Disciplined Agile

An important part of agile culture is to be honest and forthcoming about your mistakes, so I'd like to share one that I've made in a key diagram that exists in both our courseware and in the book Choose Your WoW!  This blog posting is my "failure bow" regarding mistakes that I made in the flowchart for how to choose between DA life cycles.

Figure 1 presents the original flowchart as it currently appears in the book and courseware.  Don't worry, we're in the process of updating both.  I'm writing this blog now because I want to make this update publicly available as quickly as possible to support people's learning journeys.  There are two problems in Figure 1:

• The decision in the bottom right corner has two "yes" options coming out of it.
• The decision in the bottom-right corner is poorly worded.

Figure 1. Choosing a DA lifecycle (original diagram).

The update to the diagram is presented in Figure 2.  You can see that we've changed one of the Yes options to be No.  More importantly, we've reworded the decision point so that it's clearer.  We had several people point out that they didn't understand the original wording of the question about potential disruption.  I had written that question from the point of view of a team composed of people with a traditional background.  But, many teams now have an agile background, having gotten started with a framework like Scrum only to find it insufficient for their needs.  Such teams wouldn't be disrupted, at least not very much, by adopting the Agile lifecycle.  Thus we've reworked the question to instead ask about the team's agile background. 

Figure 2. How to choose a DA life cycle (updated).

An important point that I would like to make about the flowchart of Figure 2 is that this is the logic that we suggest you follow, but you may still decide to make other decisions.  For example, consider the decision point in the bottom-right corner.  You may be working with a team that is new to agile but still decide to adopt the agile lifecycle over the lean lifecycle because you're willing to invest in the time and expense of training and coaching them in agile ways of working (WoW).  Fair enough, that's your call.

I hope that this update has cleared up any confusion you may have had around this diagram.

In the recent release of Choose Your WoW! we have evolved some aspects of the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit.  One of the things we evolved is how we communicate the DA mindset (pictured above). The principles provide a philosophical foundation for business agility.  They are based on both lean and flow concepts.  In this blog posting we explore the eight principles.  

1. Delight customers. We need to go beyond satisfying our customers' needs, beyond meeting their expectations, and strive to delight them.  If we don't then someone else will delight them and steal our customers away from us. This applies to both external customers as well as internal customers.
2. Be awesome. We should always strive to be the best that we can, and to always get better. Who wouldn't want to work with awesome people, on an awesome team for an awesome organization?
3. Context counts. Every person, every team, every organization is unique.  We face unique situations that evolve over time.  The implication is that we must choose our way of working (WoW) to reflect the context that we face, and then evolve our WoW as the situation evolves. 
4. Be pragmatic (reworded from Pragmatism). Our aim isn't to be agile, it's to be as effective as we can be and to improve from there.  To do this we need to be pragmatic and adopt agile, lean, or even traditional strategies when they make the most sense for our context.
5. Choice is good. To choose our WoW in a context-driven, pragmatic manner we need to select the best-fit technique given our situation.  Having choices, and knowing the trade-offs associated with those choices, is critical to choosing our WoW that is best fit for our context.
6. Optimize flow. We want to optimize flow across the value stream that we are part of, and better yet across our organization, and not just locally optimize our WoW within our team. Sometimes this will be a bit inconvenient for us, but overall we will be able to more effectively respond to our customers.
7. Organize around products/services (new).  To delight our customers we need to organize ourselves around producing the offerings, the products and services, that they need. We are in effect organizing around value streams because value streams produce value for customers, both external and internal, in the form of products and services.  We chose to say organize around products/services, rather than offerings or value streams, as we felt this was more explicit.
8. Enterprise awareness. Disciplined agilists look beyond the needs of their team to take the long-term needs of their organization into account.  They adopt, and sometimes tailor, organizational guidance.  They follow, and provide feedback too, organizational roadmaps.  The leverage, and sometimes enhance, existing organizational assets.  In short, they do what's best for the organization and not just what's convenient for them.

These principles are described in greater detail in chapter 2 of Choose Your WoW!.  In the next blog in this series we will explore the promises of the DA mindset.  Stay tuned!

