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.

Since Disciplined Agile (DA) joined the PMI family in August 2019 we've gotten a collection of questions from people along the lines of "Why is there a difference between the advice in DA and PMI's advice?"  So I thought I would write a few blogs examining why that is.  This is the first.

There are several reasons why there are differences between existing DA and existing (non-DA) PMI materials:

1. They were created by different groups of people.  It's natural to get different takes on a topic from different groups of people.   
2. DA took on a broader scope than PMI traditionally has (until now). PMI has focused on project management and critical topics surrounding it such as program management, portfolio management, and governance (amongst others).  That is the scope that PMI chose to focus on and has frankly done a very good job at doing so.  The scope of DA, on the other hand, has been to address how to take an agile/lean approach to all aspects of an organization, including but not limited to management.  This is a much broader scope than what PMI has taken on, until now. As a result DA addresses marketing, finance, enterprise architecture, operations, governance, software development, and many other process areas that are important to modern organizations.  Why is this broader scope important to PMI?  Because all of these areas need to be managed/led and governed.  I believe there's an interesting implication there. ;-)
3. PMI has traditionally gone very deep into management and the governance of management activities.  I'll let the great material in our standards and practice guides speak for itself. As Stan Lee was prone to say, 'Nuff said.
4. DA has traditionally taken a more holistic view.  DA includes both what is being managed as well as the management/leadership of it.  For example, consider The Standard for Program Management Fourth Edition.  Where the existing PMI standard does a fantastic job of addressing the management aspects of a traditional program it doesn't go into critical "doing aspects" of programs such as how to address architecture, requirements, and quality activities (it does address planning and management though) for example.  This isn't meant to be a criticism of the standard but merely an observation - When we (PMI) developed the standard our focus, and once again rightfully so, was on management and governance.  It was not on the overall, holistic view of what occurs with a program.  With DA we choose to take a more holistic view, as do agile frameworks such as SAFe^R and LeSS amongst others, and go beyond management and governance.  

My point is that there are very good reasons for the differences between what is in DA and what PMI has traditionally focused on.  These differences are an important aspect of the value proposition of DA for PMI, and more importantly for our membership, because we can learn from these differences and then improve and grow based on those learnings.  We're currently evolving DA based on the great material encompassed by the existing PMI standards and practice guides and our hope is that the existing PMI offerings will evolve to reflect Disciplined Agile ways of working (WoW) too.  

In the next blog in this series I will do a deep dive into the differences between DA's take on Program Management and the PMI Program Management Standard.  I suspect this will help to make some of the ideas in this blog more concrete and it will certainly make the opportunity before us a bit more explicit.

By Jeev Chugh, CDAP | CDAI and Joshua Barnes CDAC | CDAI

Enterprise agile transformation roadmaps using Lean Change are often fueled by the desire to deliver value faster with increased flexibility.  They start with replacing traditional (waterfall) delivery methods with an Agile way of working, using pilot teams to validate early decisions on how to experiment with aspects such as team formation, lifecycle (agile, lean, continuous delivery, etc.) practices and techniques, and so on.  What team members and business and technology leaders alike quickly glean is that the mind shift to collective ownership of the work, decentralized decision making, and all the energy to shift to self-organizing teams is just the first step.  A big step, but one in a long journey.

To truly achieve the sizable outcomes from these enterprise transformations, many aspects beyond that of individual agile teams achieving a good level of maturity in “their” agile ways of working are needed.  One of the shifts that enables such outcomes is adopting a Product Portfolio operating model.  In this model, we transition from assembling a team to deliver a fixed scope via a project and then disband as the project ends to a long-lasting stable team delivering business outcomes via continual improvement of a product.

Along with this change comes the realization that traditional waterfall methods of budgeting and project cost accounting that requires upfront plans and budgets, is in inherent conflict with Agile ways of working; especially so when the agile approach uses a Lean Kanban-based lifecycle (very small batches) or Lean Continuous Delivery (no batches) lifecycle. Thus, to successfully scale Agile, enterprises must work with business and Finance partners to move beyond traditional project-centric funding models and adopt a product-centric funding model that enables rolling-wave planning, dynamic resource allocation, and accelerated delivery.  Moving from funding project scope to funding teams is a seminal part of product centric funding.

However, a clear understanding and alignment on “Product” and “Product Portfolio” terminology is imperative before delving into the product-based funding model and financial governance.  It is often surprising to agile team members through all levels of leadership how hard it can be to all agree on what a “product” is.  We often start by getting an agreement on what a product isn’t, such as a platform or other part of the technology stack or a corporate function such as marketing.

