Disciplined Agile Delivery : The Complete Overview

What is Disciplined Agile and Why Adopt it?

If you wish to learn about what is disciplined agile, we need to first understand what Agile is? Agile is the hot topic nowadays and if you look at various project management and software development, you will find Agile framework is getting due weightage and for all good reasons. It is a framework that helps the team to break the project into a smaller project which ensures the timely delivery of the quality product to the customer. It is basically a collection of all the best practices and methodologies that could help to deliver a successful project.

What is Disciplined Agile?

Now coming to the topic of the day- disciplined agile. It is one of the hybrid agile approaches to all IT solutions. Think of it as a toolkit that helps to deliver learning-oriented, people-first which helps in process decisions as per the unique requirements that are needed in a specific project.

It is used to guide and look for the best approach for the project and optimizations can be done by people, teams, and organizations. It also offers a wide range of ideas for the context, and different customizations can be done. Moreover, it helps in making better decisions for the team and the overall project.

Why the Need for Disciplined Agile?

Below are some of the big benefits that your team of development as well as quality assurance will be able to see when they adopt disciplined agile in their work:

People-First

It is a known fact when a methodology followed in IT solutions puts the people as an important determinant, better results are expected. Unlike other approaches that are followed by other processes and tools to put those tools before people, disciplined agile follows an opposite approach to that. This people-focused approach in disciplined agile delivery can be very beneficial for the overall efficiency and growth of the project in the long run.

An agnostic and pragmatic approach

If we talk about the practices in the DA toolkit, we will discover that it is the combination of various techniques of the processes that come from different sources which include Scrum, Agile Modelling, SAFe, Kanban, DevOps, and many more. Keeping that in mind, the best approach to complete the project is developed which leads to better planning and distribution of tasks in the project. The context is given and the agnostic and pragmatic approach is being followed here. With the hybrid approach, it helps in the formation of tailored ideas for successful solutions in the organization.

Note of full delivery cycle

The project initiation and the various stages that come after it should be streamlined as much as possible. With disciplined agile delivery, the approach to create a product is done in increment instead of a heavy deployment phase for the team. With appropriate guidance and address to a full delivery cycle in the project, a successful consumable product is delivered at the end.

Importance to context

The team consists of people from various backgrounds, skills and they have different things to bring to the table for the project. Using this toolkit, the ideas and context is captured and it provides a good range of various choices that will help in clearly putting the context in front of the whole team. The context here counts and the team will work according to it.

Not only this, as your work is based on customer delight, the project will be able to deliver the products that make the customer happy. This will increase customer loyalty and that will further improve the market competitiveness. If you are going through PMI ACP online training, you will get to know about the reasons why the agile practitioners should follow disciplined agile in a more comprehensive way and these above-mentioned benefits can be achieved while working on the project. With a PMI-ACP certification, you will be able to put this approach in the team and expect better results.

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What are the Principles of Disciplined Agile?

Based on the concept of both lean and flow approaches, principles of disciplined agile provide a mindset for business agility. So, let’s look into those principles:

To be awesome

The client is going to choose the people who are awesome to work with, whether it is their work, their quality of products, or their ethics. So the team should be good and awesome to work in the first place.

Pragmatism

Having a pragmatic approach can do wonders for the team and this is what this principle is all about. With an agnostic and pragmatic approach, the improvements can be made and the project can be delivered effectively.

Customer delight

This toolkit follows the practices that will help the team to go beyond the needs and expectations of the client and increase customer satisfaction with their work. This follows the idea that if we are not going to deliver what is needed, then the customers will go and the market competitiveness can decrease.

Context matters

As mentioned above, the team members in the team are the most important assets. Their work, their ideas, and their skills are very important. So the way of working (WoW) should fit with the context and slowly with time it should be evolved.

Awareness of Enterprise

Taking care of the things that the organization stands for is the main role here even if it becomes an inconvenience for the team. As per this principle, organizational needs are used and guidance is needed.

Flow optimization

The flow needs to be optimized to deliver what is promised across the team and value stream. It is needed to make sure that proper customer communication is there throughout the flow.

Having choice

The best approach that is agnostic, pragmatic, and also context-oriented helps to choose the technique that will fit the whole purpose and make processes better.

Also Read: Enterprise Environmental Factors in Project Management

Conclusion

So, if you wish to deliver the project using the best agile practices along with disciplined agile, ACP certification can help you. You can check out the PMI ACP course at StarAgile and kick start our journey today itself.