™

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Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM)™ or
Study Guide
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About the DASM Training

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Is your team treading water using waterfall? Do you feel trapped in an agile framework? Would
you like to find solutions to the problems you’ve been wrestling with? Are you looking for ways
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to enhance your team’s agility?

Break free from your old ways by choosing a way of working (WoW) that fits your team’s
context. Find strategies to improve your processes and strengthen your team with the
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Disciplined Agile® (DA™) tool kit.

Disciplined Agile Scrum Master is a nine-lesson, instructor-led course that shows you how to
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use Disciplined Agile to improve your team’s WoW. In just 2 days, you’ll become familiar with
foundational agile and lean practices that DA supports, practice using the DA tool kit to solve
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problems, and learn how to build high-performance teams.

This course is also appropriate for teams that wish to work together to learn DA and customize
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their WoW.
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Filled with activities, animations, supplemental reading, and more, this course will prepare you
to take the Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM)™ certification exam and, equally important,
start using Disciplined Agile immediately.

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 The PMI® Agile Certification Journey

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Materials for This Course
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• Choose Your WoW! A Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of
Working (WoW) (PDF Version)
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• DASM Activity Workbook PDF

• DASM Participant Handout PDF
• DASM Study Guide PDF
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• DASM Bibliography/References/Glossary PDF

About This Study Guide

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• This study guide is designed to aid you in reviewing the contents of the DASM training
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and preparing for the Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM)™ certification exam.
• This study guide does NOT contain everything you need to know to pass the exam. More
tips and tricks for passing the exam can be found at: Passing a Disciplined Agile (DA)
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Exam ([Link])
• To adequately prepare, read this guide, along with relevant chapters of Choose Your
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WoW! and the Participant Handout PDF.

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• Use the objectives, listed under each lesson in this guide, to determine what you need
to study. The exam measures your ability to satisfy each of these objectives. While we
encourage you to learn more about DA, you do not have to worry about information
not contained in the objectives to pass the exam.

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 Contents
Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM)™ Study Guide 1
About the DASM Training ........................................................................................................... 1
The PMI® Agile Certification Journey .......................................................................................... 2

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Materials for This Course ............................................................................................................ 2

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About This Study Guide .............................................................................................................. 2
About the Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM)™ 8

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Who Is a DASM?.......................................................................................................................... 8

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What Is a DASM?......................................................................................................................... 8

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How Does a DASM Serve?........................................................................................................... 9
Team 9

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Product Owner 9
The Organization 9
Lesson 1: All About Agile or 10
Description ................................................................................................................................ 10
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Objectives.................................................................................................................................. 10
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Agenda ...................................................................................................................................... 10
Lesson Notes ............................................................................................................................. 11
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What Is Agile? 11
The Agile Manifesto 11
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The Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto 11

There Is No Standard for Agile Terminology 12
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Agile Breaks Projects Into Iterations 12

Planning an Iteration 13
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Agile Ceremonies 13
Agile Ceremony Summary 13
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Agile Artifacts 14
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User Stories 15
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Team Estimation Steps 15

When the Story Is Done 15
Pros and Cons of Acceptance Criteria 16
How a Demo Works 16

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 Lesson 2: Agile and Beyond 17
Description ................................................................................................................................ 17
Objectives.................................................................................................................................. 17
Agenda ...................................................................................................................................... 18
Lesson Notes ............................................................................................................................. 18

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Agile Is Showing Its Age 18

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The Disciplined Agile Mindset 18

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What Is Guided Continuous Improvement? 21
Disciplined Agile Approach to Adoption and Improvement 21

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What Is the Basis for Guided Continuous Improvement? 21

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Disciplined Agile Is Described in Four Views 22
Disciplined Agile Life Cycles 22

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Disciplined Agile Practices: How Does Disciplined Agile Work? 22
So, How Does Disciplined Agile Work? 23
Disciplined Agile Tool Kit Process Blades
Process Goals
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Lesson 3: Building and Supporting a Disciplined Agile Team 27
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Description ................................................................................................................................ 27
Objectives.................................................................................................................................. 27
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Agenda ...................................................................................................................................... 27
Lesson Notes ............................................................................................................................. 28
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Be Awesome – Disciplined Agile Principle 28

Building a Disciplined Agile Team 28
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Summary of Key Roles 29

Primary Disciplined Agile Roles 29
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Supporting Disciplined Agile Roles 30

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People Can Fulfill More Than One Role 30

Who Does the DASM Interact With? 31
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What Does a DASM Do? 31

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How Does the DASM Serve the Team? 31

How Does the DASM Serve the Product Owner? 31
How Does the DASM Serve the Organization? 31
Leaders versus Managers 32

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 What Is Emotional Intelligence and Why Is It Important? 32
Middle-Up-Down-Management 33
Team Working Agreements 34
Types of Teams – Project versus Product/Long-Standing Team 34
Shared Team Services 34

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Team Context and Scaling Factors 35

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Lesson 4: Choosing Your WoW! 41

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Description ................................................................................................................................ 41
Objectives.................................................................................................................................. 41

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Agenda ...................................................................................................................................... 41

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Lesson Notes ............................................................................................................................. 42
What Is Enterprise Business Agility? 42

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Why Do We Want to Be Able to Choose Our Team’s Way of Working? 42
What Are the Disciplined Agile Life Cycles? 42
Common Project Phases
Disciplined Agile Milestones
or 45
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How Do You Choose Your Way of Working? 46
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Lesson 5: Tailoring Your Practices: Inception Phase 48

Description ................................................................................................................................ 48
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Objectives.................................................................................................................................. 48
Agenda ...................................................................................................................................... 48
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Lesson Notes ............................................................................................................................. 48

Disciplined Agile Categories 48
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Disciplined Agile Process Goals in Each Phase 49

