Disciplined Agile

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 guidelines help us to be more effective in our way of working (WoW) and in improving our WoW over time. In this blog posting we explore the eight guidelines:

1. Validate our learnings. The only way to become awesome is to experiment with, and then adopt where appropriate, a new WoW. In guided continuous improvement (GCI) we experiment with a new way of working and then we assess how well it worked, an approach called validated learning. Being willing and able to experiment is critical to our process-improvement efforts. 
2. Apply design thinking. Delighting customers requires us to recognize that our aim is to create operational value streams that are designed with our customers in mind. This requires design thinking on our part. Design thinking means to be empathetic to the customer, to first try to understand their environment and their needs before developing a solution. 
3. Attend to relationships through the value stream. The interactions between the people doing the work are what is key, regardless of whether or not they are part of the team. For example, when a product manager needs to work closely with our organization’s data analytics team to gain a better understanding of what is going on in the marketplace, and with our strategy team to help put those observations into context, then we want to ensure that these interactions are effective. 
4. Create effective environments that foster joy. Part of being awesome is having fun and being joyful. We want working in our company to be a great experience so we can attract and keep the best people. Done right, work is play. We can make our work more joyful by creating an environment that allows us to work together well. 
5. Change culture by improving the system. While culture is important, and culture change is a critical component of any organization’s agile transformation, the unfortunate reality is that we can't change it directly. This is because culture is a reflection of the management system in place, so to change our culture we need to evolve our overall system. 
6. Create semi-autonomous self-organizing teams. Organizations are complex adaptive systems (CASs) made up of a network of teams or, if you will, a team of teams. Although mainstream agile implores us to create “whole teams” that have all of the skills and resources required to achieve the outcomes that they’ve been tasked with, the reality is that no team is an island unto itself. Autonomous teams would be ideal but there are always dependencies on other teams upstream that we are part of, as well as downstream from us. And, of course, there are dependencies between offerings (products or services) that necessitate the teams responsible for them to collaborate.
7. Adopt measures to improve outcomes. When it comes to measurement, context counts. What are we hoping to improve? Quality? Time to market? Staff morale? Customer satisfaction? Combinations thereof? Every person, team, and organization has their own improvement priorities, and their own ways of working, so they will have their own set of measures that they gather to provide insight into how they’re doing and, more importantly, how to proceed. And these measures evolve over time as their situation and priorities evolve. The implication is that our measurement strategy must be flexible and fit for purpose, and it will vary across teams. 
8. Leverage and enhance organizational assets. Our organization has many assets—information systems, information sources, tools, templates, procedures, learnings, and other things—that our team could adopt to improve our effectiveness. We may not only choose to adopt these assets, we may also find that we can improve them to make them better for us as well as other teams who also choose to work with these assets. 

These guidelines are described in greater detail in chapter 2 of Choose Your WoW!.  

Free Downloads

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

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 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.  In this blog posting we explore the seven promises:

1. Create psychological safety and embrace diversity. Psychological safety means being able to show and apply oneself without fear of negative consequences of status, career, or self-worth—we should be comfortable being ourselves in our work setting. Psychological safety goes hand-in-hand with diversity, which is the recognition that everyone is unique and can add value in different ways. The dimensions of personal uniqueness include, but are not limited to, race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, physical abilities, socioeconomic status, religious beliefs, political beliefs, and other ideological beliefs. Diversity is critical to a team’s success because it enables greater innovation. The more diverse our team, the better our ideas will be, the better our work will be, and the more we’ll learn from each other.
2. Accelerate value realization. In DA we use the term value to refer to both customer and business value. Customer value, something that benefits the end customer who consumes the product/service that our team helps to provide, is what agilists typically focus on. This is clearly important, but in Disciplined Agile we’re very clear that teams have a range of stakeholders, including external end customers. Business value addresses the issue that some things are of benefit to our organization and perhaps only indirectly to our customers. For example, investing in enterprise architecture, in reusable infrastructure, and in sharing innovations across our organization offer the potential to improve consistency, quality, reliability, and reduce cost over the long term.
3. Collaborate proactively. Disciplined agilists strive to add value to the whole, not just to their individual work or to the team’s work. The implication is that we want to collaborate both within our team and with others outside our team, and we also want to be proactive doing so. Waiting to be asked is passive, observing that someone needs help and then volunteering to do so is proactive. 
4. Make all work and workflow visible. DA teams will often make their work visible at both the individual level as well as the team level. It is critical to focus on our work in process, which is our work in progress plus any work that is queued up waiting for us to get to it.  Furthermore, DA teams make their workflow visible, and thus have explicit workflow policies, so that everyone knows how everyone else is working. 
5. Improve predictability. DA teams strive to improve their predictability to enable them to collaborate and self-organize more effectively, and thereby to increase the chance that they will fulfill any commitments that they make to their stakeholders. Many of the earlier promises we have made work toward improving predictability. 
6. Keep workloads within capacity. Going beyond capacity is problematic from both a personal and a productivity point of view. At the personal level, overloading a person or team will often increase the frustration of the people involved. Although it may motivate some people to work harder in the short term, it will cause burnout in the long term, and it may even motivate people to give up and leave because the situation seems hopeless to them. From a productivity point of view, overloading causes multitasking, which increases overall overhead. 
7. Improve continuously. The really successful organizations—Apple, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Google, and more—got that way through continuous improvement. They realized that to remain competitive they needed to constantly look for ways to improve their processes, the outcomes that they were delivering to their customers, and their organizational structures. 

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

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're happy to announce that our book, Choose Your WoW!, is now available via PMI Publications ($15.95 US for PMI members, $19.95 for non-members).  It is also available on Amazon in both print and digital format ($19.95 and $18.95 respectively).  Previous versions of the book were available only via Amazon.  

Choose Your WoW! includes an overview of the Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit, but its focus is on the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) portion of the tool kit and how to choose your way of working (WoW) using DA.  

How Will This Affect DA Certification?

We are in the process of evolving the DA certification tests to be based on a combination of the material captured in the courseware and in Choose Your WoW!  Right now the test is based solely on the courseware.  When we have an exact date for when we intend to released the updated tests we will announce via normal channels.

What's New in Choose Your WoW!?

We've made several changes in this version of the book:

1. Evolved the organization of the DA tool kit. This has mostly impacted Chapter 1 as that's where we describe DA. We recently wrote about how the DA Overview diagram has evolved and will follow with several other blog postings over the next few weeks. 
2. Evolved the DA Mindset.  In the past the DA mindset was captured via the DA Principles in combination with the DA Manifesto.  We feel that it's about time that we unshackle ourselves from the Agile Manifesto, it has been 19 years after all, and refactor how we describe a Disciplined Agile way of thinking.  We reworked Chapter 2 to describe the mindset in terms of principles, promises, and guidelines.  We'll publish a blog about this soon.
3. Updated many of the graphics. Our graphic artists reworked the diagrams contained throughout the book.  We hope you like the new style.
4. Updated the cover.  We wanted a new look and feel to the book series that reflects the new PMI branding.  
5. Fixed some spelling and grammar issues. 

Why Isn't This a Second Edition?

The changes to the DA tool kit had an impact on Section 1 of the book. The other sections, which are a reference for the process goals, were not impacted by this release of DA.  So we felt there wasn't enough of a change to warrant calling this book a second edition.