Disciplined Agile: Yet another agile framework?

When working in tech you can’t get around the topic of agile, so I started studying the topic around four years ago when it was already over hyped. But still I was interested to get behind it and how teams can benefit from agile ways of working, which I am now bringing to our teams at Neugelb.??

It is for sure a constant learning journey and I had the possibility to expand my horizon through the Further Education Program at Neugelb, which allows employees to take some time off for studying and learning new things. So let me share some of my take aways from my recent Disciplined Agile Scrum Master training.?

Strive for Business Agility?

While agile comes from the area of software development it can also bring a lot of benefit to all business areas, which enables organizations as a whole to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in a cost-effective way.??

Figure: Process blades within a Disciplined Agile Enterprise; Source: Project Management Institute PMI??

In fast paced environments it is more important to reduce the time for value realization over constant productivity. That’s why it is not only important to apply agile and lean strategies on a tactical team level, but also on a strategic level across the whole organization including operational areas such as marketing. In that specific context instead of testing and trying to evaluate the success of a campaign, it can be much faster to bring the campaign live and iterate it once you gain first insights on the success rate.?

Mindset shift over processes?

This might sound easy but is probably the hardest and most crucial part about agile. What seems to happen in a lot of organizations is that a certain framework is prescribed for all teams and people focus mostly on implementing processes like certain meeting formats and renaming team roles. But this does not make you any more agile than before. In fact, it could become more harmful to an organization than it does good.??

So how can you achieve this mindset shift? From what I see in teams often the hierarchical structures do not change by rebranding role and meeting names. Leadership in agile teams is democratic not authoritarian which requires a certain level of emotional intelligence (EQ) in all leaders and team members. The good news is that while IQ stops developing after your childhood, EQ can be gained by practice. The figure below visualizes the four quadrants of emotional intelligence. Each area can be trained by small practices. For example, you can train your emotional self-awareness by recognizing your emotions. As a next step in case of negative feelings you can try to re-purpose them to positive emotions. In practice this could be feeling nervous before a presentation, but instead of focusing on the negative side of it, put it in a positive context: “I feel energized and I’m ready to go!”.?

Figure: The four quadrants of emotional intelligence; Source: Project Management Institute PMI??

There is no one fits all solution?

Teams are different in many aspects, like team size, technical complexity, etc. and therefore need the freedom to adapt to their unique situation. What happens a lot, especially in larger organizations, is that all teams are supposed to follow one specific framework. This is done based on the assumption that if everyone does e.g., Scrum, it will be easier to compare and track teams working in the same rhythm, but then does it make sense for an operating team to plan in sprints when most of their work is ad hoc? This is quite contradictory to the basic principle of learning and adapting processes as a team to become more productive.??

Figure: Different teams with different contexts require a different WoW; Source: Project Management Institute PMI??

That’s why it is super important to enable teams to choose and evolve their individual way of working. In order to keep track across teams on a management level it is recommended to define metric categories to ensure consistency in reporting. Teams can still within those categories define useful KPIs that reflect the success of their work.?

Agile in Neugelb?

So much for the theory, but how does this apply to our day-to-day work life at Neugelb? For me still the most powerful format is retrospective which helps establish this constant learn and adapt mindset. The Disciplined Agile training helped me realize how it is important to not strictly follow a certain framework, but make it fit the unique situation of your teams.??

For us at Neugelb it is very important to, every now and then, take a step back from daily work to learn and constantly improve our way of working.??

What would you like to learn next??

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If you are interested in Disciplined Agile you can check out some of these resources:??

https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zCFNvJbjLiE&ab_channel=PMI?