Disciplined Agile

Asset Management Mindset

To capture the mindset for effective asset management, we extend the principles, promises, and guidelines of the Disciplined Agile® (DA) mindset with philosophies.

Asset Management Mindset

Figure 1. The Disciplined Agile (DA) mindset for asset management (click to enlarge).

To be effective at asset management, we embrace these philosophies:

  1. Findable, consumable, and supported. For assets to be (re)used they must be easily findable. They must also be consumable in that they are functional, they are usable, and they are desirable. Users of an asset will also need to be supported to learn about and apply that asset effectively. Assets that aren’t easily findable, consumable, and well supported won’t be used.
  2. Quality over quantity. It is better to have a small number of high-quality assets that are used a lot than many lower-quality assets that are rarely, if ever, used. Invest in the quality of an asset to make it attractive to others.
  3. Assets evolve. Expect that most of your assets, particularly digital assets, will evolve over time. This evolution will be to meet new needs or simply to improve the quality of the asset.
  4. Fund asset management directly. The creation, harvesting, evolution, support, and eventual retirement of an asset requires funding. Many asset management efforts fail when charge back schemes are put in place to fund this effort. By charge for the use of an asset you are effectively punishing people, motivating them to either buy or build that asset instead of reusing it.
  5. Only reused assets are reusable. Until an asset is being actively reused you really don’t know whether it is reusable or not. An asset is merely declared reusable until it is reused successfully.
  6. Manage assets like assets. If something is an asset, then it should be treated as such. It should be maintained and supported, its existence should be communicated to potential users of it, its use (or reuse) should be measured, it should be evolved as needed, and eventually retired when it is time to do so.