Introduction to Disciplined Agile® (DA™)

True business agility comes from freedom, not frameworks. Disciplined Agile (DA) is an agnostic, hybrid tool kit that harnesses hundreds of Agile, Lean, and traditional strategies to guide you to the best way of working (WoW) for your team or organization. DA is context sensitive; rather than prescribing a collection of "best practices," it teaches you how to choose and later evolve a fit-for-purpose WoW that is best for you given the situation you face.

The DA tool kit provides straightforward guidance to help organizations streamline their processes in a context-sensitive manner, providing a solid foundation for business agility. It does this by showing how the various business functions such as Finance, Portfolio Management, Solution Delivery (software development), IT Operations, Enterprise Architecture, Vendor Management and many others work together. DA also describes what these business functions should address, provides a range of options for doing so, and describes the trade-offs associated with each option.

This article is organized into the following topics:

1. Why Disciplined Agile?
2. A Quick Primer on Disciplined Agile
3. The Disciplined Agile Mindset
4. Supporting Enterprise Agility: Process Blades
5. The Freedom of Choice
6. How Teams Apply the Disciplined Agile Tool Kit
7. True Agility at Scale

Why Disciplined Agile?

There are several reasons why Disciplined Agile (DA) is crucial to your organization’s success:

1. DA enables you to get better at getting better. DA is focused on helping you to become a learning organization, rather than simply providing a collection of “best practices” that may not be applicable to your context.
2. DA provides a solid foundation for enterprise agility. People and teams across your organization, regardless of business function, can all benefit from straightforward guidance to streamline their processes. DA addresses the entire enterprise, not just software development.
3. DA starts where you are. Your organization has made a large investment in your current way of working (WoW), and with DA you can build upon that investment. If your organization is currently following Scrum, Kanban, SAFe^®, LeSS, or other mainstream approaches then DA shows you how to improve upon and extend those frameworks. For your teams still working in a more traditional manner, and rightfully so, DA offers advice for how they can improve their WoW because DA is a hybrid that doesn’t expect everyone to work in the same manner. Sometimes the best WoW isn’t agile – but it is still disciplined.
4. DA teaches you to become a learning organization. Adopting an agile framework might be a good first step but it isn’t your end goal. A true transformation results in you becoming a learning organization that is able to continually improve through experimentation and learning, thereby enabling you to better serve your customers/citizens.

Our fundamental advice is to start where you are, do the best that you can in the situation that you face, and always strive to get better. Read Why Disciplined Agile? for a more detailed discussion.

A Quick Primer on Disciplined Agile

Disciplined Agile (DA) is very much a tool kit, not a framework. An agile framework will present you with a collection of what it considers to be “best practices,” but the reality is that all practices are contextual in nature, working well in some situations and poorly in others. DA takes a more sophisticated approach, surfacing the decisions that you need to consider, the options available to you, and the trade-offs associated with these options. In short, DA is a process-decision tool kit that enables you to easily choose your own WoW that is fit-for-purpose for you. Where frameworks prescribe what to do, regardless of whether it’s appropriate for you, the DA tool kit instead provides you with freedom of choice.

Within any given team you can use DA to identify the intents and the activities you should address so you can make context-specific choices that are the best for your situation. DA addresses four views:

1. Mindset. DA builds on the foundations of agile and lean to address enterprise realities.
2. People. DA describes the roles, responsibilities, and team structures you should have in place.
3. Flow. DA describes the dynamic aspects of processes via lifecycle and workflow diagrams.
4. Practices. DA outlines the techniques that move your team forward, using straightforward goal diagrams that provide a high-level picklist of practices.

The Disciplined Agile Mindset

The Disciplined Agile (DA) mindset is captured in the form of principles, promises, and guidelines – as you see in Figure 1. Disciplined agilists believe in the DA principles, so we promise to adopt these behaviors and follow these guidelines when doing so. There is a purpose for each aspect of the mindset:

• Principles. The principles provide a philosophical foundation for business agility. They are based on both lean and flow concepts.
• Promises. The promises are agreements that we make with our fellow teammates, our stakeholders, and other people within our organization with whom we interact. The promises define a collection of disciplined behaviors that enable us to collaborate effectively and professionally.
• Guidelines. These guidelines help us to be more effective in our way of working (WoW) and in improving our WoW over time.

To address the various business functions within your organization the DA tool kit is organized into what we call “process blades” such as Finance, Marketing, Governance, Data Management, Security, and many others. Because the professionals who work in these areas have different backgrounds, different priorities, and different ways of looking at the world the DA mindset is extended with specific philosophies for each process blade that respects their unique and diverse backgrounds.

