1. THE DISCIPLINED
AGILE (DA) TOOLKIT
An Agile/Lean Toolkit for optimizing your
Way of Working (WoW)
YOUR NAME AND CONTACT INFO HERE
Copyright 2020 Project Management Institute
2. AGENDA
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1. What is Disciplined Agile?
2. Why Disciplined Agile?
3. Overview of Disciplined Agile
4. Choosing Your WoW
The Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit Copyright 2020 Project Management Institute
3. WHAT IS DISCIPLINED
AGILE?
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4. Introduction
to
Disciplined
Agile (DA)
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DA became part of the PMI family in August 2019
DA provides guidance to help organizations choose their
way of working (WoW) in a context-sensitive manner,
providing a solid foundation for business agility
DA is a toolkit of Agile strategies and practices to
complement any agile framework or method such as
Scrum or SAFe
The Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit Copyright 2020 Project Management Institute
5. Agile has
Devolved
into Chaos
6
• Hundreds of
Practices
• Significant overlap
• Significant gaps
• Conflicting advice
• Niche
Certifications
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The Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit Copyright 2020 Project Management Institute
Tribes
Continuous Integration
Continuous Deployment
Test driven development (TDD)
Pair programming
Mob programming
Daily standups
Taskboards
Burndowns
Burnups
OKRs
GQM
Squads
Program Increments (PIs)
Release Planning
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Guilds
Scrum
Epics
User stories
Technical Debt
Product Owners
Architecture Owners
Spikes
MVPs
MBIs
Automated tests
Acceptance Tests
Regression testing
BDD
ATDD
DevOps
Refactoring
Database refactoring
Generalizing specialists
User Experience
Design
Split testing
Exploratory testing
Active stakeholder participation
Onsite customer
Demos
Shift left
Shift right
Canary testing
Backlogs
Open space
Dashboards
Static analysis
Dynamic analysis
Business canvas
6. DISCIPLINED AGILE
Enables teams to choose their
Way of Working (WoW)TM
An umbrella over all of agile,
DA makes the Agile
landscape - and “when to use
what” - clear
Your WoW
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Tribes
Continuous Integration
Continuous Deployment
Test driven development (TDD)
Pair programming
Mob programming
Daily standups
Taskboards
Burndowns
Burnups
OKRs
GQM
Squads
Program Increments (PIs)
Release Planning
Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Guilds
Scrum
Epics
User stories
Technical Debt
Product Owners
Architecture Owners
Spikes
MVPs
MBIs
Automated tests
Acceptance Tests
Regression testing
BDD
ATDD
DevOps
Refactoring
Database refactoring
Generalizing specialists
User Experience
Design
Split testing
Exploratory testing
Active stakeholder participation
Onsite customer
Demos
Shift left
Shift right
Canary testing
Backlogs
Open space
Dashboards
Static analysis
Dynamic analysis
Business canvas
8. Classic
Project
Management
Disciplined
Agile
PMI’s Classic PM & DA Guidance are for Different Purposes but Complimentary
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The New PMBOK Guide
includes Agile content
DA includes guidance on Risk
Management & Governance
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The “Agile Industrial
Complex” has become
fragmented over 20+
years with lack of
leadership,
unprofessional behavior,
and questionable
certification schemes
The time is right for PMI
+ DA to bring
a professional approach
to mindful and bespoke
agile with PMI’s strong
community support and
a credible certification
programs
Organizations are
growing weary of
proprietary, inflexible
methods requiring
expensive training
and consulting
support
It is Time to Up
our Agile Game
11. Mindset
Disciplined
Agile (DA) is
described in
four views
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People
PracticesFlow
Roles &
responsibilities
Team structures
Lifecycles
Workflows
Goal diagrams
Principles and
guidelines
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12. The Seven Principles of
Disciplined Agile
Delight
Customers
Pragmatism
Be
Awesome
Context
Counts
Choice is
Good
Optimize
Flow
Enterprise
Awareness
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13. 14
Your Organization is a Complex Adaptive System (CAS)
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14. There are a myriad of roles within organizations
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Agile team roles:
• Team Lead
• Lean Scrum Master
• Project Manager
• Specialized Lead/Manager
• Product Owner
• Team Member
• Architecture Owner
Enterprise roles:
• Chief Financial Officer
• People Manager
• Procurement Officer
• Portfolio Manager
• Data Manager
• Reuse Engineer
• And more…
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Business
Agility:
Process
Blades
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16. Teams
should
choose an
appropriate
lifecycle
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Program
Exploratory
Lean Continuous
Delivery: Lean
Continuous
Delivery: Agile
Agile
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Milestone Fundamental Question Asked
Stakeholder vision Do stakeholders agree with your strategy?
Proven architecture Can you actually build this?
Continued viability Does the effort still make sense?