Agile Practices: Plan the Release Cycle (Agile Life Cycle) 49
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Choices in the Inception Phase 50

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Lesson 6: Tailoring Your Practices: Construction Phase 51

Description ................................................................................................................................ 51
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Objectives.................................................................................................................................. 51
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Agenda ...................................................................................................................................... 51
Lesson Notes ............................................................................................................................. 52
Disciplined Agile Construction Phase and Process Goals 52
Agile Practices (Agile Life Cycle) 52

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 Lean Tip: Deliver Value Quickly 53
Lean Tip: Visualizing the Value Stream 53
Cost of Delay 53
Lean Tip: Deliver Incrementally Using Minimum Business Increments 54
Lean Tip: Ensure Value by Building Quality In 54

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Lean Tip: Eliminating Waste 54

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Lesson 7: Tailoring Your Practices: Transition Phase 56

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Description ................................................................................................................................ 56
Objectives.................................................................................................................................. 56

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Agenda ...................................................................................................................................... 56

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Lesson Notes ............................................................................................................................. 56
Transition Phase Process Goals 56

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Lesson 8. Tailoring Your Practices: Ongoing 58
Description ................................................................................................................................ 58
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Objectives.................................................................................................................................. 58
Agenda ...................................................................................................................................... 58
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Lesson Notes ............................................................................................................................. 58
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Ongoing Category 58
Ongoing Category Goals 59
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Lean Practices for the Ongoing Category 66

Lesson 9. Influence Outside the Team 71
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Description ................................................................................................................................ 71
Objectives.................................................................................................................................. 71
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Agenda ...................................................................................................................................... 71
Lesson Notes ............................................................................................................................. 71
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Looking Beyond the Team 71

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What Is Lean? 71
Key Lean Concepts 72
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Wastes in Lean 72
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Lean Principles: Software Development and Knowledge Work 73

Lean Principle: Build Quality In 73
Lean Principle: Eliminate Waste 74
Lean Principle: Learn Pragmatically 74

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 Lean Principle: Keep Options Open 74
Lean Principle: Deliver Value Quickly 74
Lean Principle: Importance of Incremental Delivery 75
Lean Principle: Respect People 75
Lean Principle: Optimizing the Whole 75

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Lean Principle: Build in Resilience 76

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Lean: Focus on Realizing Value 77

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 About the Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM)™
Who Is a DASM?
A DASM is simply a DA team lead who practices the Scrum methodology.

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The team lead plays an important role in interacting with and serving the team. They also
interact with stakeholders and neighboring teams, which means a DASM needs superior people

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skills to be effective.
Throughout most of this training, references to the DA term “team lead” and the course term

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“DASM” are interchangeable.

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What Is a DASM?

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The responsibilities of a DASM fall below a Disciplined Agile Senior Scrum Master (DASSM)™
and a functional manager. The DASM area of focus is with a team.

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Functional Manager DASSM™

Responsible for a function

(i.e., marketing or finance)
or
Responsible for
implementation or
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development team
Makes high-level business Guides their team to make
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decisions joint decisions

DASM™
Qualified to work in variety
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Qualified to work in more

of situations, with more
straightforward, less
complex scaling factors
complex situations
and variations
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Needs skills in planning, Has basic team leadership

metrics, and reporting skills; does not take an
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active role in planning,

Takes an active role in metrics, reporting or team
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team development development

Knows the organization’s
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various layers and

departments
Can identify allies and
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coordinate with other Knows how to work at the

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teams to improve the value team level

stream
Removes barriers between
stakeholders and teams

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 How Does a DASM Serve?

Team
First, a DASM serves the team, helping them be their best:
• Coaches team members in self-management

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• Helps the team focus on creating high-value increments that meet the definition of

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done
• Helps remove impediments to the team's progress
• Ensures that necessary events take place and are:

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o Positive
o Productive

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o Within timebox

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Product Owner

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A DASM also serves the product owner in these ways:
• Helps find techniques for effective product goal definition and backlog management
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•
•
Supports in backlog grooming and planning
Keeps informed of project status or
Helps the team understand the need for clear and concise backlog items
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• Facilitates stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed
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The Organization
Finally, a DASM serves the organization in these ways:
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• Supports the product owner and team in achieving customer satisfaction

• Helps the team identify and address risks
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• Helps with training and coaching in agile adoption

• Helps employees and stakeholders understand and work in their environment
• Removes barriers between stakeholders and teams
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 Lesson 1: All About Agile
Description
In this lesson, you’ll learn agile concepts and how to work with agile as a Disciplined Agile
Scrum Master (DASM). The DASM coordinates and facilitates agile “ceremonies” or critical

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team events involved in developing a solution. A DASM also helps improve their processes by

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implementing Disciplined Agile® (DA™), which is based on agile and lean.

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Objectives
Describe the foundations of agile:

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• Compare and contrast agile and waterfall.

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• List the benefits of being agile.
• Outline the agile iterative way of working.

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• List and define the artifacts and ceremonies of agile.
Describe agile techniques and ceremonies relevant to Inception:
•
•
Define user stories. or
Describe how to write and estimate a user story using different techniques.
• Identify acceptance criteria and the definition of done (DoD).
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• Indicate how to effectively plan iterations.
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Describe agile techniques and ceremonies that take place during Construction:
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• Describe how to demonstrate an iteration.

• State how to obtain and receive feedback.
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Agenda
1. What Is Agile?
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2. The Agile Manifesto

3. How Does Agile Work?
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a. The Iterative Process

b. Planning an Iteration
c. Agile Ceremonies and Artifacts
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d. User Stories
e. Iteration Demonstration
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4. Information Radiators
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 Lesson Notes

What Is Agile?
Agile is an iterative approach to project management and software development that helps
teams deliver value faster and with fewer headaches.

