Disciplined Agile

The Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit describes strategies for how an organization’s IT group can support a lean enterprise.  An important part of this is to have an effective IT operations strategy, and to do that the people involved need to have what we call a “lean IT operations mindset.”  The philosophies behind such a mindset include:

1. Run a trustworthy IT ecosystem.  At a high level the goal is to “keep the lights on.”  At a detailed level anyone responsible for IT operations wants to run an IT ecosystem that is sufficiently secure, resilient, available, performant, usable, and environmentally friendly.  Part of running a trustworthy ecosystem is monitoring running services so as to identify and hopefully avoid potential problems before they occur.  For some systems, and perhaps for your IT ecosystem as a whole, you may have service level agreements (SLAs) in place with your end users that guarantee a minimum level of trustworthiness.
2. Focus on the strategic (long-term) over the tactical (short-term).  Anyone responsible for IT operations needs to have a very good understanding between the long-term implications of a decision versus the short-term conveniences.  A classic example of this right now is the preference of people building micro-services to use what they believe to be the best technologies for each service.  This makes a lot of sense from the narrow viewpoint of that service and it often proves to be incredibly convenient, and fun, for the developers because they often get to work with new technologies.  However, from an operational point of view you end up with a mishmash of technologies that must be operated and evolved over time, resulting in a potential maintenance nightmare.  Yes, you will still make some short-term decisions but you should do so intelligently.  Too great a focus on the long term results in a stagnant IT ecosystem, too great a focus on short-term decisions results in operations teams who spend all their time fighting fires.  The long-term technical vision for your organization is developed by your Enterprise Architecture efforts and the long-term business vision comes from your Product Management activities.
3. Streamline the overall flow of work.  This arguably should be part of everyone’s mindset, but it is particularly important for people doing IT operations work.  IT operations has traditionally been a bottleneck in many organizations, often the result of the need to run a trustworthy ecosystem and to focus on long-term considerations, hence the need to focus on streamlining the overall flow of work. BUT, this isn’t just operational work that we need to streamline, but the overall flow of work into, within, and out of IT operations.  In this case we need a disciplined approach to DevOps that takes all aspects of the development-operations lifecycle into account, including the support of multiple development lifecycles (not just continuous delivery), the release management process, and the operational aspects of data management.  Of course, streamlining the flow of work goes beyond development-operations and is an important goal of your organization’s continuous improvement strategy.
4. Help end-users succeed.  An important goal of people performing operations activities is to ensure that your end users are successfully using your IT systems.  It doesn’t matter how well your systems are built, or how trustworthy they are, if your end users are unable or unwilling to use them effectively.  End users are going to need help – you need to be prepared to provide a support function.
5. Standardization without stagnation.  The more standardized your IT ecosystem is the easier it will be to run, to release new functionality into, and to find and fix problems if they should arise.  However, too much standardization can lead to stagnation where it becomes very difficult to evolve your ecosystem.  You will need to work very closely with people performing enterprise architecture and product management activities to ensure that you understand the long term vision and are working towards it.
6. Regulate releases into production.   Most DevOps strategies reflect the viewpoint of a single product team.  But what about the viewpoint of your overall IT ecosystem, which may comprise hundreds of products?  An interesting question to ask is what is the WIP limit for releases across your overall ecosystem?  In other words, what rate of change can your infrastructure, and your stakeholder community, bear?  In the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit this philosophy is an important driver of the Release Management process blade.  Furthermore, some regulatory compliance regimes call out a separation of concerns pertaining to release management – the people building a product are not allowed to release the product into production, someone else must make that decision and do the work (even if “the work” is merely pressing a button to run a script).
7. Sufficient documentation.  Yes, there will be some documentation maintained about your IT ecosystem.  Hopefully this documentation is concise, accurate, and high-level.  Common documentation includes an overview(s) of your infrastructure, release procedures (even if fully automated, there’s still some overview documentation and training), and high-level views of critical aspects of your infrastructure including security, data architecture, and network architecture.  Organizations that operate in regulated industries will of course need to comply to the documentation requirements of the appropriate regulations.  When infrastructure components are discoverable and self-documenting there is a lesser need for external documentation, but there is still a need.  Any documentation that you do create should be maintained under configuration management (CM) control.

