Disciplined Agile 2 - The DA Principles

In the previous article we have talked about some main reasons to turn into Disciplined Agile or DA; In fact, some of them are part of a bigger group: the DA Principles. Let’s take a look to each one of them and see if (and how much) they fit your organizational culture. Since most likely yes, if you feel you are not running your business entirely under their umbrella, it could be one of the key motivators you need to start moving into that direction and to consider seriously to start walking the path to the DA transformation. 

Delight Customers

Even when it’s central and probably the most important principle, in my humble opinion it only exists because when it was enunciated, the Disciplined Agile Consortium® wasn’t yet acquired by PMI®; otherwise, probably this principle would state “Delight Stakeholders” instead. 

To delight customers is not related to the hazardous “gold plating”, but it’s related to giving the extra mile, you need to make a difference from your competitors, and you also want your stakeholders to be happy with your project. How much? The happier the better, of course; we know it’s not possible to make everybody happy, but the key point is to don’t avoid it when we are able to. Meeting expectations is good, but nowadays it is not enough frequently; beating expectations is great. Now: How could we do that without gold plating the project? Well, there are a lot of ways, such as delivering flawless quality, thinking out of box, anticipating to the risks, being in front of any issue. You also shouldn’t forget that different stakeholders consider and/or value the project in different ways.

In summary, you need to make a difference, you need to deliver more value, sometimes you need to deliver a different value, so in that way your stakeholders will fell in love with your project and its results. 

Be awesome

We already have talked about being awesome, it’s mainly related to motivation, either internal and external, you want to have people happy about working with your and for sure also want to have people happy to work for you. It is a key factor in the way to achieve the first principle. How could we get to it, definitely there are a lot ways and the best ones will be directly tied to your business and your company culture. 

Just in order to provide some tips around this topic and even when it could sound a little bit obvious, main approaches would be related to: respect, opportunities, training, transparency, professionalism, team building, trustworthy, specialization, innovation, and any other factor you could think that would make your stakeholders to become much more than that: to make them to be your fans.

Pragmatism

Being pragmatic means to be precise and assertive, you need to go to the point and to avoid spending time in unproductive ways. Of course you will invest time in research, discussion, and also experiments, but once you have the results and once you certainly know what is the optimal way to perform an activity, that is your choice and your way to do that. You and your project want to be agile and lean, as much as possible. 

In the other hand, pragmatism could be also related to make concessions or to balance, let’s say you face a strong situation where a key stakeholder demands something that, in spite it would drive the expected result, it would be less efficient or more time or resource consuming in some way. What would be the cost for your project to say no to that request? In some cases, being pragmatic would mean to execute the second best option while at the same time you are still awesome and you are still delighting your stakeholder.

Context Counts

We have talked about this one too in the previous article, one possible topic to add here is that not only your context, your company, your team, your customers, your partners, and your competitors are unique; everything around you, your project, and your organization is permanently changing, so the context you have now is quite different from the one you had 10 years ago and it will be definitely much different from the context you will have in 10 years.

The good news is, among the areas you will notice the biggest changes, you will find for sure your expertise and your skills, and it’s great to be aware of that in order to be able to take advantage from this situation, and to plan your strategy accordingly.  

Choice is good

Another old friend from the previous article, I would like to reinforce at this point the fact that context counts makes this principle even more valuable, because you are able to choice to change in regards of the context. Choice is not only good, choice is crucial, otherwise it would be incredibly harder and even impossible sometimes, to adapt and to react to certain events. In a world of uncertainty, the only sure thing is the change.

DA is so supportive of the choice, that it is entirely framework agnostic and it supports several different project life cycles, there is only one best way to run your business and to do your job, and it is “your” way. The DA toolkit will help you to identify tools and techniques, processes and life cycles, methods and best practices, it will recommend metrics eventually, but choice is always yours. You could think of you like a chef at a luxury restaurant, DA will provide the ingredients and all the stuff you could need, the stakeholders will place the orders and perhaps they will state some rules or restrictions, but then you will deliver the result by following your own recipe, and you could even create it on the flight if you decide to. 

Optimize the flow

We have stated that flows are the fat cat, well, it is still true! This is why you will want to streamline your processes to align them as much as possible with your key strategies, to make them really effective in order to ensure they are a powerful ally in the goal to success. Innovation is often scary, partially due to it could seem to bring complexity to your tasks, right? Wrong! It must not need to be like that. If you optimize your flow and you keep your processes simple, then innovation could be a straightforward exercise that you will be glad to perform. 

Most likely, you won’t have just 1 team in your company, instead of that, you have several teams carrying with different complementary activities, one team could hire the people, who will work in another team to sell the good or services that another team will produce, using the supplies provided by another team (internal or external) and selected/bought by another team, and so on. Of course, you want your teams to perform harmoniously, like the best orchestra ever or the best football team. 

This is exactly what you will get when you optimize the flow: simplicity, synchronization, unity, effectiveness. Ideally, when you are DA, the entire organization should be DA, it will be for sure the easiest way to achieve all your organizational goals.

Enterprise Awareness

Almost as if it were on purpose, our last principle is Enterprise Awareness, it doesn’t matter if you are a PM, a developer, a receptionist, or the chairman, you need to clearly understand this basic idea (and to promote it) every single member of the company is a key gear from the entire machine, if one is missing, it is not complete and it won’t work properly or at least it won’t work in an optimal way. It is great, by the way, the closer the team, the bigger the collaboration opportunities; organizations are strong from union. When the different teams work closer to each other, it’s easier to share and transfer knowledge, it’s easier to understand the needs and requirements, it’s faster to recover from problems or failures, it’s easier to identify, anticipate and mitigate risks; in general your whole enterprise life will be easier; once you get to this point, to be awesome and to delight your stakeholders will be just around the corner. As a personal recommendation, internal corporate transparency and open key metrics and KPIs are great and easy allies for enterprise awareness.

If you have further questions on these topics, please do not hesitate to contact me.