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Instead of betting everything on a big launch, agile teams deliver work in small, consumable

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increments.
There are several widely used agile methodologies, including Scrum, Extreme Programming

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(XP), and the Dynamic Systems Development Method.

The Agile Manifesto

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In February 2001, 17 people met to address a problem in software development.

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The problem, they agreed, was the document-driven, heavyweight approach most companies
used for software development. These companies were so focused on planning and

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documentation that they lost sight of what really matters—pleasing customers.
What emerged was the Manifesto for Agile Software Development (aka Agile Manifesto), a 68-
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word document that ushered in a revolution—and not just in software development.
The Agile Manifesto lists four core values. It reads, in its entirety:
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“We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.
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Through this work we have come to value:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
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• Working software over comprehensive documentation

• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan
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That is, while there is value in the items on the right, we value the items on the left more.”
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The Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto

• Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of
valuable software.
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• Welcome changing requirements, even late in development. Agile processes harness

change for the customer's competitive advantage.
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• Deliver working software frequently, from a couple of weeks to a couple of months,

with a preference to the shorter timescale.
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• Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.
• Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support
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they need and trust them to get the job done.

• The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a
development team is face-to-face conversation.
• Working software is the primary measure of progress.

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 • Agile processes promote sustainable development. The sponsors, developers, and users
should be able to maintain a constant pace indefinitely.
• Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility.
• Simplicity—the art of maximizing the amount of work not done—is essential.
• The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.
• At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and

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adjusts its behavior accordingly.

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There Is No Standard for Agile Terminology

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Disciplined Agile strives to be agnostic in its terminology.
There will never be a standardization of terminology.

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Feel free to choose whatever terms you like when you’re on your teams but recognize that
doing so may might hamper your ability to think outside the methodology box.

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DA Term XP Term Scrum Term Spotify® Team

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Iteration Iteration Sprint Sprint
Team Lead Coach ScrumMaster* Agile Coach
Daily Coordination
Meeting
Daily Meeting or
(Daily) Scrum
Meeting
Huddle
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Retrospective Retrospective Sprint Retrospective Retrospective
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Team Team Team Squad, Tribe

Architecture Owner Coach*
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Domain Expert Customer* Customer* Customer*

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* Means “not an exact match.”

Agile Breaks Projects Into Iterations

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At its core, agile is a way to get organized and plow your way through a complex project.
• Make a list. Sit down with your customer and make a list of features they’d like to see.
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This becomes your to-do list for the project.

• Size things up. Size up your tasks, relative to each other, and come up with a guess as to
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how long each one will take.

• Set some priorities. Ask your customer to prioritize their list so you get the most
important stuff done first.
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• Start working. Start at the top of your list and start delivering value, building, iterating,
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and getting feedback from your customer as you go.

This is oversimplified, of course, but it should provide a basic understanding. In the real world,
the iterative process is a bit more complex.

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 Planning an Iteration
How do teams plan iterations?
• The product backlog is where the team collects all the work flowing to the team. Work is
continuously placed in the product backlog from minimum business increments and
from the release roadmap.

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• The product owner prioritizes the product backlog, signaling to the team what work is
the most important.

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• At the start of each iteration, the team pulls the work they plan to do from the product
backlog into the iteration backlog. This is a key point: The team pulls the amount of

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work it thinks it can get done during the iteration—not the product owner, team
manager, or stakeholders.

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• Iteration planning ends when the team determines they have moved the right amount
of work—that is, when they’ve pulled an amount that matches their capacity for the

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iteration. At this point, they start the iteration.

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Agile Ceremonies
One of the things that sets agile apart from other management approaches is its ceremonies—

or
sometimes referred to as rituals. These provide the framework for the team to get work done
in a structured manner, help to set expectations, empower the team to collaborate effectively,
and ultimately drive results.
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• Iteration planning is the activity to prioritize and identify the tasks for the next iteration.
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• The coordination meeting is a regular, short meeting of the team where status is
exchanged, progress is observed, and impediments are noted and removed. This
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meeting is also known as a standup meeting or scrum.

• The iteration demonstration showcases what the team accomplished in the iteration.
• The iteration retrospective is a structured reflection designed to let the team learn and
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improve based on what’s already been done.

Agile Ceremony Summary

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These four ceremonies are only as effective as the amount of people they contain. Invite too
many people, and you may find that too many voices are in the conversation. Invite too few,
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and you will find that you are not getting enough internal feedback. The goal is to find the
happy medium.
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• Iteration planning: These should include the team, the team lead, and the product
owner. They are held at the beginning of each iteration and their length should be 1
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hour for every week of the iteration. For example, a 2-week iteration should have a 2-
hour planning meeting. The product owner comes to the meeting with a groomed
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product backlog, which they discuss with the team. They decide what work can
completed in the iteration, and place the rest into the backlog, which contains the work
that can be pulled into the backlog, time permitting.

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 • Daily coordination meeting: These should include the team, the team lead, and the
product owner. This is a short, daily meeting, usually about 15 minutes, and held at a
time convenient for the team, usually in the morning. But the time can be adjusted to
the needs of your team. Participants in this meeting discuss the following: What did I
complete yesterday? What am I working on today? Do I have anything blocking my
work? Doing this provides accountability to your peers, because no one wants to be the

e
blocker all the time.

