Disciplined Agile

The value streams layer encompasses the capabilities required to provide value streams to your customers.  A value stream begins, ends, and hopefully continues with a customer. A value stream is the set of actions that take place to add value for customers from the initial request through realization of value by the customers.  The value streams layer is one of the four layers of the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit, overviewed in Figure 1.  These layers are: Foundation, Disciplined DevOps, Value Streams, and Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE).  This blog focuses on the value streams layer.

Figure 1. The layers of the DA tool kit.

Figure 2 depicts the DA FLEX lifecycle, overviewing the high-level workflow for a value stream.  As you can see, a value stream begins with the initial concept, moves through various stages for one or more development teams, and on through final delivery into business operations.

Figure 2. The DA FLEX lifecycle for value streams.

Let's explore the components of Disciplined Agile's value stream layer.  The hexes in Figure 2 and Figure 3 represent process blades, sometimes called process areas. A process blade encompasses a cohesive collection of process options, such as practices and strategies, that should be chosen and then applied in a context sensitive manner.  Process blades also describe functional roles specific to that domain as well as extensions to the DA mindset specific to that domain. 

Figure 3. The process blades of Disciplined Agile's value stream layer.

You can see in Figure 3 that some process blades, such as Product Management and Program Management, are specific to this layer.  Other process blades, such as Strategy and Marketing, are shared between the value streams layer and the disciplined agile enterprise (DAE) layer. This is an indication that you may choose to implement those process blades at both the enterprise level as well as the level of a single value stream - do what is right for your situation.

Expanding upon the Disciplined DevOps layer, the value stream layer adds the following blades:

• Business operations
• Continuous improvement
• Governance
• Marketing
• Portfolio management
• Product management
• Program management
• Research & development
• Sales
• Strategy

Business operations

Business operations focuses on the activities required to provide services to customers and to support your products. The implementation of business operations will vary by value stream, in a bank retail account services is implemented in a very different manner than brokerage services for example. Business operations includes help desk and support services (integrated in with IT support where appropriate) as well as any technical sales support activities such as training, product installation, and product customization. As you can imagine close collaboration with both your Sales and Marketing efforts is required to successfully Delight Customers.

Continuous improvement

The continuous improvement process blade describes how people within your organization can share their improvement learnings with one another in a systematic way.  There are many strategies for doing so, including centers of excellence (CoEs), communities of practice (CoPs) which are also known as guilds, techniques for exploring existing ways of working (WoW), identifying new WoW, and sharing techniques.

Governance

Governance is the leadership, organizational structures, and strategies to enable you to sustain and extend your organization’s ability to produce meaningful value for your customers. Lean governance promotes strategies such as motivating people to do the right thing, enabling them to do so (often via automation), communicating organizational objectives, and preferring visibility over reporting.

Marketing

The goal of marketing is to ensure successful interactions between your organization and the outside world. Disciplined Agile marketing applies data and analytics to continuously source promising opportunities or solutions to problems in real time, deploying tests quickly, evaluating the results, and rapidly iterating. It also means taking a validated learning approach, being customer focused, working in a collaborative and flexible manner, and working in an evolutionary (iterative and incremental) manner. Your marketing efforts will represent your organization and your offerings, both products and services, to the outside world and conversely will represent external stakeholders, and potential stakeholders, to the rest of the organization. In conjunction with product management, Marketing will be actively involved with long-term visioning for your organization’s offerings. Marketing is sometimes called brand management

Portfolio management

Portfolio management addresses how an your organization goes about identifying, prioritizing, organizing, and governing their various endeavors. Disciplined Agile portfolio management seeks to do this in a lightweight and streamlined manner that maximizes the creation of business value in a long-term sustainable manner. Potential endeavors include solution delivery initiatives/projects, stable product development teams, business experiments (along the lines of a lean startup strategy), and the operation of existing solutions.

