PMI Disciplined Agile (DA). The new sow being driven through the agile village? Or what's behind it?

Frank Tassone PMP, DA Trainer & Coach

 PM Activist-Passionate Trainer-Speaker-Lecturer Disciplined Agile Instructor & Coach

Since October 2019 we have been hearing and reading about this "Disciplined Agile" what PMI presented at the 50th anniversary in Philadelphia when the "new" Agile Consortium of PMI was born. In fact, for the Agile world, the worlds leading Project management association was not very agile.

And this could not change the popularity of the PMI-ACP certifications, which had risen continuously to > 34.000 credential holders in the last years. After a comprehensive international demand and market analysis, PMI took over the Disciplined Agile Consortium and integrated it into PMI with the founders and chief agilists Scott Ambler and Mark Lines.

This was great news for me and until then I had never heard of Disciplined Agile. I've been in the project management business for almost 25 years and have learned to know and apply many different approaches, methods, instruments, rules and process models of the classic, agile and hybrid world.

The integration of DA into the PMI organization fitted very well into the strategy, the agile orientation and extended the portfolio of PMI with a comprehensive, hybrid process toolkit. I was present live at the first presentation of the DA Toolkit in Philadelphia and I was very skeptical about what this new and process-based hybrid toolkit for Agile Transformation for companies would mean to me.

I knew earlier that agile work requires a lot of discipline, a good toolset, the selection of certain agile methods and instruments, suitable for the respective situation. And that the best tools, without the corresponding mindset of employees and managers, do not ensure sustainable agile improvement of projects and line processes, is no longer the one million euro question.

What came next, after almost 25 years in the project management training and consulting business, was a key experience for me when Scott and Mark explained the DA Process Toolkit and how to use DA. It also looked very comprehensive at first glance when 21 process goals and more than 1000 decision and selection options for operational use were explained. It was applicable to both projects and line organisations. At first sight I thought it was a collection of everything that the agile development of the last 20 years had produced, which was pressed into a static process model. But that was not it !

The more I studied Disciplined Agile afterwards, the more I saw that it was the first comprehensive hybrid toolkit developed over almost a decade by experts from the Agile world and has been successfully supporting the Agile transformation of business organisations for years.

It became clear to me that Disciplined Agile was developed from practice for practice and it is not a theoretical process model and framework that tries to force all the different organisations into a certain agile process model and framework.

Here is a selection of my personal insights and interpretation of DA

1. Valuable business begins and ends with the customer

2. The people are the focus of the business

3. There is no such thing as best practice, but rather many good practices, whether predictive, agile or hybrid

4. It depends on the context of the organization, the teams, the processes and objectives

5. A good agile mindset is a prerequisite for the selection of methods and instruments, as well as the working methods in project and line organization

6. The use of different approaches, methods and instruments must be learned, trained, applied and constantly improved.

7. The value flows in the company are optimized according to lean principles and Kanban

8. Employees and managers must understand the company as a complex adaptive system

9. In less mature business organisations, without a culture of error and defined processes and workflows, the direct application of agile approaches, methods and instruments does not bring us the desired success.

10. An organisation is constantly evolving and this process must be managed

11. What is used is the one that provides the best benefit in the particular situation

12. The future is hybrid

Scott Ambler explains DA in one sentence: "Choose your WoW" means Choose your Way of Working. We have to decide what is the best way of working in each situation. This is supported by the Hybrid DA Process Toolkit, which consists of many proven methods and instruments.

The PMI has formulated it as follows. The DA -Toolkit is the world's only comprehensive Agile Body of Knowledge (BOK), which provides easy-to-use and practical guidance to help individuals, teams and companies in the context-specific choice of their agile "way of working". Whether start-up, medium-sized business or large corporation. Everybody finds his way of working with DA.

DA's key principles include customer focus, pragmatism rather than purism, the provision of a range of agile and lean options, the application of situational practices and the optimisation of processes throughout the organisation.

Using the DA toolkit enables companies to adapt any method or framework - such as traditional (predictive), Scrum or SAFe - to achieve the successes that set them apart from their competitors in the markets through their business agility.

My conclusion:

The DA Process Toolkit has been developed over years by agile experts from the practice for the practice. More than 12000 experts worldwide work with the first Hybrid Process Toolkit. Taking into account the entire company organization and the strategic view, it represents a decision- and process-based toolkit that can sustainably support the agile transformation of many companies. The success of agile change in companies is based to a large extent on the basic understanding of agile working, the qualification of employees, continuous controlled improvements, the context-specific selection of work and procedures, as well as the optimal use of resources in value creation.

The future will show whether it has sustainably supported the companies in the agile transformation or whether it was again just the new "Sow being driven through the agile village".

We will keep you informed with project reports and articles on Disciplined Agile. Get a first impression for yourself. On the official pages of the PMI.org you will find a variety of sources and documents, professional articles and studies on DA.

The training and learning path for new DA certifications was published in October 2020. Together with our DA Trainer Team Europe we offer the new certifications for the Disciplined Agile Scrum Master and Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master starting in November.

We will offer the DA Coach and DA Value Stream Consultant certifications from the 1st quarter of 2021.

Further information:

Here is the secure link to it: https://alvission.training/da-team-europe/

https://disciplinedagileconsortium.org/

I will be happy to answer your questions personally.

Frank Tassone, PMP, Disciplined Agile Trainer & Coach CDAC/CDAI, PM Activist, Speaker, Lecturer

MOBIL: +49 171 68 455 61

MAIL: [email protected]

WEB: https://www.alvission.training

ALVISSION GmbH | Europaallee 27d | D - 66113 Saarbrücken | Germany