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• Iteration demonstration: These should include the team, the team lead, and the
product owner. Stakeholders can also attend but are not required. Held at the end of an
iteration, these meetings showcase work that has been done during the iteration. Work

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showed here should be demonstrable and meet the quality standards of the team. In
other words, don’t show something half-baked here. These should be anywhere from 30

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to 60 minutes.
Iteration retrospective: These should include the team, the team lead, and the product

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•
owner. They are held at the end of each iteration and should last about 60 minutes.
These meetings discuss what has been accomplished during the iteration, as well as

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what worked and what didn’t work for the team. Discussing what works allows the team
to better focus on those areas. Discussing what doesn’t work allows the team to figure

or
out solutions and develop a plan for dealing with things that don’t work for the team.
These ceremonies should be scheduled in a way that makes the best use of a team’s time. For
example, some teams hold the iteration retrospectives and demonstrations at the same time
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since the team may have agreed that doing so is an efficient use of their time.
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Agile Artifacts
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Agile artifacts provide the framework for the team to get work done in a structured manner,
help to set expectations, empower the team to collaborate effectively, and ultimately drive
results.
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• The product backlog is the list of work required to create a product. This is the artifact
that collects all the work flowing into the team. The product owner prioritizes the
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product backlog, signaling to the team which work is most important.

• The iteration backlog is the list of work to be completed in the current iteration, in the
order determined by the team.
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• A burndown chart is a graphic representation of how quickly the team is working

through work items. The burndown chart shows the total effort against the amount of
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work for each iteration.

• A user story is a tool used in agile to capture a description of a feature from the user’s
perspective. A user story describes the type of user, what they want, and why. A user
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story helps to create a simplified description of a requirement.

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 User Stories
A user story is a short, simple description of a feature told from the perspective of the person
who desires the new capability—usually a user or customer of the system.
User stories shift the focus of the team from writing about requirements to talking about them.
They contain a sentence or two and, more importantly, a series of conversations about the

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desired functionality.

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Once a user story has been written, we need to estimate how much effort it will take. How easy
or difficult will it be to implement?

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User story estimates help teams plan their iterations.
There are many different estimation strategies, which fall under the Plan the Release process

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goal, under Choose Estimation.

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Team Estimation Steps

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Here’s how team estimation works. We start with unsorted user stories (click to move through
each step).
•
•
Pick a user story.
or
Pick additional cards and place each to the left or right of the first card, based on
whether they are more or less complex, or difficult to implement.
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• Continue to place stories, according to their difficulty, compared to stories currently in
the arrangement. Remember, we are just estimating. So we can place stories that are
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roughly similar levels of complexity together. The team can take turns placing or
rearranging cards. And whenever you are unsure, simply confer with others on the
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team.
It’s only after you have finished arranging the cards that you finally assign each column points
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that will estimate its relative level of difficulty.

Assigning relative points is one of many options teams can use under the Plan Release process
goal.
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Now, every story has an estimate and is ready to be added to the iteration backlog.
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When the Story Is Done

The agile way of working has two components built in.
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1. The first is acceptance criteria, which are detailed aspects of a high-level requirement
from the point of view of a stakeholder and are unique to each user story.
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2. The second is a definition of done (DoD)—a checklist of what makes a user story “done.”
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The DoD is an agreed-upon set of items that must be satisfied before a user story can be
considered complete.

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 Pros and Cons of Acceptance Criteria
Listing acceptance criteria is one option for ensuring quality under the Explore Scope process
goal. You can look this up in Choose Your Wow!, where you will find a table with a definition
and trade-offs for this option.
The benefits of acceptance criteria are:

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• Motivates teams to think through detailed requirements; and

ut
• Dovetails nicely into a behavior-driven development (BDD) or an acceptance test-driven
development (ATDD) approach.

ib
Risks: Many quality requirements are cross-cutting aspects of several functional stories, so
relying on acceptance criteria alone risks missing details, particularly in new requirements

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identified later in the life cycle.

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How a Demo Works

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1. Determine which tasks (based on user stories) meet the definition of “done.”
2. Demonstrate new features (finished stories) to stakeholders.
3. Solicit feedback:

of the customer? or
a) Is this story ready for release? Does the feature or functionality meet the needs

b) Are there issues that require more work? Should this story be returned to the
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iteration backlog?
at
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up
D
ot
N
o
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 Lesson 2: Agile and Beyond
Description
One of the most important aspects of being a DASM is leading your team through the agile
journey, embracing the DA mindset, understanding DA’s central concepts, and acquainting

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yourself with the DA tool kit to customize your team’s way of working and optimize your

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processes. This lesson provides an overview. You’ll learn more about DA as you proceed
through the training.

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Objectives

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Describe the significance of the Disciplined Agile (DA) mindset.

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• Describe what DA is.
• Define the eight principles of DA.

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• Describe the "promises" of DA.
• Describe the "guidelines" of DA.
•
variety of sources. or
Describe how DA is an agnostic hybrid of approaches that leverages strategies from a

Define the eight DA principles and how they are core to what sets Disciplined Agile apart from
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other agile frameworks.
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• Recognize the importance of making Delight Customers a priority.

• Describe how Being Awesome is important for building a great agile team.
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• List the five levels of awareness (Enterprise Awareness).

• Identify how different contexts require different strategies—teams need to be able to
own their own process and to experiment to discover what works in practice for them
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given the situation that they face (Choice Is Good).

• Identify how DA provides guardrails, helping you to make better process choices, not
strict rules that may not even be applicable given the context that you face (Pragmatism
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Over Purism).
• Identify the potential factors to consider regarding the context of a given situation faced
ot

by a team (Context Counts).

• Identify that the large number of strategies the DA tool kit supports to Optimize Flow.
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• Explain the importance of organizing around products/services.

Explain the elements of the process blade diagram.
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Discuss how to use the DA tool kit to tailor your way of working (WoW) within a select phase
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according to context.
• Explain what it means to be goal driven.
• Define process blade and how process blades are used inside DA.
• Describe the purpose of a goal diagram.

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 • Describe how to read a goal diagram.
• Describe the process goals of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD).

Agenda
1. Agile Is Showing Its Age

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2. What Is Disciplined Agile?