Product management

Product management is the art of taking strategic objectives and turning them into tactical activities.  Disciplined agile product management is performed in a collaborative and evolutionary manner that reflects the context of your organization. Disciplined agile product management includes the acts of:

• Identifying and prioritizing potential products/solutions to support your organization's vision;
• Identifying, prioritizing, and allocating features to products under development;
• Managing functional dependencies between products;
• Marketing those products to their potential customers;
• Exploring the needs of existing and potential customers;
• Identifying minimum business increments (MBIs) for delivery teams to work on.

Program management

A program is a large team composed of two or more sub-teams (also called squads). The purpose of program management is to coordinate the efforts of the sub-teams to ensure they work together effectively towards the common goals of the overall endeavor. Program management encompasses financial activities, vendor management, coordination of people/staffiing concerns, coordination of the evolution of the solution, and coordination of requirements management issues across the sub-teams within the program.

Research & development

Research & development (R&D) encompasses the innovative activities undertaken by your organization to identify potential new offerings (services or products), or to identify potential improvements to existing offerings. R&D constitutes the first stage of development of a potential new offering.  R&D activities are an important part of both product management and solution development to help explore potential ideas and strategies.

Sales

The aim of your sales efforts is to, you guessed it, sell your organization’s offerings (both products and services) to customers. Your sales people, if any, will work very closely with your marketing team to ensure they are focused on selling offerings that reflect your organizations’ overall strategy. They will also work closely with product management to ensure that what they’re selling is available or can be built in a timely manner. Organizationally Sales is often combined with marketing or may even be matrixed into business operations.

Strategy

Strategy is what you do now, and what you intend to do in the future.  The focus of the strategy process blade is to identify, evolve, and then drive the execution of your organization’s vision. Your vision is driven by the perceived needs of your customers and influenced by the environment in which you operate.

The Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit is organized into four layers, overviewed in Figure 1.  These layers are: Foundation, Disciplined DevOps, Value Streams, and Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE).  This blog focuses on the Disciplined DevOps layer.

Figure 1. The layers of the DA tool kit.

How is "Disciplined DevOps" different from normal/mainstream DevOps? Mainstream DevOps is the streamlining of software development, information technology (IT) operations, and support.  This strategy is often depicted as an infinite loop as you see in Figure 2.  Disciplined DevOps is an enterprise-ready approach that extends mainstream DevOps to include critical activities around security, data management, release management, and business operations.  The high-level workflow for Disciplined DevOps is depicted in Figure 3. 

Figure 2. The classic DevOps workflow.

Figure 3. The workflow of Disciplined DevOps.

Let's explore the components of Disciplined DevOps.  The hexes in Figure 3 represent process blades, sometimes called process areas. A process blade encompasses a cohesive collection of process options, such as practices and strategies, that should be chosen and then applied in a context sensitive manner.  Process blades also address functional roles specific to that domain as well as extensions to the DA mindset specific to that domain. The process blades of Disciplined DevOps are:

1. Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
2. Security
3. Data Management
4. Release Management
5. Support
6. IT Operations
7. Business Operations (from the Value Streams layer)

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is a people-first, learning-oriented hybrid approach to solution delivery. DAD teams focus on the creation of a new, or evolution of an existing, consumable solution for their customers.  A solution may include any combination of software, physical assets (e.g. hardware), documentation, changes to the supported business process, and changes to the organizational structure(s) of the people involved. A solution is consumable when it is usable, desirable, and functional. DAD enables a flexible way of working (WoW), supporting several lifecycles in a manner that is tactically scalable.

Security

The Security process blade focuses on how to protect your organization from both information/virtual and physical threats. This includes procedures for security governance, identity and access management, security policy management, incident response, and vulnerability management. As you would expect these policies will affect your organization’s strategies around change management, disaster recovery and business continuity, solution delivery, and vendor management. For security to be effective it has to be a fundamental aspect of your organizational culture.

Data Management

Data management is the development, execution and supervision of plans, policies, programs and practices that control, protect, deliver and enhance the value of data and information assets. DA promotes a pragmatic, streamlined approach to data management that fits into the rest of your organizational processes – we need to optimize the entire workflow, not sub-optimize our data management strategy. Disciplined agile data management does this in an evolutionary and collaborative manner, via concrete data management strategies that provide the right data at the right time to the right people.