Sufficient functionality Does it make sense to release the current solution?
Production ready Will the solution work in production?
Delighted stakeholders Are stakeholders happy with the deployed solution?
Inception Construction Transition
Initiate the endeavor Development of a potentially consumable solution Deploy the solution
Proven architecture
Stakeholder vision
Continued viability
(several)
Sufficient functionality
Production ready
Delighted stakeholders
Lean Governance – Baked into Disciplined Agile
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18. The DA FLEX Lifecycle
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20. Frameworks Aren’t Silver Bullets
What if your staff aren’t sufficiently
skilled?
What if the prescriptive advice doesn’t suit
your organization’s context?
Copying someone else’s Agile approach
at best helps you to catch up
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21. Effectiveness
Time
Initial learning curve
Things get better
We hit the limits of the framework (we’re in method prison)
Source: Reifer, D.
Quantitative Analysis of Agile Methods
Survey (2017): Twelve Major Findings
1500+ agile teams at 150 orgs
Agile methods: 7-12% more productive on average
Agile scaling frameworks: 3-5% more productive on
average
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Agile Frameworks/Methods Can Help but they are Not Enough
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22. Successful Agile Organizations Take Responsibility
for Evolving their own Agility
• Success doesn’t come from adopting a
prescriptive framework or methodology
such as Scrum or SAFe, although it may
be a good start!
• For true business agility, we need to
“Choose our agile way of working (WoW)”,
bespoke agile, optimizing for our unique
situations
23
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23. Kaizen Loops:
Improve via
Experiments
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Identify Problem
Identify Potential
Solution(s)
Try the Solution(s)
Assess
Effectiveness
Adopt What Works
Abandon What
Doesn’t Work
Share Learnings
Plan
Do
Study
Act
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24. Continuous Improvement via Kaizen Loops
The Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit Copyright 2020 Project Management Institute
Effectiveness
Time
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25. Guided
Continuous
Improvement
(GCI)
Identify Problem
Identify Potential
Solution(s)
Try the Solution(s)
Assess
Effectiveness
Adopt What Works
Abandon What
Doesn’t Work
Share Learnings
Some experiments fail.
You learn something, but
it’s still a failure.
Failing fast is fine, but
succeeding early is better.
If we get better at this,
we succeed more often
and we improve faster.
We can do this if we have
access to an experienced
agile coach, but they’re
expensive and hard to find.
We can do this if we have
access to a process
knowledgebase, like the
Disciplined Agile (DA)
toolkit.
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28. You Can Improve Your Way Out of Method Prison
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Start where you are,
do the best that you can in the situation that you face,
and always strive to get better.
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29. “Better
Decisions Lead
to Better
Outcomes”
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• Disciplined Agile is a rich, comprehensive and
well-organized toolkit of strategies to help your
organization be more successful with Agile
• DA brings a disciplined, agnostic, professional,
enterprise approach to agile which is what our
industry has been lacking in the past
• Understanding what your options are, and
which ones work in different contexts leads to
better decisions
In Summary
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The Disciplined Agile (DA) Toolkit Copyright 2020 Project Management Institute
This presentation overviews the Disciplined Agile (DA) toolkit
1 minute
Agile was formally described by the Agile Manifesto in 2001. Informally it existing in methods such as Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) since the mid ‘90s. Why are we still struggling with it?
Niches with self-interest, driven by small boutiques have no incentive to unify their ideas around one common body of knowledge.
We have long needed a unifying body to bring cohesion to our industry.
Agree on common terminology, organized the content, remove redundancies.
Add guidance to explain in what contexts different approaches work.
The 10th principle of the Agile Manifesto reads “Simplicity – The art of maximizing the amount of work NOT done, is essential”.
Scott Ambler – Co-creator of Disciplined Agile, PMI VP and Chief Scientist of Disciplined Agile
Mark Lines – Co-creator of Disciplined Agile, PMI’s VP of Disciplined Agile
Al Shalloway – Creator of FLEX (now part of DA), PMI Director of Agility at Scale
1 min
There is no intention of combining the PM BOK Guide content and the DA BOK into one. Each program is has its own approach. Ideally we know both. Some projects are best suited for a traditional project management approach while others favour an agile approach. There is some common overlap between the programs, specifically in the risk management and governance guidance.