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3. The Disciplined Agile Mindset
4. What Is Guided Continuous Improvement?
5.

ib
Disciplined Agile People
6. Disciplined Agile Flow
7.

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Disciplined Agile Practices
8. How Disciplined Agile Works

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Lesson Notes

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Agile Is Showing Its Age

or
Agile frameworks are being routinely imposed upon teams—as well as on entire
organizations—whether they make sense for specific teams or not, presumably to provide
management with some degree of control.
e
Often, leadership’s decision-making process boils down to “Ask an industry analyst what’s
at

popular” or “What are my competitors doing?” rather than what is best for the situation.
With the development of what Martin Fowler referred to as the “agile industrial complex,” agile
lic

seems to have lost much of its agility.

As a DASM, you should be aware of the emotional intelligence of your team members,
up

especially when introducing a new way of working (WoW). Some may embrace the change
while others may find it stressful. Effectively managing your emotions, as well as the emotions
of others, will positively impact your project.
D

The Disciplined Agile Mindset

The Disciplined Agile mindset is informed by principles, promises, and guidelines. Disciplined
ot

agilists believe in these principles, promise to adopt these behaviors, and follow these
guidelines. There is a purpose for each aspect of the mindset.
N

• Principles. The principles provide a philosophical foundation for business agility. They
are based on both lean and flow concepts.
o

• Promises. The promises are agreements that we make with our fellow teammates, our
D

stakeholders, and other people within our organization whom we interact with. The
promises define a collection of disciplined behaviors that enable us to collaborate
effectively and professionally.
• Guidelines. These guidelines help us to be more effective in our WoW and in improving
our WoW over time.

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 The Disciplined Agile Mindset: Principles
• Delight customers. Customers are delighted when our products and services not only
fulfill their needs and expectations but surpass them. Successful organizations delight
their customers.
• Be awesome. There are several things that we, as individuals, can do to be awesome.
o Act in such a way that we earn the respect and trust of our colleagues: Be

e
reliable, be honest, be open, be ethical, and treat people with respect.

ut
o Be willing to collaborate with others. Share information with them when asked,
even if it is a work in progress. Offer help when it’s needed and, just as

ib
important, reach out for help yourself.
o Be an active learner. We should seek to master our craft, always being on the
lookout for opportunities to experiment and learn. Go beyond our specialty and

tr
learn about the broader environment.

is
o Seek to never let the team down. Yes, it will happen sometimes, and good teams
understand and forgive that.

D
o Simon Powers points out that we need to be willing to improve and manage our
emotional responses to difficult situations. Innovation requires diversity, and by
their very nature, diverse opinions may cause emotional reactions. We must all

•
or
work on making our workplace psychologically safe.
Context counts. Every person is unique, with their own set of skills, preferences for
e
work style, career goals, and learning styles. Every team is unique, not only because it is
composed of unique people, but also because it faces a unique situation. Our
at

organization is also unique, even when there are other organizations that operate in the
same marketplace that we do.
lic

• Be pragmatic. Instead of requiring “best practices,” DA provides strategies for

maximizing the benefits of agile despite certain necessary compromises that are being
made. As such, it’s pragmatic—not purist—in its guidance.
up

• Choice is good. To provide people with choices from which they can choose their way of
working, DA has gathered strategies from a wide variety of courses and put them into
context. It combines strategies from methods, frameworks, bodies of knowledge, books,
D

our practical experiences helping organizations to improve, and many other sources.
Better choices lead to better outcomes, earlier—because choice is good.
ot

• Optimize flow. Looking at the flow of value enables teams to collaborate in a way to
effectively implement our organization’s value streams. Although each team may be but
N

one part of the value stream, they can see how they might align with others to maximize
the realization of value.
• Organize around products/services. In DA, we don’t organize around job function—
o

such as having a sales group, a business analysis group, a data analytics group, and so
D

on. We organize around products and services. This enables us to accomplish several
important things:
o Organizing around products and services enables us to identify and optimize the
flows that count, which are value streams.

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 o Organizing around products and services enables us to be laser-focused on
delighting customers.
• Enterprise awareness. When people are enterprise aware, they’re motivated to
consider the overall needs of their organization, to ensure that what they’re doing
contributes to the goals of the organization and not just to the goals of their team.
Enterprise awareness positively changes people’s behaviors in several important ways,

e
making them more likely to:

ut
o Work closely with enterprise professionals to seek their guidance.
o Leverage and evolve existing assets within the organization, collaborating with
the people responsible for those assets to do so.

ib
o Adopt and follow common guidance, tailoring it where needed, thereby
increasing overall consistency and quality.

tr
o Share their learnings across teams, thereby speeding up their organization’s
overall improvement efforts.

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The Disciplined Agile Mindset: Promises

D
The promises of the DA mindset are agreements that we make with our fellow teammates, our
stakeholders, and other people within our organization with whom we interact. The promises

professionally. or
define a collection of disciplined behaviors that enable us to collaborate effectively and

Create psychological safety and embrace diversity.

e
•
• Accelerate value realization.
at

• Collaborate proactively.
• Make all work and workflow visible.
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• Improve predictability.
• Keep workloads within capacity.
• Improve continuously.
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The Disciplined Agile Mindset: Guidelines

The guidelines of the DA mindset help us to be more effective in our way of working (WoW)
D

and in improving our WoW over time.

• Validate our learning.
ot

• Apply design thinking.

• Attend to relationships through the value stream.
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• Create effective environments that foster joy.

• Change culture by improving the system.
o

• Create semi-autonomous, self-organizing teams.

• Adopt measures to improve outcomes.
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• Leverage and enhance organizational assets.

