Disciplined Agile

The Scope of Governance

One philosophy of the Disciplined Agile (DA) governance mindset is “holistic governance”. What we mean by that is that you want to enable lean, appropriate governance across all aspects of your organization. Rather than addressing individual functional governance areas, such as security governance, data governance, financial governance, and others separately you instead want to address them holistically. When you address governance areas separately the individual governance strategies may be inconsistent and at odds with one another and they very often prove to be overly burdensome in total. Furthermore, the way that you govern an individual team or group must reflect their way of working (WoW) – an agile team should be governed in an agile manner, a serial team in a serial manner, and so on.

The potential scope of governance is depicted in Figure 1. Figure 1 is not meant to be an exhaustive list. Rather, its purpose is to show that there is a wide range of potential governance aspects within your organization.

Scope of Governance

Figure 1. The potential scope of governance (click to enlarge).

February 2022

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