Free Downloads

We have made several Disciplined Agile (DA) posters available to you for free download, including a Disciplined Agile Mindset poster.

As I posted recently, the new version of our book Choose Your WoW! is now available.  With this new release we have evolved the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit, and one of the things that we have updated is our approach to describing the DA Mindset.  In this blog posting I overview our previous approach to describing the DA mindset and then describe our new strategy, which is summarized in the diagram above.

Our Previous Approach to Describing the DA Mindset

Until recently, we described the DA mindset as the combination of the DA Principles and the DA Manifesto.  The DA Manifesto in turn was described in terms of five values and 17 principles behind the manifesto.  The DA Manifesto was based on the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, or more colloquially known as the Agile Manifesto.  

Three issues motivated us to move away from this approach:

1. It was a bit confusing given that there were two levels of principles. We had originally developed the DA Manifesto in 2010 to reflect our belief that the Agile Manifesto wasn't sufficient for enterprise-class software development, let alone to support business agility. Over the years we evolved the DA Manifesto to reflect our learnings. Then around 2015 we found that we needed a layer above the DA Manifesto to capture key aspects of the DA mindset with respect to business agility, hence the DA principles.  At this level the term principles made the most sense, even though the DA Manifesto had principles at a lower level.  
2. The Agile Manifesto was too constraining. The Agile Manifesto was written in 2001.  While it was an incredibly important milestone for both the software world and now the business world, we've found that we need a more robust strategy.  We've also found that some people struggle with why we would even need to extend the Agile Manifesto at all, or wanted to extend it in different ways, and we've grown tired of debating various nuances of the various extensions. It is time to move on.
3. FLEX proved that a different approach works.  When PMI decided to merge Al Shalloway's FLEX into DA one of the benefits was that we are able to benefit from Al's deep experience and thinking that is encapsulated in FLEX. The mindset behind FLEX wasn't based on the values and principles of the Agile Manifesto but instead on concepts based on lean and flow.  Al had approached the same problem from a different direction and had found a different way to communicate very similar concepts.  So we worked it through and developed our new approach.

Our New Approach to Describing the DA Mindset

Our new approach to describing the DA Mindset is straightforward: We believe in these principles, so we promise to adopt these behaviours and follow these guidelines when doing so. There is a purpose for each aspect of the mindset:

• Principles. The principles provide a philosophical foundation for business agility.  They are based on both lean and flow concepts.  
• Promises. The promises are agreements that we make with our fellow teammates, our stakeholders, and other people within our organization whom we interact with.  The promises define a collection of disciplined behaviours that enable us to collaborate effectively and professionally.  
• Guidelines. These guidelines help us to be more effective in our way of working (WoW) and in improving our WoW over time.

We will soon be updating DA pages on PMI.org and the Disciplined Agile courseware to reflect the changes being described in this blog series.  Our strategy is to let the books lead, in other words we update the relevant book and then shortly afterwards we release updates to related material.  

Future postings in this series explore the principles, promises, and guidelines behind the DA Mindset in greater detail.  

Free Downloads

We have made several Disciplined Agile (DA) posters available to you for free download, including a Disciplined Agile Mindset poster.

We have recently updated our book, Choose Your WoW!, which overviews the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit and provides a detailed description of the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) portion of it. Our primary goal was to bring the book into PMI publications so that we could offer it on PMI marketplace.  We also wanted to share with you the changes that we're making to the rest of the DA tool kit.  

In this blog I will focus on the changes that we've made to the DA Overview diagram.  Figure 1 shows the previous version of the diagram and Figure 2 our updated version.  When PMI purchased Disciplined Agile in August 2019 we had several streams of evolution underway at the time, all of which are reflected in Figure 2.  PMI also purchased Net Objectives so that we could merge their FLEX framework into DA, forming what has now become the Value Streams layer of DA.  Al Shalloway and I will go into more detail on this in future blog postings.

Figure 1. The previous Disciplined Agile overview diagram.

Figure 2. The new Disciplined Agile (DA) overview diagram.

