The Discipilined Agile (DA) mindset is captured in the form of principles, promises, and guidelines. The principles provide a philosophical foundation for business agility. They are based on lean and flow concepts. The promises are agreements made between teammates and stakeholders. They define a collection of disciplined behaviors that enable effective and professional collaboration. The guidelines help to be more effective in the way of working and improving that way of working over time.
The principles are: Delight customers, be awesome, context counts, be pragmatic, choice is good, optimize flow, organize around products and services, and enterprise awareness.
The promises made while following these principles: create psychological safety and embrace diversity, accelerate value realization, collaborate proactively, make all work and workflow visible, improve predictability, keep workloads within capacity, and improve continuously.
The guidelines provided are: validate the learnings, apply design thinking, attend to relationships throughout the value stream, create effective environments that foster joy, change culture by improving the system, create semi-autonomous self-organizing teams, adopt measures to improve outcomes, and leverage and enhance organizational assets.
The DA tool kit provides four layers. The foundation layer provides the conceptual underpinnings of the DA tool kit including the principles, promises, and guidelines, as well as fundamental concepts from agile/lean and serial approaches, and roles and team structures. The second layer provides an understanding for disciplined DevOps. DevOps is the streamlining of software development and IT operations activities. The workflow for disciplined DevOps is classically as follows: plan, design, test, code, deploy, operate, support, monitor. The third layer describes the value streams. The value stream layer is based on the Flex workflow. This layer shows how to increase value realization in the environment each team faces. The fourth layer is the disciplined agile enterprise. This enterprise is able to sense and respond fast to changes in the marketplace. This includes an organizational culture and structure that facilitates change within the context of its situation. These organizations require a learning mindset in the mainstream business and underlying lean and agile processes. This last layer focuses on the rest of the enterprise activities that support the organization.
For more detailed information on the disciplined agile toolkit please visit https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile.
