Working Smarter: Learn, Optimize, Accelerate

WORKING SMARTER
LEARN à OPTIMIZE à ACCELERATE
Scott Ambler
Vice President & Chief Scientist, Co-creator of Disciplined Agile
Mark Lines
Vice President, Co-creator of Disciplined Agile
Project Management Institute
Twitter @scottwambler @mark_lines
Copyright 2021 Project Management Institute

Copyright © Project Management Institute. All rights reserved. 2
Scott Ambler
Twitter: @scottwambler
linkedin.com/in/sambler/
Copyright © Project Management Institute. All rights reserved.
Mark Lines
Twitter: @mark_lines
linkedin.com/in/marklines/

Agenda
3
• Introduction
• Are we there yet?
• What is Disciplined Agile (DA)?
• Learn
• Optimize
• Accelerate
• Parting thoughts

Evolve beyond
Frameworks and
Methods
Design your Agile
Ways of Working
(WoW), to win
Disciplined Agile
improves value
streams and flow of
value to customer
Be Nimble, Improve
Flow, Deliver more
Value to your
Customers
Better skilled
teams deliver
better results,
quicker, happier,
lower risk
Supercharge skills
of your teams
LEARN OPTIMIZE ACCELERATE
5

Are we there yet?
Agile methods: 7-12% more productive on average
Agile scaling frameworks: 3-5% more productive
on average
Source: Reifer, D.
Quantitative Analysis of Agile Methods
Survey (2017): Twelve Major Findings
1500+ agile teams at 150 orgs
6

For every complex problem there is an
answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.
- H.L. Mencken
7

You can’t buy
enterprise
agility
Organizations have been looking for simple
solutions…
buying a framework, declaring themselves a
method “shop” of some sort.
Being Disciplined means we need to
- Invest to learn our options
- Optimize the overall system for our situation
- Accelerate delivery of value to customers

D E F I N I T I O N
Disciplined
Agile (DA)
DA is a tool kit that provides
straightforward guidance that enables
us to make better decisions inside our
organizations about our Way of
Working (WoW).

The Disciplined Agile Mindset
The Way of Thinking for Enterprise Agility
11

The Scope of
Disciplined
Agile
Going beyond IT
for true Business
Agility
Disciplined Agile © Project Management Institute. All rights reserved.

- LEARN -
SUPERCHARGE YOUR SKILLS

The DA Tool Kit: The only truly comprehensive, agnostic Agile & Lean BoK
14

You and your teams have options, LOTS of them! Do you know what they are?
Do you know which ones work in different situations?
15

DA Tool Kit: The Only Comprehensive Agile & Lean Toolkit of Strategies for Success
Release Planning Risk Management
Lean Governance
Predictive Planning
Not Covered by Typical Agile Certification
Guided Continuous Improvement
Testing Strategies
Selection of Methods/Lifecycles
Architecture Modeling
Requirement Modeling
Team Design
Distributed Development
The DA Toolkit (comprehensive, agnostic guidance)
Requirements Modeling: 53 techniques
Testing (Auto & Manual): 93 techniques
Architectures Strategies: 40 practices
Forming Teams: 40 strategies
Accelerate Value Delivery: 67 strategies
DevOps Security: 77 techniques
Product Management: 30 strategies
And much more!
Agile Metrics
Lean Change Management
Design Thinking
16

Program
Lean Exploratory
Continuous
Delivery: Lean
Continuous
Delivery: Agile
Agile
Teams
should
choose
their own
lifecycle:
Fit for
purpose
Scrum-based Kanban-based
Project
Lifecycles
Product
Lifecycles
17

18
Disciplined Agile
provides you with
choices and helps you
to choose a fit-for-
purpose WoW

19
Disciplined Agile
provides you with
choices and helps you
to choose a fit-for-
purpose WoW
Frameworks make
the decisions for
you, restricting
your ability to
improve

Goal diagrams are your
pantry of ingredients
DA life cycles are starter
recipes
20

- OPTIMIZE -
#CHOICEISGOOD
#CONTEXTCOUNTS
21

We Should Look at
Apex-Level Competitors
Are they copying someone else’s
approach or evolving their own ways
of working?
22

You improve over time with continuous improvement
23
Effectiveness
Time
Continuous
Improvement

Continuous
Improvement
Identify Problem
Identify Potential
Techniques(s)
Try the
Techniques(s)
Assess
Effectiveness
Adopt What Works
Abandon What
Doesn’t Work
Share Learnings
24
What actually happens…
Fail!
Fail!
Fail!
Success!

