Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

Disciplined Agile Delivery attempts to answer that question with the Disciplined Agile Framework.

The ideas in the framework is simple: every team in the organization should be Agile.

This means that teams such as Marketing, Sales and Finance should be Agile. So should the Legal, Human Resources, and IT Governance teams. All Development-Operations (what are called "Support Teams" by many or "Systems Teams" in SAFe) should also be their own agile teams.

This requires that the organization can create products that are consumable by the other parts of the organization. And it means that at all levels the whole organization is learning. However, this also requires that each team be Enterprise Aware a core tenant of the Disciplined Agile framework. In total there are a select number of key Disciplined Agile considerations that expand on Scrum, with an ultimate goal of having Scrum work over time, locations, size of teams, and the variety of teams needed to run whole organizations.

Key questions to consider as you think about Disciplined Agile Delivery, are as follows:

• What would an Enterprise Aware team of teams look like?
• How would you prioritize the work across the organization?
• How could teams manage their dependencies if they act as semi-independent Agile teams?
• How could learning and "flow" of value needed for continuous operations at scale be incorporated?

 

Disciplined Agile Delivery starts from one single premise: being Agile doesn't permit teams to be undisciplined.

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) grew from origins in Extreme Programming (XP), Scrum, and Lean. As it's original forms were being codified it was clear that Agile was being used by many teams to avoid good practices of sustainable development. "We don't do that, we're Agile" was a common phrase that frustrated many in the Enterprise. DAD offers a compromise that many people today find extremely valuable in fitting into the organization.

The key characteristics of Disciplined Agile Delivery are:

• People first
• Learning oriented
• Agile
• Hybrid
• Goal-driven 
• Delivery focused
• Enterprise aware
• Risk and value driven
• Scalable

In order to achieve these goals, the Disciplined Agile Delivery process uses a hybrid framework with stages that align with the Traditional Stage-Gate model, from concept to retirement (disposal). It's focus in generally on very large solutions that are required for organizations or developed within large organizations that roll out a product line. 

The key difference between this model and the typical Scrum Model that starts when a team is initiated with funding is as that DAD uses a startup phase called "Inception." During this phase many important things happen to help scale:

• Modeling of the solution
• Proof of concepts are explored
• Shared architectures across teams are initiated
• High-level release planning and feature roadmaps are established

During this phase the teams often work in functional and cross-functional groups. This startup phase allows for a shared understanding going into the solution development or "Construction Phase."

Disciplined Agile also believes in many more roles than Scrum does:

• Primary Roles:
• Stakeholder - these are the same as in Scrum - anyone who is impacted by the solution being built (owners, support, customers, etc.)
• Team Member - focuses on producing solutions for stakeholders, the Scrum "generalizing specialist"
• Team Lead - servant leader that coaches and helps organize delivery, and often considered an "Agile Project Manager"
• Product Owner - provides the "voice of the customer" as either the representative, actual customer, or business line expert
• Architecture Owner - can be simple as the "senior developer" or an architect; with the goal of reducing technical debt risk at scale
• Secondary Roles:
• Specialist - may be the specialist in a certain technology or tool that's used in the solution
• Domain Expert - provides detailed domain expertise on critical topics for parts or details of complex solutions
• Technical Expert - can be experts in key non-functional areas (user interface, security, databases, etc.) needed for performance
• Independent Tester - can be required for complex solution environments or for regulatory requirements (such as government)
• Integrator - can be a separate role for integration and delivery mechanisms in complex solutions, such as DevOps teams

Disciplined Agile Delivery works by always having the Primary Roles (although sometimes the Architecture Owner and Team Lead are the same person). Then it adds the Secondary roles as needed.

In order to scale across teams, DAD uses the "team of teams" model, building on the "Scrum of Scrums" concept invented by Jeff Sutherland.

• DAD Agile teams meet in Daily Standups
• DAD Team Leads meet separately to coordinate delivery, as the Product Delivery Team
• DAD Architecture Leads meet separately to coordinate architecture and remove dependencies, as the Architecture Team
• DAD Product Owners meet separately to coordinate planning, as the Product Management Team

These teams of teams models are then coordinated, as needed, by an overall Program Manager role. 

From this basic scaling model, Disciplined Agile then extends these concepts to the organizational level. How can we mature the organization into a "Learning" organization. In fact, the ideas are that the Agile model is a startup model for Disciplined Agile that can be used to eventually create a lean-agile organization that continuously performs the "stages" of development as needed.

Concepts that are built in are the idea of scaling the "Supporting Cast." Those in the secondary role can become their own Agile teams that produce products used by the Disciplined Agile teams to delivery new product. Support teams include everything that could be considered "Development-Operations" or DevOps:

• IT Operations
• Customer Support
• Security
• Data Management
• Release Management

These teams are then further scaled up into the total Product Management realm, deemed the "Disciplined IT" realm including Governance and Reuse of products (COTS, GOTS, FOSS), as well as Enterprise Architecture, People Managemenet, and Portfolio Management.

Then Disciplined Agile goes one step higher, suggesting that the entire Enterprise can behave in an Agile manner. Every part of the organization can be its own Agile team or team of teams. This applies to Sales, Marketing, Legal, and Finance, as well as other organizational areas.

To keep the entire organization aware of its own structure, there is a need for "Organizational Assets" and the "Knowledge Base." This means that the Organization becomes its own market for consuming products both internally and externally. By managing a central portal to access the key information and tools needed to run the organization, each team can run without being directive to the others.

This is the actualization of the ideas of a adaptive learning organization. The stages of which are below (shorted from longer forms you can find at http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/dae/):

• Tribal - impulsive, and driven by urgency; management "preys" on its employees
• Traditional - Authoritarian, driven by protocols and formal roles and hierachies
• Scientific - Profit or growth-oriented, driven by innovation and meritocracies of ideas
• Post-Modern - Consensus driven, with values-based decision making
• Living - Cellular models of management with an evolutionary purpose

Do these ideas make sense to you? What kind of organization do you work in?  You can learn more about the concepts and ideas of Disciplined Agile Delivery here: http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com

Other Sources of key pages cited here:

• Introduction to Disciplined Agile: http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/introduction-to-dad/
• Disciplined Agile Lifecycle: http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/lifecycle/agile-lifecycle/
• Disciplined Agile Enterprise: http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/dae/
• Disciplined Agile Teams: http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/roles-on-dad-teams/
• Disciplined Agile Teams at Scale: http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/agility-at-scale/large-agile-teams/