Supporting Enterprise Agility: Process Blades

The Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit is overviewed in Figure 2. Process blades are shown as hexagons and are sometimes called process areas, key process areas (KPAs), or business functions. A process blade encompasses a cohesive part of your overall organizational way of working (WoW). Each process blade addresses a specific organizational capability such as Enterprise Architecture, Product Management, and Vendor Management and each blade is described in terms of the four views described previously. 

You can see in Figure 2 that each process blade appears in one or more layers.  For example, Program Management is part of the Value Streams layer whereas Strategy is part of both the Value Streams and Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE) layers because you may choose to develop a value stream specific strategy as well as an enterprise strategy. The four layers of the DA tool kit are:

1. Foundation. The Foundation layer provides the conceptual underpinnings of the DA tool kit. This includes the principles, promises, and guidelines of the DA mindset; fundamental concepts from both agile and lean; fundamental concepts from serial/traditional approaches; roles and team structures; and the fundamentals of choosing your WoW.

2. Disciplined DevOps. DevOps is the streamlining of software development, what we call Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), and IT Operations activities. DevOps is typically presented as you see in Figure 3. This is a great start, and in Disciplined DevOps we extend this to take an enterprise-class approach that integrates Security and Data Management so as to provide more effective outcomes for your organization. We also recognize that for organizations with hundreds, and sometimes thousands of systems in production that Support (help desk) and Release Management activities need to be robust. The workflow for Disciplined DevOps is shown in Figure 4. 

3. Value Streams. The Value Stream layer is based on DA FLEX, the workflow of which is shown in Figure 5. DA FLEX is the glue that ties an organization’s strategies in that it visualizes what an effective value stream looks like, enabling you to make decisions for improving each part of the organization within the context of the whole. It’s not enough to be innovative, you also need to increase value realization – this layer shows you how to do exactly that in the environment that you face.

4. Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE). A Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE) is able to sense and respond swiftly to changes in the marketplace. It does this through an organizational culture and structure that facilitates change within the context of the situation that it faces. Such organizations require a learning mindset in the mainstream business and underlying lean and agile processes to drive innovation. The DAE layer focuses on the rest of the enterprise activities that support your organization’s value streams.

The Freedom of Choice

Different contexts require different strategies – teams need to be able to own their process and be enabled to experiment to discover what works in practice for them given the situation that they face. This is why the DA tool kit presents people with choices through the application of process goal diagrams, as you see in Figure 6 which depicts the options for addressing risk at the team level. The idea is to make important decision points explicit, such as when to accept changes, and then present teams with their options and the tradeoffs surrounding those options. This enables teams to make effective process choices given the situation that they face. To make better choices teams need to know: what each option is, the tradeoffs associated with each option, and in what situations each option is and isn’t applicable.  

Let’s explore the process goal notation used in Figure 6.  The process goal, Address Risk, is indicated using a rounded rectangle on the left side of the diagram. A decision point, indicated as a squared rectangle, is an intent that you need to consider addressing, such as how to classify and score risks and how you intend to address a threat. You may choose not to address some decision points, but you should at least consider them. Each decision point is potentially addressed several options, techniques such as practices or strategies, which are shown to the right of the decision point. For example, when addressing a threat you may choose to avoid it, mitigate it, transfer it, and so on. A “default option” is depicted in bolded italics, which is a suggested starting point for a team that is tasked with a relatively straightforward domain problem to address.  Some option lists are ordered, this is indicated by an arrow to the left of the list, in that the options appearing at the top of the list are more desirable from the point of view of agile and lean thinking and the less desirable options are at the bottom of the list. For example, when tracking risks it is typically better to capture them as work items on your backlog rather than not tracking them at all.  Finally, some option lists are unordered (there’s no arrow to the left of it). While each option has its advantages and disadvantages, we can’t say that some options are generally more effective than others.

DA takes a similar, goal/choice-driven approach to every process blades as well.

How Teams Apply the Disciplined Agile Tool Kit

A fundamental philosophy of agile is that teams should own their own process, or, as we like to say in DA, teams should choose their way of working (WoW). This is easier said than done in practice. The challenge is that every team is unique and faces a unique situation – in other words, context counts. Furthermore, there are no “best practices,” rather, every practice has tradeoffs and works well in some situations and poorly in others. Worse yet, you really don’t know how well a technique will work for you until you actually try it out in your environment. Given all of this, how can a team choose its WoW?

We’ve developed a DA technique that we call guided continuous improvement (GCI). GCI is based on a proven lean strategy where teams improve over time by making small changes to their WoW.  There are various versions of this strategy, including both Gemba Kaizen and Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA).  The process flow of GCI is depicted in Figure 7 and it is mapped to PDSA.