Future blog postings in this series about IT operations and support will explore topics such as why you need IT operations and support, what activities you perform, and the workflow of doing such.

On May 17 2016 I gave a webinar entitled Agile Enterprise Architecture: Disciplined and Pragmatic Strategies (at this link you can watch a recording and download a PDF of the slides). During the webinar I received many questions, some of which we had time to answer but some which we did not.  Regardless, here are all of the questions and my answers.  I’ve organized them into the following topics:

1. Long vs. Short Term
2. Deferring Commitment
3. Transitioning to Agile EA
4. General

1. Long vs. Short Term

What about longer term? How do you see the role of EA on portfolio creation?  As you can see in Disciplined Agile’s Enterprise Architecture process blade one of the primary tasks of the EA activity is to consider the longer term. The enterprise architects will collaborate to do so, and will help bring their vision to their stakeholders in various ways.  As you can see in the workflow, the EAs will interact with the Portfolio Management effort (and many others).

How do you balance the needs of today vs. the needs of tomorrow? Would you wait for business to identify it as a priority, which may be too late… or look to get ahead of the curve and build something that can scale for anticipated growth? Experienced enterprise architects will definitely think about the long term needs of the organization. Disciplined Agile EAs will do so but will wait to act to the most appropriate time to do so.

2. Deferring Commitment

Can you point us to some places to read more about deferred commit? Deferring commitment to the last most responsible moment is a concept that comes from lean software development. I recommend the writings of Mary and Tom Poppendieck as well as the book SDLC 3 by Mark Kennaley.

If we defer commitment, how about if we need infrastructure, procurement and so on to implement that architecture? This deferring will delay the entire implementation? No. The advice is to defer commitment to the last most responsible moment.  You need to understand the needs of your stakeholders, which in Disciplined Agile include a wide range of people, and then act accordingly. The problem is that traditionalists will act too early and thus add unnecessary risk.

A good observation from Valentin Tudor-Mocanu is that to be able to defer decisions we need a design that separates the concerns (adaptive design).

3. Transitioning to Agile EA

Is there a strategy to change the mindset of enterprise architects on a large organization?  Yes. It first begins with education.  We offer a one-day workshop called Agile Enterprise Architecture: Disciplined and Pragmatic Strategies that does a very good job of working through the fundamentals.  The next step is coaching of the EA team themselves, and of the teams that they interact with, to help them gain the mindset and habits required to work in a more effective agile/lean manner.  We also provide such coaching services.

One specific question related to a service or consulting organization: One of the specific requirements for us to is to deliver architecture as a deliverable. How can agile can help us?  Can we apply sprints there?  Can we apply any architecture principles? I’ll assume you meant an architecture model as a deliverable. The answer is yes, you can easily create an architecture model in an agile manner. I highly suggest that you visit the Agile Modeling site and read the advice about agile architecture strategies and to agile documentation strategies.

4. General

Can you talk about metrics in agile EA and Architecture in general?  In the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit we suggest that you adopt a lightweight Goal-Question-Metric (GQM) approach to your metrics strategy. The fundamental idea behind GQM is that you first identify a goal that you would like to achieve, a set of questions whose answers are pertinent to determining how well you’re achieving that goal, and then the metric(s) that could help you to answer each question. In short, the metrics that you gather will vary based on your need.

Given that Feedback cycle plays an important role, why does DAD say “Reduce feedback cycle”? Is there a pre-defined cycle frequency?  You should find the blog posting Reducing the feedback cycle requires discipline to be an interesting read.

Some forms of architecture (UX/UI) need a different cadence than the delivery team follows. What is your recommendation for handling this… UX research, etc? I disagree with your premise. I’ve heard this claim in the past and it’s never held water with me.  About 10 years ago I wrote an article entitled Introduction to Agile Usability that overviews how UX activities can appear in the agile lifecycle.  The Lean UX community has clearly gone further than what I originally wrote so you might want to go poking around on the web a bit.