You may be wondering about the future of the PMI-ACP certification. The ACP designation is a very good certification and there are no plans to stop the program at this time. While it is not part of the Disciplined Agile certification program, anyone taking a DA certification will get credit for their ACP experience and education. This means an accelerated path for those with an PMI-ACP who wish to attain a DA Certification
1 minute
DA content is organized into 4 architectural views: Mindset, People, Practices, and Flow
Mindset – Addresses what it means to be agile/lean
The People view describes Roles & Responsibilities as well as various strategies for organizing teams
Flow addresses lifecycles and workflows/process flows
Practices includes strategies and procedures
We will review some aspects of each of these aspects in the following slides
What does it mean to be disciplined? To be disciplined is to do the things that you know are good for you, things that usually require hard work and perseverance. It requires discipline to regularly delight your customers. It takes discipline for teams to become awesome. It requires discipline for leaders to ensure that their people have a safe environment to work in. It takes discipline to recognize that you need to tailor your approach for the context that you face, and to evolve your approach as the situation evolves. It takes discipline to recognize that you are part of a larger organization, that you should do what’s best for the enterprise and not just what’s convenient for you. It requires discipline to evolve and optimize your overall workflow, and it requires discipline to realize that you have many choices regarding how you work and organize yourselves, so you should choose accordingly.
For details, visit http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/principles/
An organization is a collection of interacting teams
Every team has it’s own way of working (WoW)
Teams learn and evolve their WoW over time
Teams have external working agreements (the aquamarine boundaries, that define how other teams can interact with them. Sometimes these working agreements are informal, sometimes formal
Disciplined Agile calls out a number of roles which reflect the scope of the toolkit
We are updating our graphics.
Instead of circles we’re using hexes. We’ve also updated the color scheme
You will soon start to see this on the website
Each hex represents what we call a process blade. Think of it like a process area, but with advice for where to start and more important how to evolve your WoW
DAD supports multiple lifecycles for solution delivery (software development).
Some people think that all you need to know about agile is Scrum. Scrum can be a very effective agile approach but in some situations, such as where priorities are changing daily, Lean may be a better approach.
If you think that this is complicated, it is not. You only need to understand one, such as Agile, which is based on Scrum. But knowing more options such as Lean can make your teams more effective
Choice is good!
We are adding a serial lifecycle, what some people would call “predictive,” in March 2020
The lifecycles of Disciplined Agile support a common set of risk-based, lightweight milestones.
This provides senior leadership visibility into key aspects of what teams are doing and entry points for them to provide guidance.
These common milestones are one aspect of how governance is baked into DA.
DA FLEX is an approach based on Lean-Thinking and process patterns that improves an organization’s ability to achieve business agility – the quick realization of value reliably, sustainably and with high quality. It works by:
Understanding what the workflow and structure of the organization adopting it should be
Identifying the challenges being incurred in the organization in relationship to this idealized structure
Identifying potential solutions to the challenges and creating a roadmap of adoption for them based on the organization’s culture and situation
Starting implementation of this roadmap
Providing a way to continue the improvement process
A “silver bullet” is a single solution that slays the “problem” werewolf that you are currently suffering from
You are a unique organization facing a unique situation. You need to tailor your WoW to fit it.
See https://disciplinedagiledelivery.com/gci/ for a detailed discussion
Dr. Reifer is not aligned with any of the agile frameworks or methods (he has no skin in this game)
Ivar Jacobson coined the term “method prison” in 2017
By trying to implement a prescriptive framework, we seem to have forgotten that agile was always about figuring out better ways of working, not following a prescribed approach
Kaizen = Continuous improvement via small steps
This is a common lean strategy that has been around for decades
This is a great start, but with DA we can do better (as you’ll see a few slides from now)
Kaizen leads to continuous improvement over time
Of course the line isn’t this smooth in practice, some experiments work and some don’t.
So the actual line is bumpy but over time it trends upwards
This is exactly how the Amazons and the Googles of the world approach improvement. They’ve been doing it for years, and are now way ahead of everyone else
Disciplined Agile enables you to make better decisions regarding what techniques to experiment with.
This leads to quicker process improvement because more of your experiments succeed.
See https://disciplinedagiledelivery.com/gci/
Scenario:
Your team is having problems identifying how people will use their solution because they don’t have access to actual end users
The Team Lead says, ”Hey, why don’t we look up potential options in the DA toolkit” and see what we could try
The team looks at the Explore Scope goal diagram, and discovers that there’s more options for exploring usage than writing user stories
They then look up the details in the Choose Your WoW book and learn about personas in the corresponding lookup table
They identify that Personas are a likely option for addressing their problem, and decide to experiment with that strategy
With GCI you use the DA toolkit to identify techniques that are more likely to succeed in your context
This means you have more successful experiments, so you improve faster than the usual CI approach
Ivar Jacobson coined the term “method prison” in 2017
With method prison you hit the boundaries of what the method addresses, then you’re left on your own
Few teams/orgs break out of method prison
If you’re doing traditional, Scrum, SAFe, … that’s your starting point, your method prison
With GCI and DA you can then improve your way out of “method prison”
No matter what kind of agile you are using, you can be more effective with the DA Toolkit.
With PMI’s acquisition of DA, PMI is committed to raising the standard of professionalism in the agile community.