What is a Product?

A product is designed to continuously create business value for the customer by solving their problem or providing a benefit. Products have more permanence, and are living entities that we continuously iterate to meet market needs and finally are retired when the demand for it diminishes.

On the other hand, a project is a temporary endeavor, with a clear definition of the work that needs to be delivered, within a defined budget and by a specified date in time.

Key characteristics of a Product and a Project are elaborated below:

So, what are the benefits of pivoting to a product mode?

High Performing Teams

Standing Projects up and down is Inefficient and runs the risk of disbanding teams just as they enter the norming or performing phase. Organizations often underestimate the staff onboarding costs and ramp up time. Most product-centric organizations try to keep the same people working on a product through the lifespan of the product. Overtime, these teams build the stakeholder relationships and business domain knowledge, being stable and long-lived can benefit from a long performing phase.

Maintain Strategic Focus

Projects are funded independently and investments tend to be quite scattered and fragmented. Often, this leads to executives not having enough confidence that much of their investments are committed to top strategic priorities. Moreover, it really slows the organization’s response to change in business priorities.

Product Roadmaps are aligned with business capabilities and deliver measurable business outcomes. Further, funding is continuous with frequent checkpoints, allowing to dynamically reposition investments should the business priorities change

Ability to Truly Iterate

Projects are funded in one go, the entire agreed upon scope is funded to deliver the projected benefits. These un-validated hypotheses of benefits in the business case are based on a lot of assumptions, and it is often not feasible to clarify the entire scope upfront, despite the significant investment routinely made with traditional approaches. The reality is that many projects regularly miss the mark in terms of delivering benefits, and organizations often don’t have an effective process in place to validate actual benefits post every release.

On the other hand, product funding is continuous and flow based on validated learning of short timelines. This is a truly iterative approach that allows to pivot or preserve strategy to maximize the value delivery.

Customer focused

Project teams measure success as the delivery of agreed up-front scope, on time and in budget. This often means that they get too solution focused and lose sight of whether appropriate value is being delivered to the stakeholders. There is no point in delivering the entire upfront agreed scope if it doesn’t cater to the stakeholder needs anymore.

We all work to create value for our stakeholders as well as the organization. Business outcomes allow us to define value in a measurable way, thus focusing on what matters most from the customer perspective. For product teams, success equals improvement directly related to a business outcome. Hence, rather than seeing their job as delivering a task, product teams focus on delighting and adding value for their customers (internal or external).

Knowledge Retention

Project teams ramp up quickly to build a solution over one or more releases, hand it over to an operations team in the “run” organization and are then disbanded, and the members move on to other project teams. With project teams being continually dragged onto new things, it gets very difficult to retain knowledge in legacy systems and often results in unmaintainable code, making it much harder to support such systems.

On the other hand, knowledge grows in product teams that allows team members to focus on a given business area for much longer. Overtime, these teams build strong stakeholder relationships and business domain knowledge, and can better understand the stakeholder problems and serve to their needs.

System Integrity and Continuous Improvement

Project teams are in constant pressure to deliver the agreed scope in defined timelines. This often leads to cutting corners and applying tactical fixes, increasing technical debt and neglecting long term architectural integrity in favor of short-term feature delivery. As the project team doesn’t face the long-term consequences of these tradeoffs, they are more likely to take such decisions for short-term gain. Over a period, this phenomenon compromises stability of systems, lowering quality and worsens the seed of value delivery.

On the other hand, Product teams have complete and collective ownership of the code and systems. There are no handovers, BAU or Operations team. The same team builds, runs and fixes any defects over the lifespan of the product, allowing them to evolve the system continuously and in a more sustainable manner.  This also fosters a mindset that promotes taking responsibility for their product and the decisions they are empowered to make.

Making the shift to a Product Centric Organization Model

According to a recent Gartner survey, 85% of the organizations have adopted or plans to adopt a product-centric organization model.

To enable accelerated value delivery, adaptive planning, and flexibility required to achieve the digital priorities, many organizations are shifting towards a product centric model. In a product centric model, organizations align funding & resources to product portfolios that support their key business capabilities.

A business capability is the ability of an organization to do things effectively to achieve desired business outcomes and measurable benefits. Each business capability is independent from other business capabilities and realized by combining different functions of an organization to fulfil one functionality. Example, for an FMCG, key business capabilities are often: Direct to Consumer, Wholesale and Retail.

