Scott Ambler and Mark Lines, co-founders of Disciplined Agile(DA), have been teaching Agile methodologies for decades, and have recently released a new book entitled An Executive’s Guide to Disciplined Agile: Winning the Race to Business Agility. We caught up with Scott at Agile2017 in Orlando to talk Disciplined Agile, Business-IT alignment, and everything in-between. Here’s the top six insights we took away from our chat with the Agile guru.
- Agile software development is finding its stride while the Agile enterprise lags
In their new book, Scott and Mark have broken Disciplined Agile adoption down into:
- DA Delivery
- DA DevOps
- DA IT
- DA Enterprise
You can picture this as a hierarchy with DA development at the individual team level and DA Enterprise at scale.
Scott sees more organizations successfully implementing Agile development at the team level. The most forward-thinking companies have been implementing Agile software development methodologies for fifteen years and many have refined the process. DevOps has really only been around for five of those years, and few if any organizations are really executing Agile IT and Agile Enterprise at scale. Many organizations are just starting to apply Agile at the IT and Enterprise levels, and they’re finding this is a multi-year journey.
- Agile adoption – land and expand or organizational overhaul?
The Disciplined Agile preference is to go in at the organizational level. When you come in and overhaul, you can drive alignment between business and IT teams. When Scott goes in at the individual team level, there’s always closely integrated teams that are completely misaligned with agile strategies. This proximity to agile delivery teams can act as an opportunity to learn, but there’s always the risk of people on those periphery teams sabotaging progress.
“They’re either embracing it or running scared.” Says Scott. “If they’re running scared, if you don’t engage them, they’re going to start undermining your agile adoption effort.” One of the main benefits of landing and expanding with individual teams is to show rapid value-add to the organization. When individuals and teams undermine the effort, that value quickly dissipates.
- Agile metrics driving business value
“We’re firm believers that the needs of the organization need to drive the metrics you collect” says Scott. In Disciplined Agile, Scott and Mark leverage Objectives and Key Results(OKR) and the Goal, Question, Metric(GQM) approaches. By identifying what’s important to the organization, DA drives better alignment between technical and business teams. Are they most interested in time to market? Customer satisfaction? Staff morale? Once you identify your goals, you can measure how well newly Agile teams drive success through business alignment.
- Managing competing values in the Agile organization
Based on Scott’s perspective on metrics, I couldn’t help but wonder how DA deals with competing values, and conflicting metrics. Scott and Mark’s approach is straightforward – get the stakeholders together and talk it out. Alignment is key in driving metrics, and defining success in the Agile world is crucial to the success of Agile adoption.
- The role of Product Owners – A bridge or a barrier?
In general, the Product Owner(PO) plays a pivotal role in DAD. They’ve adopted the PO role from Scrum, as it can help alleviate a lot of the burden associated with cross-team alignment. The ideal state for DA has the stakeholders actively interacting directly with designers and developers. Unfortunately, at enterprise-scale, that can become almost impossible. Leveraging a PO and proper collaboration tools, organizations can create a flow of communication between stakeholders and developers second only to them sitting side-by-side.
- Business-IT alignment is key to the speed of Enterprise Agile
Business Stakeholders can often act as a bottleneck in the Agile process. I wanted to know how DA encouraged rapid feedback and decision making between business and IT.
Scott and Mark’s approach is to cherry pick parts of the organization that have flexible stakeholders at first. People willing to adapt and move at Agile speeds to align business and IT. Earn a few wins with those people, and they’ll sing your praises to their colleagues who are a bit more leery of Agile. Agile adoption is a multi-year journey, so you need to play both a short and a long game if you’re going to be successful.
“The last several decades we’ve been teaching the business side of the organization that they should be treating IT like a black box, you don’t need to know anything about it. That’s been devastating for the relationship.” Says Scott. “We need to pull that back. IT is your primary competitive advantage, if you’re not engaging with IT teams, you’re done.”
DA takes a unique perspective on Agile transformation, leveraging their framework to roll out adoption to teams and organizations alike. At Blueprint, we see huge value in DA’s focus on business-IT alignment.
Our Agile planning solution, Storyteller, is an important tool for organizations implementing DA. It shares the fundamental values of alignment, collaboration, automation, and flexibility. Read more to learn how Storyteller supercharges ALM Tools for enterprise Agile transformation.
