Breaking the Misconceptions on Disciplined Agile

Let me break some of the misconceptions that we see in the industry.?

There are many misconceptions about Disciplined Agile. Two of the most misleading are that it is the most complicated agile way of working, especially when adopting for entire enterprises. Or it's a very heavyweight process that can stifle teams and organizations. These are both misconceptions that indicate either a lack of understanding in the very essence of what Disciplined Agile is or how it is intended to be used in delivering business agility.

Agile is small. The Scrum Guide is a considerably small body of knowledge, now at just 13 printed pages long. There is a misconception that I often come across that Disciplined Agile is very heavy and complicated. What many people envision can be represented graphically by Scrum as two small gears. The misconception about Disciplined Agile is that it looks like many multiple and overlapping gears. The two gears we had for Scrum get expanded upon, and now we have many, many, many more gears. Disciplined Agile is a very sizable body of knowledge. Please don't confuse the amount of guidance with complexity. (In other LinkedIn Learning videos, I cover the wealth of guidance that is arranged into containers of information. Disciplined Agile in actual use is intended to enable choices for teams and organizations to reduce process complexity and has many strategies to do so).?

Another misconception is that Disciplined Agile is a very heavyweight process that stifles teams' and organizations' ability to be agile. This is quite literally the opposite of Disciplined Agile's philosophy. The basic philosophy of Disciplined Agile is improving your way of working requires time and effort. Based on your team's situation and your organization's culture, first, start where you are. Then do the best you can given the existing situation you face, and always try to get better. It comes down to having choices.

Scrum is one of the smallest bodies of knowledge to adopt an agile way of working, yet some teams cannot adopt Scrum in the whole. There are many whimsical metaphors such as "Scrum but," meaning we do Scrum; still we might not be able to actually get all of the backlog items we committed to doing in sprint planning completed, and not just that sprint, but potentially multiple sprints. "Scrumfall" is another one. We do Scrum,?but?mostly in a waterfall way. "Wagile," waterfall agile, et cetera.?

With Disciplined Agile, the best you may be able to do, based on impediments beyond you and your team's ability to remove, is to start with some process improvement, which could be as small as a few practices. How Disciplined Agile is tailored is based on pragmatism, what a team or organization may realistically do. There is no minimum quality of Disciplined Agile you have to do to start getting value from it. Ideally, we would want to start with an approach that provides a reliable way of working.??To actually be able to do for the minimum, we would consider an agile way of working. Still, sometimes that's not the context that we are in, and we need to do less. And that's something with Disciplined Agile we can do and begin to get value from.

In case you haven't had a chance to view my new LinkedIn Learning course, "Introduction to Disciplined Agile," I'm making this video link available to you for free.?

Join in the conversation in the LinkedIn Learning Course Q&A's or on my LinkedIn and let me know how you're finding Disciplined Agile is busting the myths and providing a valuable toolkit in reaching business and organizational agility.?