The buzz around Disciplined Agile is growing, and there are a lot of people interested in this new Agility paradigm.
Disciplined Agile is a revolutionary and novel concept that does all of the heavy lifting and cherry-picks the best parts of all current Agile practices, and provides contextual guidance based on the team’s situation or requirement.
Disciplined Agile removes process thinking and administrative overheads or guesswork from the Agile team, allowing the team to focus on the work at hand and deliver results.
Disciplined Agile, unlike all other agile practices and methodologies, is a “Hybrid Toolbox” that leverages various practices depending on the situation. It is an excellent combination of Agile, Lean, and Disciplined Agile. And is more concerned with providing business or enterprise agility rather than team agility.
With its unique approach, Agile Certification candidate has proven to be beneficial to many leading organizations such as Barclays and Franklin Templeton in their transformation to Agility.
The Disciplined Agile process decision framework offers light guidance to assist organizations in streamlining their information technology (IT) processes in a context-sensitive manner.
It accomplishes this by demonstrating how various activities such as solution delivery, operations, enterprise architecture, portfolio management, and many others interact to form a unified whole. The framework also describes what these activities should address, offers a variety of approaches for doing so, and describes the tradeoffs associated with each approach.
Because each person, team, and organization is unique, process frameworks must provide options rather than prescribe answers. (Reference: “Software Quality: The Future of Systems” by S.W.Ambler and M.Lines.)
Businesses are becoming more dynamic and change-resistant. Assume you call an airline’s customer service center and a chatbot greets you. Rather than asking you, the chatbot addresses you by name and provides details about your next flight, as well as other insights based on intelligence gathered from your previous purchases and preferences.
It used to take you 15-20 minutes to complete your work, but now it only takes you 2-3 minutes. As a result, you are overjoyed with the service you just received.
Enterprise agility is all about detecting changes in the business environment, responding quickly to them, and learning and adapting to them. It includes all business functions and departments throughout the organization.
Our organizations are complex, adaptive systems in which teams interact across business units, departments, and locations. The work of one team may have a significant impact on the work of another. Each team learns from one another’s methods of operation and strives for continuous improvement.
Three Reasons You Should Learn Disciplined Agile Today
1. Reason – Disciplined Agile includes six distinct life cycle models.
DA, in contrast to other models, is a highly adaptable toolkit that includes a collection of life cycle models that can be applied to meet the specific needs of a project situation.
Agile, Agile Continuous Delivery, Lean, Lean Continuous Delivery, Program, and Exploratory are some examples. I won’t take away your chance to learn about each of these, but just know that they are all unique in their areas of focus and value.
2. Reason – Disciplined Agile values context and customization.
Context and pragmatism are at the heart of DA; DA accepts your unique circumstances and does not attempt to prescribe any “best practices” because there is no such thing as a “best” approach for all situations. What works well in one circumstance may not work well in another.
DA empowers you to choose your own model by encouraging you to understand your cultural and organizational constraints and requirements. DA also encourages you to adapt your working style as your context and domain change.
3. Reason – Disciplined Agile is goal-oriented.
Process objectives are the fuel that powers the DA engine. The goals help teams focus on what they want to achieve, and then provide a roadmap for selecting specific practices that will help your team achieve the goals. DA provides a collection of industry practices that are commonly used today, as well as recommendations on what works well in specific situations based on real-world field experience.
For example, if your team wants to “Explore Scope,” DA offers a number of activities such as “Explore the Domain,” “Explore General Requirements,” and “Apply Modeling Strategies” – Each of these decision points will include a list of potential tools/techniques to assist you in meeting your goal, such as “Agile modeling sessions,” “Open space,” “Joint Application Requirements sessions,” and so on.
To summarize, DA is a frequently overlooked approach that has been eclipsed by more popular and well-known frameworks such as Scrum or SAFe. However, I am convinced that DA is a hidden gem that can make a significant difference in your team and organization . Do yourself a favor and read up on Disciplined Agile today to see how you can put this powerful toolkit to use!