Disciplined Agile: Optimize your Way of Working

In context of project management, despite being comparatively new to waterfall, Agile methodology is widely accepted and works very well in small teams. But what happens when we want to scale up? How can we bring other teams to agility and not just the developers? Here comes Disciplined Agile; an enterprise framework and solution for solving enterprise problems. It provides a strong foundation for Business agility in organizations and help them streamline their processes by making informed choices of their way of working (WoW) in context sensitive manner.

There are 7 primary principles behind Disciplined Agile toolkit:

1. Delight Customers 
2. Be Awesome 
3. Pragmatism 
4. Context Counts 
5. Choice is Good 
6. Optimize Flow 

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) recommends Inception and Transition phases on top of Construction phase which is equivalent to scrum but extended ensure streamlined strategies from beginning to end. DAD is a people-first, learning oriented hybrid agile approach to delivery of IT solutions. Its scalable and enterprise wide.

Regarding process guidelines, Disciplined Agile Delivery supports six categories of lifecycles as below:

• Agile (basic)
• Lean (advanced)
• Continuous Delivery Agile
• Continuous Delivery Lean
• Exploratory/ Lean Start Up
• Program

The Lean lifecycle aims at maximizing flow and minimizing work in progress by using processes similar to Kanban. Continuous Delivery Agile lifecycle is based on scrum. The focus of Continuous Delivery Lean life cycle is mature DevOps, continuous integration and deployment processes for projects with frequent deliverables. Exploratory Lifecycle favors fast delivery by cutting down the time spent in early planning but gaining frequent feedbacks and incorporating them into next delivery.

Overall, Disciplined Agile promotes a full, beginning-to-end, solution delivery; supports several lifecycles keeping in mind variables like team skills, team size, geographical distribution, organizational culture and aims to build enterprise teams that are sufficiently skilled and flexible to support delivery teams in a manner which best suits the delivery teams.

More information published by PMI at: https://disciplinedagiledelivery.com

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