Choose your WoW!

Disciplined Agile Strategies for Optimizing Your

Way of Working (WoW)

• Mark Lines
• Co-creator of the Disciplined Agile (DAD)
Toolkit
• Disciplined Agile provides guidance for you
on your journey to awesomeness

• mark [at] disciplined-agile.com

• Twitter: @Mark_Lines @Disc_Agile
“I am not here to tell you how to do Agile!”

© Disciplined Agile 2
Our Industry is Fixated on Calling ourselves a Certain kind of “Shop”

© Disciplined Agile 3
It is time to break
out of
“Methods Prison”
– Ivar Jacobson

© Disciplined Agile 4
Agenda
• Step 1: Understand the Situation
• Step 2: Adopt a Continuous Improvement Strategy
• Step 3: Choose Your WoW!
• Q&A

5
 Step 1:
Understand the Situation

© Disciplined Agile 6
Context Counts Straightforward
situations are rare

Start by identifying the

situation that your team
faces so that you can
tailor your WoW to
address that context

© Disciplined Agile 7
Unfortunately,
there is no
”Easy Button”

© Disciplined Agile

8
Your Organization is a Complex Adaptive System

Disciplined Agile
Delivery (DAD)

Disciplined Agile
for IT (DAIT) and
the Enterprise (DAE)

© Disciplined Agile 9
The Disciplined Agile Toolkit

© Disciplined Agile Consortium 10

Step 2: Adopt a Continuous
Improvement Strategy

11
Adopting a Prescriptive Method Helps a Bit

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Adopting a Prescriptive Method/Framework Helps a Bit
You Are Promised You Actually Get
Recent study of 3,000+ teams within 155
organizations found:
• Teams adopting agile (mostly Scrum)
saw productivity increases of 7 to 12%
on average
• Teams adopting prescriptive scaling
frameworks, the most popular of which
is SAFe, saw average productivity
increases of 3 to 5%

InfoQ.com/articles/reifer-agile-study-2017

© Disciplined Agile 13
 Apply the
Identify a Potential Disciplined Agile (DA)
Improvement
Guided toolkit to
identify better options
Continuous Experiment with
Improvement the new WoW

Assess
Effectiveness

Adopt the new Abandon the new

WoW WoW

Share Learnings
with Others

© Disciplined Agile 14
It Works Even Better With Light-Weight Guidance

© Disciplined Agile 15
You Can Combine Strategies

© Disciplined Agile 16
Step 3: Choose your Own Way of Working (WoW)
© Disciplined Agile
How to be a better
Agile “Chef”

© Disciplined Agile
 What Recipes does your
Organization Use?

• Scrum?
• SAFe?
• Extreme Programming (XP)?
• Lean/Kanban?
• DevOps?
• Traditional/Waterfall?
• Hybrid?

© Disciplined Agile
The Ingredients for the
Scrum Recipe are Few
• Sprint Planning
• Daily Stand-up (Scrum)
• Sprint Review
• Retrospective

2
0
 If you are
just using
Scrum your
possibilities
are limited

© Disciplined Agile
What if your Pantry
contained more ingredients?
• Retrospectives
• Behaviour Driven Development (BDD)
• Test-driven Development (TDD)
• Big Room Planning
• Value Stream Mapping
• Mob Programming
• Boundary Spanners
• Feature Toggles
• Etc…
 Be
Awesome

Enterprise
Pragmatism
Awareness
The Seven Principles
Delight
of Disciplined Agile Customers

Optimize Context
Flow Counts

Choice is
Good

© Disciplined Agile 23
 Choice is
Good
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
A Toolkit of Practices
Tailoring Your WoW
• Initially:
– Understand the situation that you face
– Choose the most appropriate lifecycle
– Choose the best strategies/practices that your
team can perform

• Over time:
– Regularly reflect
– Experiment with new strategies
– Evolve your WoW

© Disciplined Agile 25
Choosing a
Lifecycle

© Disciplined Agile 26
Evolving Your
WoW:
Lifecycles

© Disciplined Agile 27
The Process Goals of Disciplined Agile Delivery

© Disciplined Agile 28
Goal: Form
Initial Team

29
© Disciplined Agile
Goal:
Evolve
Way of
Working
(WoW)

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Ok, but how
to I actually
use this
toolkit?

© Disciplined Agile 31
© Disciplined Agile 32
 • Tailoring sessions
• Early in your projects
• Retrospectives
• Throughout your Projects
• Identify a problem area
• Look in the DA
knowledgebase for
suggestions
• Choose a likely candidate
to experiment with
• Experiment
• Try out a practice/strategy
in your environment
• Measure the results

Evolving Your WoW: • Aim is to determine

whether the new strategy
works well for you
Referencing the Practices
© Disciplined Agile 33
 Context
Counts

Expand your Pantry

with new Ideas

• Learn about New

Ingredients/Practices
• Disciplined Agile is a rich pantry of
ingredients
• Use Different Recipes for your
different Contexts
• Putting them together is not hard

© Disciplined Agile
It is not DAD
“OR…”,
it is DAD
“AND…”
Parting Thoughts

• Context counts - Every team is unique, facing a

unique situation

• Choice is good - Agile teams own their own

process, they get to choose their Way of Working
(WoW)

• Pragmatism – There are hundreds of

practices/ingredients and strategies to choose
from, we need to choose the ones that are right
for us so that we can be a better Chef and get
better results

© Disciplined Agile 36
Thank you!

@Mark_Lines
@Disc_Agile

[email protected]
© Disciplined 37