There are several reasons why teams should adopt the Disciplined Agile® (DA™) tool kit:
- Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) addresses the full agile process. DAD is the portion of the DA tool kit that addresses the software development, or more accurately solution delivery, process. For an agile software development team DAD does the heavy process lifting for you that methods such as Scrum leaves up to you. The implication is that with DAD your team needs to spend less time identifying their way of working (WoW) and can instead focus on providing real value for your stakeholders.
- Improve upon your existing WoW. Agile methods can give you a good start, but because your team is unique you eventually discover that you need to go beyond their advice. But other than platitudes claiming that you can easily modify them they don’t give you any concrete advice to do so. DA’s philosophy is to start where you are and then improve from there. If your team is currently taking a Scrum, Kanban, SAFe®, or even traditional-based approach then that’s your starting point. The DA tool kit, however, takes a completely different approach and instead provides you with a collection of options and the trade-offs associated with them. This helps your team to evolve their WoW more effectively so that you can be awesome!
- Optimize workflow. The DA tool kit looks at the whole, organizational picture. Yes, you may not need to worry about the whole picture but you need to be enterprise aware enough to know how you fit into that picture so that you can optimize the overall workflow in which you’re involved. Just as important, DA looks at all aspects of the work. For example, where Scrum focuses on collaboration and management strategies but not technical ones, the DAD portion of the DA tool kit considers all aspects of solution/product development from beginning to end. This includes collaboration, management, architecture, design, testing, coding, governance, and many more considerations in a coherent manner. You have a much better chance at optimizing flow, and thereby increasing your effectiveness, when you know how it all fits together.