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 What Is Guided Continuous Improvement?
A Kaizen loop is an approach where a team experiments with a small change in their way of
working (WoW), adopting the change if it works in their given context, and abandoning it if it
doesn’t.
Continuous improvement is the act of applying a series of Kaizen loops to improve your WoW

e
over time.

ut
Some students have heard this referred to as PDCA—Plan-Do-Check-Act. W. E. Deming went
back and forth between PDCA and PDSA—Plan-Do-Study-Act, finally settling on PDSA.

ib
Disciplined Agile Approach to Adoption and Improvement

tr
The DA approach to adoption and improvement has six primary focal points.
1. Take a scientific approach—be guided by data, observation, facts, and rely on evidence.

is
2. Understanding where you want to go is essential to positive outcomes. Know what
success looks like in real terms and insist on defining objectives and success.

D
3. Choose a well-defined starting point.
4. Be able to make reasonably accurate predictions of whether a change will be beneficial.

5.
6.
Again, rely on a scientific approach.

Use a simple model that works at all levels.

or
Provide options to adopters and keep it simple.
e
What Is the Basis for Guided Continuous Improvement?
at

Because we’re in a complex adaptive system (CAS), nothing is ever fully predictable. But when
we improve based on sound principles, one of three things will happen:
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• We get an improvement.
• We learn something about how the work in one part of the system affects another.
up

• We learn something about the people in our system.

This is the basis for guided continuous improvement (GCI).
D

GCI extends the Kaizen loop strategy to use proven guidance to help teams identify techniques
that are likely to work in their context. This increases the percentage of successful experiments
ot

and thereby increases the overall rate of process improvement.

And that’s where DA comes in. It enables you to increase your rate of process improvement by
N

helping you identify strategies that are more likely to succeed given your situation.
If we get better at this, we will succeed more often and improve faster. We can do this if:
o

• We have access to an experienced agile coach, but they’re expensive and hard to find.
D

• We have access to a process knowledgebase, like the DA tool kit.

Some experiments fail. You’ll learn something, but it’s still a failure.
Failing fast is fine but succeeding early is better.

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 Disciplined Agile Is Described in Four Views
DA is described in four views:
• Mindset: Builds on the foundations of agile, lean, and flow to address enterprise
realities.
• People: Individuals and interactions; this view addresses roles, responsibilities, and

e
team structures.
Flow: This includes the dynamic aspects of process, captured via life cycle diagrams and

ut
•
workflow diagrams.
• Practices: Small strategies/techniques; goal diagrams are a high-level pick list of

ib
practices.

tr
Disciplined Agile Life Cycles

is
A life cycle is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying a product or service. DA
life cycles provide teams with the flexibility of choosing an approach that makes sense for
them. They are an essential tool for teams choosing their own way of working (WoW).

D
• Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) supports several life cycles.
DA describes some additional life cycles, especially Disciplined Agile FLEX, which is a life
•

•
cycle at the value stream.
DA also has life cycles for business teams.
or
The flow aspects of process blades are described via either a life cycle or workflow
e
•
diagram(s).
at

Disciplined Agile Practices: How Does Disciplined Agile Work?

lic

Knowing where you want to end up is having a goal.

• Goals give us focus.
up

• Goals allow us to measure progress.

• Goals help us remain committed and undistracted.
• Goals help us overcome procrastination.
D

• Goals give us motivation.

That’s why DA takes a goal-driven approach.
ot

Most teams struggle to truly own their process—mostly because they don’t have the process
expertise within the team to do so.
N

A few key points:

• Every team faces a unique situation and therefore should tailor their approach to best
o

address that situation and evolve their way of working (WoW) as the situation evolves.
D

In other words, context counts.

• You need to have choices and know what those choices are—you can’t own your
process if you don’t know what your options are.
• We want to be awesome at what we do, so we need the flexibility to experiment with
ways of working so that we can discover how to be the most awesome team we can be.

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 There are several fundamental advantages to taking a goal-driven approach to agile solution
delivery:
• It enables teams to focus on process outcomes, not on process compliance.
• It provides a concise, shared pathway to leaner, less wasteful process decisions.
• It makes process decisions explicit, helping your team choose its way of working.
It makes your process options very clear and thereby makes it easier to identify the

e
•
appropriate strategy for the situation you find yourself in.

ut
• It enables effective scaling by providing you with strategies that are sophisticated
enough to address the complexities that you face at scale.

ib
• It takes the guesswork out of extending agile methods and thereby enables you to
focus on your actual job, which is to provide value to your stakeholders.

tr
• It makes it clear what risks you’re taking on and thus enables you to increase the
likelihood of success.

is
• It hints at an agile maturity model (this is important for any organization struggling to
move away from traditional maturity models).

D
So, How Does Disciplined Agile Work?

or
Unfortunately, there are no one-size-fits-all solutions.
This may sound obvious, but you would be surprised at the number of organizations that
overlook it. They seek to impose a single solution on all teams, regardless of whether the
e
solution is appropriate or not.
at

Since your organization is a complex adaptive system (CAS), no single approach will work for all
the groups in it.
lic

That’s where DA comes in.

DA is an agnostic hybrid approach that leverages strategies from a variety of sources.
up

• DA does much of the heavy lifting when it comes to answering the question: “How do all
of the various agile techniques fit together?”
• In many ways, DA is the process glue that connects the various agile practices.
D

• DA leverages ideas from a wide variety of agile, lean, iterative, and even traditional
sources.
ot

To accommodate the wide variety of needs in a complex organization, the DA tool kit captures
team-level strategies in a series of process blades.
N

A process blade addresses a specific organizational capability, such as finance, people

management, data management, agile solution delivery, or vendor management.
o

A process blade encompasses a cohesive collection of process options—including practices,

D

strategies, and workflows—that should be chosen and then applied in a context-sensitive

manner.
Why is it called a blade?