Release Management

The release management process blade encompasses planning, coordinating, and verifying the deployment of solutions into production. Release management requires collaboration by the team(s) producing the solutions and the people responsible for your organization’s operational environment(s). In the case of organizations with a “you build it, you run it” DevOps mindset these people may be one in the same, although even in these situations you will often find a group of people responsible for governing the overall release management effort. In a true DevOps environment release management is fully automated for the intangible aspects (e.g. software and supporting documentation), and perhaps even some physical aspects, of your solution.

Support

Support focuses on helping customers/end users to work with the solutions produced by your delivery teams. Ideally your solutions should be designed so well that people don’t need anyone to help them but unfortunately it doesn’t always work out that way. So in many ways your support strategy is your “last line of defense” in your efforts to Delight Customers. Support goes by many names, including help desk, customer support, and customer care.

IT Operations

The primary aim of IT operations is to run a trustworthy IT ecosystem. From the point of view of your customers, you want to do such a good job that they don’t even notice IT. For older organizations this can be a challenge due to the existence of hundreds, if not thousands, of legacy systems that have been deployed over the decades. You may face daunting technical debt in these systems – poor quality data, overly complex or poorly written source code, systems with inadequate automated regression tests (if any), different versions of the same system, several systems offering similar functionality, numerous technology platforms, systems and technologies for which you have insufficient expertise, and more.

Business Operations

Business operations is one of the process blades of the value stream layer, although as you see in Figure 3 it is a critical component of the Disciplined DevOps workflow. Business operations focuses on the activities required to provide services to customers and to support your products. The implementation of business operations will vary by value stream, in a bank retail account services is implemented in a very different manner than brokerage services for example. Business operations includes help desk and support services (integrated in with IT support where appropriate) as well as any technical sales support activities such as training, product installation, and product customization. As you can imagine close collaboration with both your Sales and Marketing efforts is required to successfully Delight Customers.

Scott Seivwright is leading the #Agile20Reflect effort to reflect on 20 years of the agile movement. He has posted a call for help to organize Agile20Reflect.

He's looking for people to get involved who can help run things rather than argue and fight about various nuances. Given the Disciplined Agile strategy of embracing the various agile, lean, and even traditional strategies I suspect that some of you may be well suited to join in this effort.

And yes, I'm already involved.

Each business challenge is both unique to your situation and informed by traditional conventions. By using the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit, you and your team can better understand how seemingly segmented activities - such as security, product management, portfolio management, solution delivery, and finance to name a few - can work together in a context-sensitive manner.

By understanding what these activities should address, as well as the tradeoffs associated with each, you can make more informed decisions for better business agility.  To help you to navigate the wealth of advice contained in the DA tool kit, we have organized it into a four layers as you see in the following diagram.

The four layers of the DA tool kit are:

1. Foundation. The Foundation layer provides the conceptual underpinnings of the DA tool kit.  This includes the DA Mindset; foundational concepts from agile, lean, and serial/traditional ways of working (WoW); people-oriented issues such as roles, responsibilities, and teaming structures; and of course how to choose your WoW.
2. Disciplined DevOps. Disciplined DevOps is the streamlining of IT solution development and IT operations activities, and supporting enterprise-IT activities, to provide more effective outcomes to an organization.
3. Value Streams. The value streams layer encompasses the capabilities required to provide value streams to your customers.  A value stream is the set of actions that take place to add value to a customer from the initial request through realization of value by the customer. A value stream begins, ends, and hopefully continues with a customer. The value stream begins with the initial concept, moves through various stages for one or more development teams, and on through final delivery and support. It’s not enough to be innovative in ideas if these ideas can’t be realized in the marketplace or in the company. DA FLEX is the glue that ties an organization’s strategies in that it visualizes what an effective value stream looks like, enabling you to make decisions for improving each part of the organization within the context of the whole.
4. Disciplined Agile Enterprise. A Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE) is able to anticipate and respond swiftly to changes in the marketplace. It does this through an organizational culture and structure that facilitates change within the context of the situation that it faces. Such organizations require a learning mindset in the mainstream business and underlying lean and agile processes to drive innovation.

The Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit is organized into four layers: Foundation, Disciplined DevOps, Value Streams, Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE).  This blog focuses on the Foundation layer, the purpose of which is to provide the underpinnings of the DA tool kit.  The foundation layer itself is organized into four distinct topics:

1. The DA mindset
2. Fundamental concepts
3. People
4. Choosing your WoW

The DA Mindset

The Disciplined Agile (DA) mindset is captured in the form of principles, promises, and guidelines. Disciplined agilists believe in the DA 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.

Fundamental Concepts

Disciplined Agile (DA) is a hybrid in that it adopts ideas and strategies from a wide range of sources. DA encompasses three categories of fundamental concepts:

1. Agile. Agile is both a mindset and a skillset. As a mindset Agile is the manner in how you look at your environment; it is the desire to collaborate with and to learn from others; and it is the willingness to share your skills and knowledge with others.  As a skillset Agile varies based on the domain in which you operate.  For example, an agile skillset for a marketing professional may include experimental strategies such as minimum viable products (MVPs) and marketplace sensing strategies, whereas an agile skillset for a software professional may include test-driven development (TDD) and chaos engineering techniques. Agility is the ready ability to move with quick and easy grace to respond to changes in your operating environment.  
2. Lean.  Lean produces value for customers quickly through a focus on reducing delays and eliminating waste which results in increased quality and lower cost. Lean philosophies and strategies infuse DA, and in fact much of the DA mindset reflects lean thinking. This includes ideas such as optimizing flow, making all work and workflow visible, keeping workloads within capacity, and attending to relationships throughout the value stream to name a few. 
3. Serial. DA adopts great ideas from serial - often referred to as traditional, waterfall, or even predictive - ways of working (WoW). There are many strategies and concepts from the past which are critical to our success in the future, and DA chooses to leverage them where they make sense. For example, DA's project-oriented lifecycles have explicit, named phases which are clearly serial in nature. DA recognizes that inception efforts, sometimes called  project initiation or simply initiation activities, such as initial planning, initial scoping, and initial design can be critical to your success.  These efforts are very different than the construction/realization efforts that happen after this, and different yet again than the transition/delivery efforts that then follow, and different again than the operational efforts that bring actual realized value to your customers.

People

The people portion of the Foundation layer addresses two key aspects of agility:

1. Roles (and responsibilities). The DA tool kit captures a wide range of roles that people may fill.  This includes common agile roles such as Team Lead/Senior Scrum Master, Product Owner, Architecture Owner, and others.  It also includes function-specific roles such as Program Manager, Financial Specialist, Governor, Security Engineer, Sales Manager, and many others.  All of these roles have associated responsibilities, and of course there are common rights and responsibilities that everyone has.
2. Teams. Every team is unique and faces a unique situation.  As a result, DA supports several team structures which your teams can adopt and evolve to meet their needs.  There are suggested structures for small, medium, and large (program) teams.  There are team structures that support geographic distribution.  There are team structures that support learning teams such as communities of practice (COPs)/guilds and centres of excellence (CoEs), and structures that support common services teams.

Choosing Your WoW

A fundamental philosophy of agile is that teams should own their own process, or as we like to say in Disciplined Agile (DA) teams should choose their way of working (WoW). Of course this is easier said than done in practice. The challenge is that every team is unique and faces a unique situation – in other words, context counts. Furthermore, there are no “best practices,” rather, every practice has tradeoffs and works well in some situations and poorly in others. Worse yet, you really don’t know how well a technique will work for you until you actually try it out in your environment. Given all of this, how can a team choose its WoW?

While working with organizations to help them to learn how to improve their WoW, we’ve developed a technique that we call guided continuous improvement (GCI). GCI extends the kaizen-based continuous improvement approach, where teams improve their WoW via small incremental changes, to use proven guidance to help teams identify techniques that are more likely to work in their context. This increases the percentage of successful experiments and thereby increases your overall rate of process improvement.