When the business case says “many years before payback”, doesn’t that usually mean that the business case is missing some important elements? (or that the org is really small) ?  My experience is that the business case is usually crap in these situations. There in fact a few things in the software world that may have a multi-year payback period, operating systems come to mind, but they are more the exception to the rule.  The problem with multi-year payback schemes in the software world is that the ecosystem changes so quickly.  During the several years it takes for payback your needs change, there are new options on the market, your organization structure and direction may change, and so on.

I realize I’m asking a history question here, but regarding deferring commitment, a superb method for this that I have often used in the past comes from RUP: architecture mechanisms. (I should know this but) Is this in DAD?  If you read the Enterprise Architecture process blade article you will see that it supports several strategies for capturing and communicating EA ideas such as reference architectures, models, architectural runways, interfaces, and many others. You might also find the Reuse Engineering process blade to be of interest.

Governance is a common thread throughout all aspects of the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit. Delivery governance activities were built right into Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) v1.x, each of the process blades include a governance process factor, and there is an IT Governance process blade that coordinates all IT governance activities.

The following process goal diagram overviews the potential activities associated with a disciplined approach to IT governance.  These activities are typically performed by a variety of people within your organization. In DA each of the process blades includes activities around governing the activities encapsulated by that blade. For example, the Enterprise Architecture blade includes architectural governance activities and the Data Management blade includes data/information governance activities.

The process factors that you need to consider for IT governance are:

1. Governance view. There are many potential aspects, or perhaps subsets, to IT governance including security governance, data governance, delivery governance, and more. Too many organizations make the mistake of treating each of these issues separately, which is easy enough to do given the different focus of each one. The Disciplined Agile toolkit promotes a more holistic, integrated view that results in a streamlined, consistent, and effective governance strategy. Another common mistake is to focus on portfolio governance over other aspects and have your Portfolio and Project Management Office (PPMO) be responsible for IT governance. PPMO-led governance efforts tend to result in documentation-heavy, bureaucratic strategies instead of lean, risk-based approaches.
2. Develop metrics. Metrics define the measurements that you will take to gain insight into what has happened, what is happening, and hopefully what may happen in the future. The least effective approach to metrics is to have a standard set that all teams are expected to collect whereas the most effective is a context-sensitive approach such as a light-weight implementation of Goal Question Metric (GQM).
3. Measure. The measures themselves can be collected either manually or automatically (usually as the result of tool or system usage). We have found that a combination of the two is required – although automated metrics are inexpensive, accurate, and real-time you cannot always automate all of the measurements that you need to collect.
4. Monitor. Information radiators are sufficient in smaller organizations, but automated dashboards in combination with direct interaction with teams are also needed in modern enterprises. Traditional strategies, such as status reports or status meetings, do not prove to be effective in practice nor do they provide an honest assessment of what is actually occurring.
5. Guidance detail. An easy and important way to support governance within your organization is to have commonly accepted guidance, including standards and guidelines, for teams to follow. We suggest that you keep this guidance lightweight, starting with high-level rules but aiming towards principles whenever possible.
6. Develop guidance. Guidance is ideally developed collaboratively with a combination of practitioners and experienced enterprise IT professionals who understand the bigger picture.
7. Define roles and responsibilities. The definition of roles and responsibilities is an important aspect of your overall governance strategy as it describes what is expected of people. We’ve found that the most effective way to do this is to start with the roles and responsibilities described in the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit and then collaboratively evolve them from there. The framework ha both delivery team roles as well as enterprise IT roles defined.
8. Manage IT risk. Risk management for the entire IT portfolio, including both in-progress development teams as well as operational risks. Small risks on individual teams can add up to a large risk across your organization. For example, if many teams adopt a new and relatively unproven framework and that framework is then abandoned by its creators (think about how many open source projects or new companies flounder) then you have a serious problem. Similarly, when multiple teams start addressing a similar business opportunity and that line of business dries up or is legislated away.  Although risk management is addressed on delivery teams via the goal Address Risk, their focus is on risk management within a team as opposed to risk management across all of IT, or even across all of your organization.