The key primary constructs of translating Enterprise Strategy into traceable User Stories, via Features and Business Outcomes are:

• A Product Portfolio, also known as a Product Line, solely exists to fulfill its contribution toward realizing the overall enterprise strategy. Each Product line is tied to a distinct business capability with end to end accountability to deliver measurable business outcomes.

• The Portfolio Management board allocates funding across each of the Product Lines based on the importance of the business capabilities they support and the business outcomes they are expected to deliver. The Product Line budget is then split into individual product streams by the Product Line Council, which is then further split into individual feature teams by the Product Council.

• The business outcomes communicate aspects of strategic intent from the enterprise to the product line. Business outcomes are a means of concisely capturing business needs in a measurable way. Business outcomes most often require product functionality as well as supporting business activities (sales, marketing, promotions, delivery chain, etc.). The product teams work with leadership to establish measurable product outcomes tied to those business outcomes, which are then further split into Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each Product Feature team, who will then breakdown those features into user stories, establishing a clear line of sight from enterprise strategy to user stories.

Adaptive Funding of Products and Product Portfolios: From Annual to Quarterly Cycle

Organizing work by Products and Product Portfolios is a good starting point to accelerate the delivery of value to one’s customers. However, that enough won’t suffice if the work is still funded through projects on an annual basis.

An annual investment process simply can’t keep up with the pace of change. Under an annual planning approach, entire funding is allocated at the start of the fiscal year. Significant effort is spent upfront to create a detailed business case required to win the funding approval. Changes in stakeholder priorities or market demand often render a lot of early requirements captured in the business case as obsolete, creating a lot of waste and requiring significant rework.

Thus, to achieve their digital ambitions, enterprises must work with business and Finance partners to move beyond traditional project-centric funding models and adopt a product-centric funding model that enables rolling-wave planning, accelerated delivery of value, and validated learning to make much more informed decisions.  Moving from funding project scope to funding teams is a seminal part of product centric funding.

(Re)allocation of Funds across Product Portfolios

Initial annual funding allocations to individual product portfolios are based on un-validated hypothesis of benefits, which must be tested over the course of the year against changing priorities and proven value. The Portfolio Management Board meets on a recurring basis (Quarterly plus any market triggered event) to assess the allocation at the product-line level and reallocating funds as necessary to reflect changes to strategic enterprise priorities.

(Re)allocation of Funds within a Product Portfolio

The Product Line Council has the autonomy and the empowerment to reprioritize and reallocate funds across all products within the product line.  Each product team within a product line are allocated funds on a quarterly basis based on proven value (unless it’s the first quarter where funding is based on projected benefits). The business value is measured by hitting a set of KPIs tied to the business outcomes such as increasing revenues, reducing costs, and improving customer satisfaction. This level of decentralization in decision making is possible when an organization implements a consistent, standardized and predictable cadence to support governance, offering frequent opportunities for key stakeholders to provide input on the roadmap.

Impediments to adopt Product-based Funding Model

The shift from a project-based funding model to a product-based funding model requires a major cultural and mindset change, as different stakeholders will have different reservations about the new approach. Some of the challenges to adopt a product-based funding model include:

Business & Finance partners reluctant to cede control of budgets

Some CFOs and business leaders are reluctant to cede control of budgets. In response, they must be made to understand that the reality is that they are gaining a lot more control by not allocating the entire funding based on the un-validated hypothesis of projected benefits and with no benefits tracking in place most cases. Also, by offering them visibility into product portfolio performance on quarterly basis with the option to pivot or preserve funding strategy based on proven value and/or change in priorities, we can significantly reduce the risk of financial loss.

Product Managers lacking finance expertise to manage product budgets

Identifying Product Managers with sufficient expertise to manage large budgets is often challenging and requires significant effort and commitment from the organization to build the financial competencies.

Resistance to funding not” fully detailed” requirements or outcomes

Business partners feel a comfort factor with a detailed business case based on projected benefits, even if it is based on a lot of assumptions and uncertainty upfront. To get business partners fully on board, product leaders need to craft a pitch that provides tangible examples of how adaptive funding model leads to better business outcomes.

Requires structural changes to support product-centric organization

Most companies we work with are organized around functions. Organizational structure change is required to adopt a product-centric operation model. Organizations are reluctant to Org design changes as it can be very difficult and expensive to implement.

Parting Thoughts

We have endeavored to shed some light on a very complex topic, balancing the amount of context we can provide in a blog entry.  If you have any questions please do use the comments section below.

