond of the way the question is framed in the survey and would like to share my thoughts for how it could be improved, and my interpretation of the findings.

1. Disciplined Agile (DAD) is listed as an option in the “Which scaling method/approach do you use?”.  People who understand DA know that it is actually not specifically a scaling framework.  It is rather a toolkit of strategies, a hybrid of practices from many methods and frameworks which can help you optimize your way of working (WoW) regardless of which approach you use.  It can be used on one small Scrum team, or dozens of SAFe teams.  Whatever approach you use, DA can help you to become even more awesome! #beawesome
2. As I said above, Scrum of Scrums should not be one of the choices as it is simply a coordination practice for Scrum at scale, not a method.
3. “Don’t know” is interesting as an option.  It puzzles me that people that are answering this survey aren’t aware of their organization’s approach.  My suspicion is that many of the people picking this selection actually mean “Not applicable” as many organizations do not scale agile.  I think that this should available as a selection.
4. The question really should be a multiple choice, rather than single.  Most organizations use a variety of approaches.  It would be more useful to ask “What percentage of your IT spend uses each of the following approaches?”
5. Spotify is actually not a framework.  It is how a Swedish music company circa 2014 had adapted agile at that point in time, to optimize their WoW for their unique context.  If you copy their approach you are copying an old approach of a company in a situation unlike yourselves, and for which they have evolved away from significantly.
6. I find “Internally created methods” intriguing as a choice.  We think that this is what all companies should aspire towards.  Start with either where you are currently, or one of the other methods (recipes), and then use the DA Toolkit to either evolve away from, or to improve your approach for your unique organization and team context.
7. Spotify actually embodies this approach.  They have continually evolved, improving, and optimizing their way of working.  Menlo Innovations also has done the same thing, starting with Extreme Programming (XP) as their core method, and then optimized for what works for them.  Rather than copying other companies approaches we should “learn how to learn” about what works best for us. We describe this approach of leveraging proven fit-for-context practices in our Choose your Wow! book as “Continuous Guided Improvement”.  Starting with some basic scaffolding of an existing method (what we refer to as “lifecycles” in DAD) provides a jumpstart on your WoW optimization.

We would recommend that you do not aspire to “be Spotify”, but rather “be like Spotify”.  Start with a basic method/lifecycle (recipe), then spice it up with the help of proven strategies from the DA Toolkit (ingredients).

Become your own Spotify or Menlo, not somebody else’s.

Thoughts?

Not a week goes by where we are not asked to contrast DAD to SAFe.  In this short blog I would like to point out some things to consider as you decide whether to implement SAFe, DAD, or both.  First of all, a review of some quick facts about DAD:

• DAD is a process decision framework, not a methodology.  It is a hybrid of leading agile and lean methods with guidance on how to make better choices when applying strategies for the situation that you find yourself in.  DAD can be summed up as “pragmatic agile“, giving you the flexibility to adapt your approach for your unique context.
• DAD is not a scaling framework per se.  Indeed it can be equally effective on one small team as it is for agile at scale.  However mastering the DAD fundamentals of agile and lean in the enterprise dramatically increases your probability of sustainable success at scale.
• Unlike other frameworks, DAD supports four lifecycles:  Agile/Scrum, Lean, Continuous Delivery, and Exploratory/Lean Startup.  Most if not all large organizations will find each of these lifecycles to be necessary in some situations.

SAFe provides a largely prescriptive approach to decomposing large initiatives into smaller streams of work which can be implemented by a number of teams in parallel with periodic integrations of their work and delivery to stakeholders.  SAFe does fill a need as our industry had been lacking such a pattern for scaling these large initiatives.  In our opinion, it is suitable for situations for large agile teams (say 100+) and are working on a cohesive product ideally based upon a shared architecture.  The teams should also be very competent and can be depended on to reliably deliver functionality on a common cadence with the other teams in their release train.  SAFe is definitely not a good fit for teams new to agile.

In the last few weeks I reached out to a couple of our customers at very large organizations to find out in their words why they selected DAD over SAFe.  In the first company, although they had been doing some agile in pockets over the last eight or so years, they were lacking consistency in their approach and struggling to achieve the promised benefits of agile.  They initially chose to rollout SAFe.  However, after training 120+ practitioners they stopped the training and chose to pivot to DAD.  They realized that SAFe was a poor fit for their organization for the following reasons:

• The level of disruption required to roll out SAFe across the organization was not palatable
• The investment in training and the overhead associated with running the SAFe program would be too high
• SAFe would not be applicable to all types of projects so they would need another framework anyway.

In the second example, we spoke with a Fortune 100 company that is farther along in their agile journey with many highly advanced agile teams.  Their agile community of practice has over 1,700 members and they use many flavours of agile and lean.  They made a choice to go with DAD across the company rather than SAFe.  They do use SAFe in one area of business that has a large yet highly cohesive development team working on a common product.  But beyond this line of business they have a vast array of projects, technologies, and skill sets.  They chose DAD for the following reasons:

• Enterprise practicality
• A choice of four lifecycles supporting all flavors of agile yet having some consistency that a toolkit provides
• Built-in, lightweight agile governance
• Most of their development teams are geographically dispersed which would make SAFe impractical
• Support for projects using more traditional approaches (Note: In the majority of large enterprises agile teams need to collaborate with traditional teams)

We of course understand DAD’s value proposition but it is particularly useful to hear it from real customers.  While we are pleased that SAFe has given us a pattern for scaling agile initiatives albeit in a largely rigid and prescriptive fashion, we encourage you to consider the following points before rolling it out aggressively across your organization:

• Do you really need to have large projects?  A large organization does not necessarily equate to large development teams.  In fact you should try to reduce the size of your projects and product teams whenever possible to reduce overall risk.  In short, your first approach should be to “descale” to whatever degree possible because large projects typically fail.
• DAD provides the foundation for scaling.  Without a solid base of enterprise agile capability it will be difficult to successfully adopt scaling frameworks such as SAFe or LeSS.  If you’re still struggling to succeed consistently on small agile teams, what makes you think you can succeed on large agile teams?
• Agile governance built in.  Your sponsors don’t care what agile “religion” you follow.  They would however like to see consistent views on the health and status of your projects regardless of the implementation approach.  DAD provides guidance on lightweight governance in a consistent fashion.
• DAD is pragmatic agile.  The framework provides rich and flexible guidance for the vast array of situations that your organization faces.  DAD does this through its process goal driven approach.  Choice is good.
• One process does not fit all.  Beware the hype.  There is no silver-bullet process.  Even if you find a place to utilize SAFe, you will need other approaches.  So beware of hitting all projects with the SAFe sledgehammer.  It simply doesn’t fit in many if not most situations.

In a nutshell, our recommendation is to adopt DAD to support the diversity of people, processes, and technologies found in any large organization.  Then apply the SAFe scaling pattern if and when it makes sense.  Not the other way around.

In an upcoming article we will be describing how you could apply DAD to help you be more successful in your SAFe implementations.