Related Reading:

• The Lean Governance Mindset
• Lean Governance Strategies
• What is Lean IT Governance?
• Why Lean IT Governance?
• What is Agile Delivery Governance?
• Strategies that Enable Agile Governance
• Supporting Agile Delivery Team Governance
• Lean vs. Traditional IT Governance

There are several strategies that you can adopt to promote a lean approach to governance. These strategies include:

1. Empowered teams. Teams should have both the authority and responsibility to fulfill their mission. Agile teams should be allowed to be self organizing, the implication being that the team itself determines who will do what work (the team doesn’t have a manager telling them what to do).   Related to that the team should own their process, which is the agile way of saying that the team is allowed to determine how it will work together and as the team learns it will evolve the process that it follows – of course the team will be guided and constrained by your organization’s governance strategy.
2. Enterprise awareness. One of the principles of the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit is that you should work in an enterprise aware manner. It is based on the observation that your team is only one of many teams, so therefore you need to consider the bigger picture when you’re working and do what is best for your organization, not just what is convenient for you. Promoting enterprise awareness throughout your organization is a fundamental enabler of lean governance.
3. High-level roadmaps. High-level technology and business roadmaps, produced by your Enterprise Architecture and Product Management efforts respectively, will provide important guidance to your teams. These roadmaps capture the vision as to where your organization is heading, helping teams to understand what the overall vision is, to focus on what is important to your organization, and to help guide and constrain their decisions.
4. Collaborative enterprise IT professionals. The DA toolkit includes several process blades, including Enterprise Architecture, Reuse Engineering, Data Management, and others that address enterprise level concerns. The people performing these activities should work closely with their customers, the delivery teams and stakeholders, in a collaborative and evolutionary manner. This promotes better governance for two reasons. First, by getting the vision, knowledge, and skills of the enterprise professionals into the hands of their customers it increases the chance that they work in a manner that is consistent to the needs of your organization. Second, the enterprise professionals want to get feedback from their customers and learn more about what their customers need from them. This enables them to be more effective at serving the enterprise and guiding their customers.
5. Enterprise IT knowledge in teams. Although roadmaps and enterprise IT professionals collaborating with development teams help, it is far more effective to have people with enterprise knowledge embedded within the development teams. This is why we promote the idea that Architecture Owners (AOs) should not only work closely with the enterprise architects but should preferably be a member of the EA team. Similarly, Product Owners (POs) should either work closely with the product management team or preferably be a member of that team.   And it’s possible to do better than that – if team members are truly enterprise aware and are continuous learners, then it is reasonable to expect them to pick up enterprise knowledge over time. The more knowledgeable people are about their organization and its goals the less supervision/governance they will need.
6. Automated dashboards. Automated dashboards, a strategy that we’ve referred to as development/operational/IT intelligence in the past, is a scalable form of information radiator. With just a bit of work you can take the information being generated by your tools and, using business intelligence (BI) technologies, populate team and even portfolio dashboards in real time. These dashboards provide important information that teams can use to manage themselves as well as governors to monitor what is happening within your organization. This enhances governance because when you get better quality information into people’s hands and they are more likely make better decisions.
7. Defined roles and responsibilities. Defined roles and responsibilities help people to understand who does what, what are they are responsible for and when they need to collaborate with others. This is an important aspect of governance because critical guidance about how people will need to interact with one another.
8. Defined organizational structure. You may choose to have a hierarchy of teams, a network of teams, a collection of circles (along the lines of holocracy), or combinations thereof. This is important to your governance efforts because people need to know what are the teams and how do they interrelate within your organization.
9. Common guidance. Guidance – standards and guidelines – is important to your governance effort because it helps people to understand how they can develop consistent assets which in turn are easier to understand and evolve. Common development guidance includes coding standards, data naming conventions, user interface (UI) design guidelines, security standards, and more. This guidance should be straightforward, ideally be supported through automation, and collaboratively developed.
10. IT governance team. People, typically senior people, are responsible for IT governance. The team, who is on it and what they do, should be defined and publicly known by those being governed. Everyone knows who the governors are and what they do, so that your governance strategy is open and transparent.

In the next blog posting in this series on governance we’ll overview the process goal diagram for IT governance.