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 A process blade is called a blade to imply that it can be updated or even replaced, just like a
blade server in your IT infrastructure, where components can be independently replaced. As
the situation a team faces evolves, a team needs to be able to update their configuration of a
process blade—or even replace it entirely—with little or no impact to the team around them.
Hence, a process blade is the process equivalent of a server blade.
If you don’t have data center experience, think of a blade as you would think of the different

e
blades in your kitchen’s knife block. Each knife serves a different purpose: a paring knife for

ut
fruit, a serrated knife for cutting bread, a cleaver for chopping through bones, and so on. In the
same way, each process blade services a different function: data management, portfolio

ib
management, and so on.

Disciplined Agile Tool Kit Process Blades

tr
To help you to navigate the wealth of advice contained in the DA tool kit, it has been organized

is
into four layers:
Foundation: Provides the conceptual underpinnings of the Disciplined Agile tool kit. This

D
•
includes the mindset and people of the Disciplined Agile; fundamental concepts from
both agile and lean; fundamental serial approaches; and the fundamentals of choosing

•
your way of working .
or
Disciplined DevOps: The streamlining of solution development and operations.
Disciplined DevOps is an enterprise-class approach to DevOps. This layer includes
e
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) and other enterprise aspects of DevOps.
Value Stream: Based on Al Shalloway’s Flow for Enterprise Transformation or “FLEX.”
at

•
It’s not enough to be innovative in ideas if these ideas can’t be realized in the
marketplace or in the company. FLEX is the glue that ties an organization’s strategies in
lic

that it visualizes what an effective value stream looks like, enabling the team to make
decisions for improving each part of the organization within the context of the whole.
up

• Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE): Senses and responds swiftly to changes in the
marketplace. It does this through an organizational culture and structure that facilitates
change within the context of the situation that it faces. Such organizations require a
D

learning mindset in the mainstream business and underlying lean and agile processes to
drive [Link] DAE layer focuses on the rest of the enterprise activities that
support an organization’s value streams.
ot

Process Goals
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A process goal captures the detailed, process-related decisions and options for a cohesive
subset of a team’s way of working (WoW). It provides guidance so that a team can tailor and
o

scale agile strategies given the context of the situation they face. It is sometimes called a
process capability.
D

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 Process Goal Diagrams

e
ut
ib
tr
is
D
all levels of the tool kit. or
Each of these process goals is elaborated by a process goal diagram. We apply goal diagrams at

Process goal diagrams are visual depictions of the aspects you need to think through about the
e
goal—which we call “decision points”—and several options for each decision point to choose
at

from. These don't identify every possible technique available. However, they provide you with a
good range of options and to make it clear that you do, in fact, have choices.
lic

It has three main components.

1. The process goal itself is the beginning of the diagram.
2. Each goal is tied to a collection of decision points. These are issues that your team needs
up

to determine whether they need to address and, if so, how they will do so.
3. Each decision point is tied to a list of potential practices and strategies that address it. In
many cases, these can be combined.
D

Because there may be many techniques to choose from, “default” techniques are listed in
boldface italic type.
ot

Tied to each decision point is a list of potential practices and strategies. Each option in the list
has its advantages and disadvantages:
N

• An ordered option list is depicted with an arrow to the left of the list of techniques.
In an ordered list, the most desirable, most effective techniques appear at the top of
the list and the less desirable techniques are at the bottom of the list.
o

• An unordered option list is depicted without an arrow—each option has advantages

D

and disadvantages, but it isn’t clear how to rank the options fairly.
• Potential starting points are shown in bold italics. These are good starting points for
small teams new to agile that are taking on a straightforward problem.

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 Often you will find that you need to examine the trade-offs associated with each of the options
you’re considering.
That’s where the option descriptions and trade-off tables come in.
These list each of the options associated with a given decision point in the left column, then
explain some of the trade-offs associated with that option in the right.

e
ut
ib
tr
is
D
or
e
at
lic
up
D
ot
N
o
D

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 Lesson 3: Building and Supporting a Disciplined Agile Team
Description
As a DASM, your primary focus is on the teams you work with on a daily basis. In this lesson,
you’ll learn about Disciplined Agile teams, the characteristics of a leader, and how you can

e
support your team so that they can be their best. This lesson will also introduce you to

ut
aspects of a team’s context that can impact how you form a team and evolve your way of
working (WoW).

ib
Objectives

tr
Explain how people are organized into DA teams.

is
• Compare and contrast leaders to managers.
• Identify roles that can be leaders.

D
• Describe potential primary and secondary roles on DA teams.
Define the primary DA roles and how they each are key to the success of a self-organizing agile
team.
•
•
Describe the five primary DA roles.
or
Describe the responsibilities of the five primary DA roles.
e
• Describe why each of the five primary DA roles is important.
at

• Explain how to help your team work well together.

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Agenda
1. Disciplined Agile People
up

• Roles on a DA team
2. Team Lead
• The DASM
D

• Leader qualities
• Supporting the team
ot

3. Types of Team
4. Tactical Scaling Factors
5. Team Context and Scaling Factors
N
o
D

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 Lesson Notes

Be Awesome – Disciplined Agile Principle

DA teams are awesome and foster joy. Let’s review the ways teams can use the DA principle
“Be awesome.”

e
• Act in such a way that we earn the respect and trust of our colleagues. Be reliable, be

ut
honest, be open, be ethical, and treat them with respect. Second, willingly collaborate
with others.
• Share information with them when asked, even if it is a work in progress. Offer help

ib
when it is needed and, just as important, reach out for help yourself.
• Be an active learner. We should seek to master our craft, always being on the lookout

tr
for opportunities to experiment and learn. Go beyond our specialty and learn about the
broader software process and business environment.

is
• Seek to never let the team down. Yes, it will happen sometimes, and good teams
understand and forgive that.