Joshua Barnes, CDAC | CDAI

Jeev Chugh, CDAP | CDAI

The basic idea with rolling wave planning is that you plan things that are near in time to you in detail and things that are distant in time at a higher level. The thinking is that the longer away in time that something is the greater the chance that it will change during that time, therefore any investment in thinking through the details is likely wasted. You still want to plan at a high level to both guide your current decisions and to set people’s expectations as to what is likely to come.

Rolling wave planning is implemented in several places of the DA toolkit. First, as you can see in Figure 1 below, it is an option of the Level of Detail decision point of the Develop Initial Release Plan process goal. A rolling wave approach to release planning has the advantages of more accurate and flexible planning although can be a bit disconcerting to traditional managers who are used to annual planning strategies.

Figure 1. The Develop Initial Release Plan goal diagram.

The Portfolio Management process blade supports rolling wave budgeting as an option for its Manage the Budget decision point. This is depicted in Figure 2. The advantages are greater flexibility and greater likelihood of investing your IT funding more effectively, albeit at the loss of the false predictability provided by an annual budgeting strategy.

Figure 2. The goal diagram for the Portfolio Management process blade.

The Program Management process blade supports rolling wave planning of a program itself, as you seen in Figure 3. Planning and coordination are critical on a large program, and rolling wave planning offers the advantages greater flexibility, the ability to think important cross-team issues through, and the ability to react to changing stakeholder needs. The primary disadvantage is that it can be disconcerting for traditionalists who are used to thinking every thing through from the beginning.

Figure 3. The goal diagram for the Program Management process blade.

As you can see in Figure 4, rolling wave strategies can be applied in Product Management to evolve the business vision/roadmap. A continuous, rolling wave approach is critical to your success because the market place changes so quickly – these days, few organizations can tolerate an annual approach to business planning and in the case of companies with external customers an ad-hoc approach can prove to be too unpredictable for them.

Figure 4. The goal diagram for the Product Management process blade.

Previously we saw that rolling wave strategies can be applied to evolve your technology roadmap, as indicated in the goal diagram for Enterprise Architecture in Figure 5. The advantages of this approach are that your roadmap evolved in sync with both changes in technology and with your organization’s rate of experimentation and learning. The main disadvantage is that your technology roadmap is effectively a moving target.

Figure 5. The goal diagram for the Enterprise Architecture process blade.

As you can see, rolling wave strategies are an integral part of the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit. In fact, in most situations they prove to be the most effective and flexible strategies available to you. The advantages of rolling wave planning tend to greatly outweigh the disadvantages. More on this next time.

For a long time now we’ve been applying what’s often called rolling wave planning with our clients. Rolling wave planning is applied in several areas of the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit, including release planning by a delivery team, technology roadmapping, and product roadmapping to name a few.  This blog overviews this important practice.

The basic idea is that you plan things that are near in time to you in detail and things that are distant in time at a higher level. The thinking is that the longer away in time that something is the greater the chance that it will change during that time, therefore any investment in thinking through the details is likely wasted. You still want to plan at a high level to both guide your current decisions and to set people’s expectations as to what is likely to come.

In Figure 1 below you see an overview of how rolling wave planning works and in Figure 2 an example of how a Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) team applies it for release planning. Upcoming work is planned in detail, the planning unit “X” is one month in the case of the delivery team. In order to do their work they need detailed user stories and supporting artifacts such as acceptance criteria and supporting models such as user interface (UI) sketches or data source analysis. They have this information for the work that they are doing right now as well as about one month’s of upcoming work. They don’t yet need details for work that is several months away in time. In this case for work that is two to three months in the future they only have user stories developed and work that is four to six months away epics. Work in what the team considers to be the distant future, in this case six or more months away, is described in very high-level terms such as epics or solution capabilities.

Figure 1. Rolling wave planning overview.

Figure 2. Rolling wave release planning on a solution delivery team.

Part of the work that the team is doing right now is to keep their plan up to date. For example, if they are working in two week iterations they will pull two weeks of work into the team. During the current iteration they will pull about two weeks of user stories from the near term category (the yellow box in Figure 2) into the very near term (the green box). They may also bring upcoming work into the near term category at this point too.

Rolling wave planning has its source in iterative software development such as the Rational Unified Process (RUP). It is a strategy that is commonly applied by agile software teams and the Project Management Institute (PMI)’s Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBoK) supports it.

Further Reading

• Rolling Wave Planning in Disciplined Agile
• Rolling Wave Planning for Product Roadmaps
• Rolling Wave Planning for Technology Roadmaps
• Rolling Wave Release Planning for Agile Delivery Teams