DISCIPLINED AGILE
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Enables a heterogeneous not homogenous approach
Choice is Good, Context Counts & Enterprise Awareness
Common vocabulary of understanding
Encourages thinking rather than following orders
Encourages accountability/ownership
Requires servant leadership & coaching
Building a muscle of continuous improvement
Stakeholders can clearly communicate their needs earlier
Breaking down silos in complex and challenging environments
CASE FOR AGILE
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Teams should regularly reflect and strive to improve process/plans
Retrospective tools which can be used – sailboat (what’s holding us back; storms to
watch out for; tailwinds to propel our success) and/or mortar days (the untimely death).
WoW must address how to approach requirements, architecture, testing, design,
programming, management, deployment, governance, and other software development.
Describes HOW – through entire lifecycle, from beginning to end (holds up mirror to
complexities)
Tools to make better process decision that leads to better outcomes.
Guided continuous improvement (CGI) is a team-based process improvement strategy
rather than naïve adoption of a populist process.
DISCIPLINED AGILE IS
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Contextualized process reference
Guided continuous improvement (CGI)
Process tailoring workshops
Enhanced retrospectives
Enhanced coaching
CHOOSING THE WOW
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Agile
Continuous Delivery – Agile
Exploratory
Lean
Continuous Delivery – Lean
Program
IMPROVMENTS ACROSS THE ORG AT MANY LEVELS
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Process improvement = Wow evolution occurs across the organization.
Complex adaptive systems (CAS) describe the organization.
Team organization areas – divisions, lines of business, or value stream and enterprise
teams.
Shared learning strategies include – practitioner presentations, communities of practice,
(CoPs)/guilds, coaching and many others.
Team level strategies are captured in the Evolve WoW process goal
Organizational goals are captured in the Continuous Improvement process blade
FOUR LAYERS:
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Foundation: provides the conceptual underpinnings of the DA tool kit.
Disciplined DevOps: streamlining of solution development and operation. Level
includes Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) – enterprise approach.
Value Stream: based on Al Shalloways’s FLEX method. FLEX is the glue that ties the
organization’s’ strategies.
Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE): layer focuses on the rest of the enterprise
activities that supports your organization’s value streams.
GUIDED CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT (CGI)
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Starts out the agile journey – i.e., Scum [W], Extreme Programming (XP), [W], or
Dynamic Systems Development Method (DSDM) – Atern [W].
Larger teams may use SAFe [W], LeSS [W] or Nexus [Nexus].
Prescriptive, that they don’t provide many choices.
Team seems to drop in effectiveness at beginning, due to learning new ways of working.
Training & Investing in Knowledge impacts this – learning new techniques.
Over time, effectiveness increases and goes above to reach new WoW.
Demands concerted efforts to improve team’s efforts.
IMPROVING WoW’s
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Experimental approach is often used.
Guided experiments can be used.
Done in small incremental changes called kaizens.
Retrospective or working sessions offer improvement loops.
PDSA – Plan, Do, Study, Act; or kaizen loop is first approach.
PDCA became later in the business community in 1990’s.
Deming realized PDCA wasn’t as effective as PDSA – due to the study activity which
motivated people to measure + think deeply if the change worked.
US Air Force uses Colonel John Boyd’s OODA (Observe, Orient, Decide & Act).
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Effectiveness is measured via – clear outcomes, identified goal question metric (GQM) or
an objective and key result (OKRs).
Measuring how effective the new WoW’s are applied is called validated learning [W].