Figure 1. Governing Disciplined Agile Teams.
When it comes to governing Disciplined Agile® (DA™) teams, we’d like to share the following observations:
- DA teams are significantly easier to govern than traditional teams. This is the result of greater transparency, accurate and timely intelligence and greater opportunities to steer disciplined agile teams.
- Traditional approaches to governance are guaranteed to harm DA teams. The bureaucratic, documentation driven governance strategies of yesteryear provide little more than a governance veneer regardless of the paradigm being followed. Agile and lean teams must be governed in an agile/lean manner. DA teams must demand good governance. Your teams deserve to be governed well and should settle for nothing less.
- Agile practitioners must be prepared to educate existing governance people. When you provide a coherent governance strategy to management you are more likely to be governed effectively. Our experience is that most existing governance strategies are still traditional in nature and this inappropriate for agile/lean teams. Worse yet the people involved in the governance effort either don’t know that this is a problem or if they do then they don’t (yet) understand how to govern in an agile manner.
- Agile team governance is part of your overall organizational governance strategy. This is true of data governance, architecture governance, portfolio governance, and many other governance aspects. These other aspects of governance are addressed in the appropriate process blades and collated in Disciplined Agile’s Governance process blade.