In addition to modernizing the look of the diagram, you'll notice several important changes:

1. We simplified the diagram.  We simplified the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) layer into a single process blade.  Figure 1 shows the six lifecycles supported by DAD, but we've consistently heard that this overcomplicates the overview diagram.  The lifecycles still exist but we're not showing them at this level any more.
2. We've reworked the layers. The original layers (DAD, Disciplined DevOps, Disciplined Agile IT, and Disciplined Agile Enterprise) reflected the order in which the DA toolkit evolved.  The new layers are:

• The Foundation layer is where fundamental agile and lean concepts; our evolved approach to the DA mindset that is based on principles, promises, and guidelines; roles; and team structures are captured.  This layer encompasses concepts and strategies applicable across your organization.
• The Disciplined DevOps layer has pretty much remained the same, with the exception of the visual refactoring of the DAD layer into an explicit process blade.
• The Value Streams layer is where we have merged FLEX into DA.  Very exciting things are happening here that we'll cover in future postings.
• The Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE) layer encompasses the activities that support the value streams that your organization offers to customers.

3. We've evolved some process blades.  Several process blades of Figure 1 have evolved:

• Reuse Engineering has become Asset Management to better reflect common enterprise practice.  
• Procurement has evolved into Vendor Management to reflect the full lifecycle of VM, not just the procurement portion of it.  
• Program Management has been refactored, with a Program lifecycle being explicitly called out within DAD and Program Management itself elevated out of the software development space to address all aspects of Program Management (as per PMI's existing standard).  
• DAIT, formerly a layer, has become the Information Technology (IT) process blade which focuses on the coordination of IT efforts across value streams.    
• DAD is now a process blade rather than a full-fledged layer.  
• Control was renamed back to Governance.  We had a lot of feedback that Control didn't reflect DA's lean governance philosophy.

4. We've added some process blades. As you can see in Figure 2, we have introduced 3 new blades:

• Research and Development, a critical aspect of an organization's capacity to innovate.
• Strategy, to guide an organization over the long term.  We're adopting many great ideas from PMI Brightline.
• Transformation, to guide you in organizational change.  We've combined great strategies from our own transformation practices (pre PMI) at Disciplined Agile Inc., those of Net Objectives, and the PMI Brightline transformation strategy.

 As you can see, there is a long list of potential blog topics to describe how DA has evolved, and continues to evolve.  Next up will be an overview of our updated approach to describing the DA mindset. Please stay tuned!

Free Downloads

We have made several Disciplined Agile (DA) posters available to you for free download, including a Disciplined Agile Overview poster.

Photo credit: Umanix

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Disciplined Agile (DA) has always recognized that some teams work remotely and now, given the need to respond to the challenges presented by COVID-19, we are applying our own advice with our DA training offerings.  

Starting in early March we reworked our instructor-led training (ILT) offerings so that they can be delivered remotely by qualified instructors. In the picture above we see two Certified Disciplined Agile Instructors (CDAIs) from Umanix delivering the a Disciplined Agile workshop virtually.  As you might expect, the instructors are using video conferencing software to work through the courseware with the students, but there's much more to it.

The DA workshops have many hands-on exercises, both games and case study work, in which students collaborate to learn critical concepts and techniques.  In the bottom left-hand corner you see an exercise in which a group of students are in a breakout room and are working together.  In the face-to-face (F2F) version of this exercise students move cards around on a table and discuss their decisions as they go.  In the virtual version they move images around on the screen.  In both cases the instructor is observing and helping the students where necessary.  Once the group work is over the students then do a "wall walk" by going into each of the breakout rooms to see and discuss how other groups approached the problem.

We've been very lucky in that one of our DA Training Partners has been delivering DA training to globally dispersed teams for years.  They agreed to take the lead and share their experiences and techniques with our other training partners so that we can successfully bring DA training to you remotely.  In short, we've been in a position to apply proven remote training strategies so that your learning experience is the best that it can be.

Don't worry, DA Training Partners will still be offering face-to-face training once it becomes safe to do so again.  And we'll also continue with virtual workshops as well, because my gut tells me that we're going to have a lot more distributed Disciplined Agile teams in the future.

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Please visit Disciplined Agile Training to discover our current workshop offerings.