Choosing and Evolving Your Team’s Way of Working (WoW)

The Disciplined Agile^® (DA^™) tool kit enables teams and organizations to choose and then evolve their way of working (WoW) in an effective manner. Figure 1 depicts a high-level overview, showing that some activities occur early in an initiative whereas other process improvement activities occur on an ongoing basis throughout the lifetime of team. In fact, Figure 1 reflects DA’s philosophy of “Start where you are, do the best that you can in the situation that you face, and always strive to get better”.

Let’s consider each of the activities in Figure 1.

1. Visualize existing process. As you can see in the Evolve WoW process goal diagram of Figure 2, there are several options to choose from.  Although value stream mapping (VSM) is a great technique that has become popular the past few years, the fact is that it requires a bit of skill to execute well. Luckily, you have choices.
2. Tailor initial WoW. Figure 2 also shows that you have options for initially tailoring your WoW. Adopting DA suggestions refers to the bolded options on process goal diagrams, such as Figure 2 itself, in that these options are often good starting points for most teams. Process tailoring workshops may seem like an overhead to agile purists, but in practice they are effective at identifying a WoW that is more likely to be fit-for-purpose for your team, thereby putting your team in a better position to collaborate from the start.
3. Identify potential improvements. The identify potential improvements decision point of Figure 2 captures strategies for both identifying problem as well as potential solutions to those problems.
4. Implement potential improvements. You also have options for how to implement potential improvements, as you see in Figure 2. We highly recommend Guided Continuous Improvement (GCI) which leverages the DA tool kit to improve your process improvement efforts.