Continuous
Improvement
Some experiments fail. You
learn something, but it
doesn’t get you closer to
your goal.
Failing fast is fine, but how
can we succeed earlier?
If we get better at this,
we succeed more often,
and we improve faster.
We can do this if we
have access to an
experienced agile
coach; but they can
be expensive and
hard to find.
We can do this if we
have access to a process
knowledge base, such as
the Disciplined Agile
tool kit.
Guided
Identify problem
Identify potential
technique(s)
Try the technique(s)
Assess
effectiveness
Adopt what works
Abandon what
doesn’t work
Share learnings
25
25

Start where you are.
Do the best that you can in the situation that you face.
Always strive to get better.
Guided
Continuous
Improvement
Improve faster
through Guided
Continuous
Improvement
• Proven techniques
for your context.
• Accelerates your
path to delivery
excellence!!!
• Fail less.
• Get results quicker.
Continuous
Improvement
(Agile)
Time
Effectiveness
Adopting a
framework

The Process Goals for Team Agility
27

28

- ACCELERATE -
DELIVER MORE VALUE
DELIGHT CUSTOMERS

Improving Across The Organization
Portfolio management: “We need to release
new offerings to market faster.”
Product management: “We want to release
minimum business increments (MBIs) rather
than big releases.”
Portfolio management: “We fund projects, not
new features.”
Release management: “We would love to
support a quicker release cadence, but any
database change takes three months.”
Data management: “Data is different. We need
to think through everything up front, agile
doesn’t apply to us.”
Portfolio management: “We need to release
new offerings to market faster.”
30

We need to negotiate an overall strategy across many teams
31

Disciplined Agile Improves your Effectiveness Regardless of Approach
32

Successful
agile
organizations
take
responsibility
for evolving
their own
agility.
• Using a prescriptive framework, like Scrum or
SAFe®, is a good start.
• But it does not guarantee success
• It doesn’t separate you from the competition
• For true business agility
• We need to choose our agile WoW™
• Optimizing for our unique situations
Don’t copy Spotify, become a Spotify!
33

Call to Action:
Learn more
about
Disciplined
Agile
PMI.org/disciplined-agile
• Intro to agile and lean
• Understand the extensive options in the DA toolkit
• Improve at personal and team level
• Enterprise-class agile
• Lead improvement at team(s) level
• Lead improvement across disparate teams
• Lead improvement across value streams
and organization
34

Scott Ambler
Twitter: @scottwambler
linkedin.com/in/sambler/
Mark Lines
Twitter: @mark_lines
linkedin.com/in/marklines/
Thank you!

“It’s not just a technology thing.”
Barclays Banks on Disciplined Agile
After considering agile scaling frameworks including
SAFe and LeSS, Barclays enlisted Disciplined Agile to
help scale its agile transformation across thousands of
teams, multiple business lines, and many different
combinations of product.
Barclays plc is a 325-year
old global bank and financial
services company with over
83,000 employees and
£21.7B in revenue (2019).
Results
Throughput
300% increase in avg.
stories delivered per
month per app.
Code Complexity
50% drop in code
complexity on average
across 80+ applications
Test Code Coverage
50% increase in test code
coverage, leading to lower levels
of production incidents per app
Benefits of Agile Transformation at Barclays, Ben Linders, Sep 08, 2016
37

“We knew it was a long-term investment.”
ICBC Implements a Company-Wide Transformation
The Insurance Corporation of
British Columbia (ICBC) is a
provincial crown corporation (a
government-owned company) that
provides auto insurance to
residents of British Columbia.
Execution
Delivered 36 successful
transformation projects
Speed
7x annual increase in
enhancement releases
over the first two years
After struggling to blend Agile and Waterfall
approaches in response to a large-scale transformation
initiative, ICBC sought out Disciplined Agile to
provide a solution that combined flexibility in project
delivery with an approach that could scale across a
large government organization.
Results
Integration
Dovetailed seamlessly with
ICBC’s existing Lean process
improvement initiative

Learn more
about
Disciplined
Agile
Basics of Disciplined Agile online course
• An eight-module, self-paced and scenario-based introduction to how Disciplined Agile
works.
• PMI.org/da-basics
Agile Certification
• PMI.org/certifications/agile-certifications
• PMI.org/learning/training-development/authorized-training-partners/find
Books
• PMI members can download the Choose Your WoW book from PMI.org/disciplined-
agile/books/dad-handbook
Websites
• DA hub: PMI.org/disciplined-agile
• Blogs: ProjectManagement.com/blogs/
Case Studies
• Metrics and CxO Testimonials PMI.org/disciplined-agile/resources/disciplined-agile-
success-stories
39

Disciplined Agile includes many team-level improvement strategies
40

T H I N K I N G P O I N T
How to read
a process
goal diagram

Tactical Scaling: Our Teams Face
Different Situations
One way of working
(WoW) for all of your
teams will not suffice!
Teams must be allowed to
choose and then evolve
their WoW to meet the
unique and changing
situation that they face.
42

The Agile Certification Journey – Begin where you are
43

44

Some Organizations using Disciplined Agile
45

Working Smarter: Learn, Optimize, Accelerate

More Related Content

What's hot (20)

Similar to Working Smarter: Learn, Optimize, Accelerate (20)

More from Scott W. Ambler (20)

Recently uploaded (20)

Working Smarter: Learn, Optimize, Accelerate