DA FLEX for the Disciplined Agilist: Flow for Enterprise Transformation (online book)
Note: Much of this book has chapters on concepts that are either not well known or that are explained in this book in a more accessible manner than in the past. If you are already familiar with advanced Agile topics, reading these chapters can give a broad stroke of how DA FLEX is different than current Agile frameworks. These are high-lighted for the interested reader. These chapters are in bold. A page with these chapters and why they are so useful, along with some other useful concepts not in this book, can be found here.
Table of Contents
Part I: The Theory Underneath DA FLEX
- Why We Need an Attitude change in Agile
- What’s Holding Us Back
- Dealing with Complexity by Creating a Bias For Simplicity
- The Dilemmas We’re In
Part II: The Goal Is Business Agility (with exercises)
- The Business Case For Agility
- The Minimum Business Increment
- What is flow?
- The value stream of the effective organization
- Strategic Planning and Lean Portfolio Management
- Lean Product Management
- The importance of Having an Intake Process
- Planning, Collaboration, and Dependency Management
- Implementation and Integration
- Release and Realization
Part III: The Goal Is Business Agility: What’s in Your Way?
- Inherent Challenges at Scale
- Mapping Your Value Stream
- Why Looking at the Value Stream Is So Important
- Using the Theory of Flow to Find Your Impediments
PART IV: DA FLEX as a Patterns Framework
- Understand Your Options
- Contrasting Epics and MBIs
- How Using MBIs Tie Strategies, the intake process, ATDD, and planning together
Part V: Using DA FLEX to transform your organization (with exercises)
- Starting a Transition to Business Agility in Six Steps
- Setting up a Transition Monitoring Team
- The Purpose of an Assessment
- Using DA FLEX to Perform an Assessment
- Using the Intake Process to Educate Leadership
- Attending to Flow Through the Development Group
- The assessment timeline for a development group of less than 125 people
- Creating a Roadmap for Improvement
- Improving your company’s culture
Part VI: New Roles Needed
- Business Architect
- The Application Development Manager
- The Technology Delivery Manager
- The Value Stream Network Architect
Part VII: Agreements We Make With Each Other: The Guardrails
- Leadership and Management
- Those Working at the Portfolio Level
- Business Architect
- Product Managers and Product Owners
- During Implementation and Integration
- Teams and Agile Coaches
- During the Planning Event
- During Release and Realization (ops et al)
Part VIII: Topics In Depth – Value Stream Wide
- The Mindshifts of DA FLEX
- Laws of Software Development
- The Value Stream Impedance Scorecard
- Systems thinking and How It Can Be Applied to Frameworks and Methods
- Why Lean-Agile Should Be More Predictable than Waterfall
- Collaboration and alignment
- The role of leadership and management
Part IX: Topics in Depth – Practices
- Create visibility
- High Level Release Planning – Pareto Vs Parkinson
- Improving WSJF
- Running Effective Planning Events
- The Benefits of Acceptance Driven Development Using Behavior Driven Development
- The Relationship Between Acceptance Test-Driven Development and Design Patterns
- How to Use Estimates
- A Simple Guide to See if a Change Will Be an Improvement
- The Purpose of Metrics
PART X: Using DA FLEX to Both Enhance and Simplify Scrum
Part XI: Using DA FLEX to both enhance and simplify SAFe
- Why Essential SAFe is Both More and Less Than What’s Needed at Small to Mid-Scale
- SAFe From a Value Stream Perspective
- Putting it together: DA FLEX and SAFe