Related Reading:

• The Lean Governance Mindset
• What is Lean IT Governance?
• Why Lean IT Governance?
• What is Agile Delivery Governance?
• Strategies that Enable Agile Governance
• Supporting Agile Delivery Team Governance
• Lean vs. Traditional IT Governance

The mindset required to govern IT in a lean or agile manner is very different than the traditional mindset. In this blog we review the key aspects of a lean governance mindset. These aspects are:

1. Lead by example. People take their cues from their leadership teams. If your governance strategy is streamlined and light weight then whatever it governs will inevitably become streamlined and light weight. Conversely, an onerous and heavy governance strategy will lead to onerous and heavy strategies by those being governed.
2. Be a servant leader. The primary function of governance people should be to prevent roadblocks, and if not to get rid of them as soon as they arise. You should strive to get teams the resources that they need and then get out of the way. Wait a minute, isn’t that the job of the Team Lead in Disciplined Agile (DA)? Yes, but who do you think that they work with to actually get that done?
3. Motivation over management. IT professionals are intellectual workers, and intellectual workers generally don’t respond well to being told what to do. But they can be motivated, and once motivated will actively work on what they’ve been motivated to do. So motivate them to do the “right thing”. One way to do this is to communicate very clearly what your organization is trying to achieve. Another way to motivate people is to ask tough questions such as: What value is there in doing that? What can we do to increase value? How can we eliminate waste in what we’re doing? and What will we learn by doing that?
4. Enablement over audit. Psychology shows that people, when given the choice, will usually take the easy path. This tells us that if we want people to do something, or to work in a given manner, then if we make it very easy to do so then they likely will. For example, if you want developers to follow common coding conventions then provide easy to understand and straightforward guidelines. Better yet, provide code analysis tools that they can include in the continuous integration (CI) tooling that provides feedback that they can act on. The traditional approach would be to rely on code inspections or code audits to ensure that conventions were being followed. This approach is not only onerous, and thus less likely to be followed, it has a long feedback cycle which means that any feedback resulting from the audit will be much more expensive to act on (on average) than the code analysis tool which has a very short feedback cycle. Yes, you may need to run the occasional audit, particularly when you’re working in a regulatory environment, but you should do so only as a last resort.
5. Communicate clearly, honestly, and in a timely manner. Effective governors communicate what the priorities of your organization are and what is expected of people. It is crucial to set realistic expectations in an open, honest, consistent, and continuous manner.
6. Streamline collaboration. Governors should help teams collaborate effectively with others. This not only helps them to achieve their goals but also supports enterprise awareness.
7. Trust but verify. Agile is based on trust, but to ensure that the right thing is happening within your organization there needs to be verification of that. Governors can do this by monitoring teams via several strategies. These strategies include asking people what’s going on, automated metrics (via team dashboards), looking at information captured by information radiators, attending team demos, and as a last resort asking teams to produce status reports to address questions that can’t be answered via automated metrics.
8. Focus on mitigating risk, not just reviewing documents. A primary goal of your governance strategy should be to mitigate risk. Sadly, many governance strategies have fallen into the bureaucratic trap of relying on documentation reviews to provide insight into what a team is doing. For example, your “architecture quality gate” might be based on the review and acceptance of an architecture model or document, the idea being that if some knowledgeable people assess the content of the document they will be able to determine whether the described architecture strategy will work. Unfortunately this isn’t the case. We’re sure you’ve seen several IT project teams who had a well-documented architecture, which was reviewed and signed off on, yet the technologies didn’t work well in practice, or perhaps they didn’t perform well, or perhaps they didn’t even integrate easily. The only thing that the review and acceptance of a document tells you is that a document was created, reviewed, and accepted.
9. Learn continuously. Good governors learn as much as they can about what they’re governing so that they can make better decisions and can make effective suggestions to the people being governed.
10. Consider both the long and short term. Governance must balance short-term needs with the long-term strategy of growing and enhancing your organization.
11. Be a great host. People who have fun at work, who enjoy what they do, are much more productive than people who don’t. In this respect being an effective governor is like being a good host at a party – as host it’s your job to see that everyone has a good time and gets along well with each other, and to swiftly deal with any problems that arise.

Having a lean governance mindset, as described above, helps you to increase your effectiveness at governance. In the next blog we will describe what IT governance encompasses.