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    Disciplined Agile® Transformation Roadmap: Improve a Specific Business Area

    Many organizations have successfully adopted within their IT department and are now applying agile in other areas such as finance, vendor management, people management. Disciplined Agile® (DA™) can help with that. Figure 1 overviews the steps that organizations typically take to improve a specific business area.

    improve business area

    Figure 1. Improvement roadmap for a specific business area within your organization (click to enlarge).

    As you can see in Figure 1, the transformation of a specific business area is a three-step process

    1. Foundational team training. Everyone on your team should be given foundational training in Disciplined Agile (DA) fundamentals. To help with this, PMI training partners offer a range of training for your teams. In addition, your team coach be trained in leading the team in process improvement. We recommend they earn their Disciplined Agile Coach (DAC) certification.
    2. Adopt a business-area starter kit. A starter kit is what it sounds like: a description of how to get started at a specific thing. A business-area starter kit captures how to get started with an agile approach for a team in a particular business area including an initial way of working (WoW) and way of thinking (WoT). For example, there might be different starter kits for an agile marketing team, an agile procurement team, an agile security team, and an agile finance team because they all have different needs. If you are working with a Disciplined Agile consulting firm, they may already have starter kits for business areas that can be adapted to your organization. If you’re not working with a DA consulting firm, or they don’t happen to have a starter kit for the business area that you are focused on, you will use the DA tool kit to develop a starter kit for that area. For example, suppose you need to develop a DA starter kit in the asset management area. The DA tool kit gives you a good start: a WoT for asset management in the asset management mindset, asset management roles and responsibilities, and a workflow for an asset management team. Supported by a coach with a background in asset management, this basic starter kit should give you a very good starting point for improving your organization’s approach to asset management.
    3. Apply improvements specific to the business-area. Once the team has gotten started in DA, their focus turns to experimenting with new WoW and WoT. The team coach, possibly assisted by the CoE, will guide this effort. Over time, they will gain practical experience with new WoW and learn how to improve via guided continuous improvement (GCI) and skill-based training. Within three to six months, they should become self-sufficient at improvement.