Disciplined Agile

Align With Enterprise Direction

This Inception phase process goal describes how our team will ensure that what we’re about to do reflects the overall strategy of our organization. We will want to understand both the technical and business strategies that are relevant to our situation and to identify existing assets that we can leverage to streamline what we’re doing.

Copyright Project Management Institute All Rights Reserved Align With Enterprise Direction v5.5 Align With Roadmaps Business roadmap Staffing roadmap Technology roadmap Align Measurement Strategy Adopt common metrics Align with enterprise goals/outcomes Align with program goals/outcomes Adopt Common Guidelines Architecture Branding Coding Data Documentation Risk management Security Tool User interface (UI) Adopt Common Templates Minimal Comprehensive None Reuse Existing Infrastructure Domain components (microservices, ...) Web services Tooling Applications/systems Frameworks Data sources Components Code Align With Governance Strategies Control Data Enterprise architecture Financial Quality People management Release management Security

Figure 1. The Align with Enterprise Direction process goal diagram.

Click the diagram to open the interactive DA Browser, where you can learn more about the decision points and options of this goal.

Why This is Important

There are two reasons why this is important: 

  1. Ensure we’re doing the right thing. We want to understand both the technical and business strategies that are relevant to our situation. We also want to follow appropriate conventions and controls to streamline our interactions with others in the organization. In other words, we want to work in an “enterprise-aware” manner.
  2. Ensure we’re taking advantage of everything available to us. We want to identify existing assets that we can leverage, thereby enabling the team to focus on adding new value.

Important Questions to Consider

  • What is our overall organizational direction?
  • What do we need to measure, at a minimum?
  • What are the standards and guidelines we should follow?
  • What templates should we adopt?
  • How will we go about reusing existing enterprise assets?
  • What governance strategies will we need to work under? 

Key Points

  • We can increase quality, consistency, and speed up our delivery by adopting common guidelines and templates, and taking advantage of asset reuse opportunities.
  • We should understand our enterprise governance strategies and look for opportunities to help leadership to understand and support lean governance strategies.

January 2023