Author: Adi Muslic, PMP
On 18th June, over 100 participants from several countries joined the session organized by the PMI Switzerland Online events team. The presenter, Mark Lines is PMI VP and along with Scott Ambler, Co-creator of Disciplined Agile (DA).
Mark started the presentation by saying that with Disciplined Agile (DA) PMI is transitioning from traditional to more agile project management. The next version of the PMBOK will have even more agile content. And it will be a combination of traditional, hybrid, and agile project management principles.
Mark also added that there will be still a place for traditional projects. Launching of the Basics of DA course was delivered in the traditional way.
Agile has many different practices. A combination of these practices makes a method. If you learn practices you will be able to apply it to various methods. This is why DA is also called a toolkit.
DA promotes that having a choice is good, Scrum is good in many situations, but in some situations, Scrum is not good. A hybrid or traditional method might be better. SAFe is good in scaled agile implementations, but may not be suitable for all scaled agile situations. Teams should choose the appropriate lifecycle that suits them.
There are 3 ways DA helps to increase agility :
1. Enables you to optimize agile teams.
2. Enables you to extend agility to the entire organization.
3. Lets you accelerate value delivery in scaled agile solutions.
As we already learned in "Achieving discipline in an agile environment" online event, agile projects require Risk Management and Governance. In agile projects, we still need to provide visibility on the progress to sponsors or customers or provide reports.
DA comes with lifecycle phases: Inception, Construction, and Transition. They could be used or not, based on lifecycle choice. DA also incorporates a number of light-weigt milestones.
A typical DA team: Team member, Team lead (could be called also Project Manager or Scrum Master or else.), Product Owner, Stakeholder, Architecture Owner (this role is unique to DA and can be seen as a Technical lead).
We were also briefly introduced to Disciplined Dev Ops.
Successful agile organizations keep evolving their agility. Adopting a single methodology such as Scrum or SAFe results in limited improvements. To achieve true business agility we need to choose our Agile WoW, by building a methodology for our unique situation.
Another key to customizing your agile methodology is by use of the very classical Continuous Improvement process (Kaizen loop). It is also important to have everyone understand the available tools. If part of the organization involved in the projects does not understand agile principles they will not be adding value to Agile delivery.
With everyone understanding where you go, you can move to Guided Continuous Improvement and accelerate value delivery in scaled agile situations. However, putting metrics to measure the improvements might be difficult if there are no baseline metrics in place. It can be overcome by starting where you are, capture available data, and keep learning and improving.
The combination of Disciplined Agile and FLEX will be covering Agile at Scale. The DA FLEX lifecycle will help with the acceleration of value delivery at scale.
At the end, Mark mentioned that in addition to the existing DA certifications, additional certifications are currently in development. DA for SAFe will be available in July.
The event ended with Q&A. The event recording is available on the PMI Switzerland YouTube channel.
The testimonial, one of the participants provided in the event survey, is a nice summary of what we all experienced: “Thank you for this opportunity! Disciplined Agile promises an answer for the future!”