D
• Be willing to improve and manage our emotional responses to difficult situations.
Innovation requires diversity, and by their very nature, diverse opinions may cause

• or
emotional reactions. We must all work on making our workplace psychologically safe.
Involve senior leadership to enable, establish, and motivate awesome teams. Senior
leadership can provide teams with the authority and resources required for them to do
e
their jobs, building a safe culture and environment, and by motivating them to excel.
at

Building a Disciplined Agile Team

lic

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) teams can be made of different combinations of roles,
depending on the skills the team needs. These teams include primary and secondary roles.
Primary roles are the key roles on a delivery team. Every team needs these roles.
up

•
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ot
N
o
D

• Secondary roles are additional roles. Any one or more of these roles might be included
on a team. There may be other secondary roles not included here.

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 e
Summary of Key Roles

ut
A delivery team is made up of four roles:

ib
• The team members’ main jobs are to build the product.
• The architecture owner’s main job is to ensure that the team builds the product right.
• The team lead’s main job is to coordinate the building of the product.

tr
• The product owner’s main job is to ensure that the team builds the right product.

is
• The stakeholders are not necessarily a part of this team, but they talk with the members
of it throughout the process. Stakeholders are customers, but can also be the project

D
sponsor, operations engineers, support staff, architecture engineers, database group, or
finance staff for a project.

Primary Disciplined Agile Roles

or
Primary roles are ones that we typically see on all teams regardless of the situation.
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Role Description
at

Team Lead • Agile process expert

• Keeps team focused on achievement of goals
lic

• Removes impediments
Product Owner • Owns the product vision, scope, and priorities of the
up

solution
Architecture Owner • Owns the architecture decisions and technical priorities
• Mitigates key technical risks
D

Team Member • Able to work in cross-functional roles to deliver the solution

ot

Stakeholder • Includes the customer but also other stakeholders such as

the sponsor, operations engineers, support staff,
architecture owner, database group and finance staff.
N

A few key points to keep in mind:

o

• DA explicitly brings in the role of architecture owner.

• The product owner should not be the team lead or the architecture owner.
D

• The product owner is part of the team. Scrum typically does not include the product
owner as part of the team.
• Stakeholder is a more robust term than customer, although we really love the word
customer.

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 Note: Chapter 4 of the Choose Your WoW! book describes the rights and responsibilities of the
primary and supporting roles.

Supporting Disciplined Agile Roles

DA supporting roles and their responsibilities are listed below.

e
Role Description

ut
Independent Tester A test/quality professional outside of the team who validates their
work

ib
Specialist Someone in a specialist role, such as business analyst, program
manager, or enterprise architect

tr
Domain Expert (SME) Someone with deep knowledge of the domain, such as a legal
expert or marketing expert who is brought in as needed to share

is
their expertise

D
Technical Expert Someone with deep technical knowledge, such as a security
engineer or user experience (UX) professional, whose help is
needed for a short period
Integrator or
Someone responsible for the operation of the overall team build
e
Note: DA addresses many of the roles that are common in modern organizations, but because
at

every organization is unique, it isn’t possible to cover all potential roles.

lic

People Can Fulfill More Than One Role

There are many different types of roles, and people can hold more than one role.
up

Below are different roles based on functional areas.

D
ot
N
o
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 Who Does the DASM Interact With?
The DASM plays an important role in interacting with and serving the team.
They also interact with stakeholders and neighboring teams. In addition, to effectively interact
with others, they must have people skills.

e
What Does a DASM Do?

ut
A DASM …
• Leads and guides their team through their agile journey.

ib
• Is qualified to work with one team on straightforward situations, scaling on a team level
and utilizing basic team coaching skills.

tr
• Practices team-oriented agile and lean techniques; and
• Applies the DA tool kit at a beginner level to solve problems and improve processes.

is
How Does the DASM Serve the Team?

D
The DASM serves the team by:
• Coaching team members in self-management.
•

•
done; and
or
Helping the team focus on creating high-value increments that meet the definition of

Ensuring that necessary events take place and are:

e
o Positive
at

o Productive
o Within timebox
lic

How Does the DASM Serve the Product Owner?

up

A DASM serves the product owner by:

• Helping find techniques for effective product goal definition and backlog management;
• Supporting the product owner in backlog grooming and planning;
D

• Keeping the product owner informed of project status;

• Helping the team understand the need for clear and concise backlog items; and
ot

• Facilitating stakeholder collaboration as requested or needed.

How Does the DASM Serve the Organization?

N

A DASM serves the organization by:

o

• Supporting the product owner and team in achieving customer satisfaction;

• Helping the team identify and address risks;
D

• Helping with training and coaching in agile adoption;

• Helping employees and stakeholders understand and work in their environment; and
• Removing barriers to progress.

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 Leaders versus Managers
Key concepts:
• Teams need leaders more than they need managers.
• Managers are still important; they add value.
• There is some overlap between managers and leaders, but there are some important

e
differences, too.

ut
• Most great managers are also good leaders.
• Agile teams are led, not managed.
• Develop leadership skills so that you can guide, coach, and support your team.

ib
What Is Emotional Intelligence and Why Is It Important?

tr
Emotional intelligence (EQ) is the ability to understand your emotions and manage them in

is
positive and productive ways. It’s also the ability to be able to understand, relate, and work
effectively with others.

D
It’s important because it plays an important part in your success in leading a team.
While you may have the technical skills, or IQ, to do your job, you’ll need EQ to motivate,
support, and guide your team to high performance.
Leaders with emotional intelligence:
or
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• Acknowledge and manage their emotions in a positive way
• Redirect their negative thoughts and behaviors to positive ones
at

• Think before speaking when emotions are high

• Relate to and work effectively with others
lic

• Show empathy and concern for others

• Understand that they’ll need more than IQ; they’ll need EQ, too
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• Motivate, support, and guide their team toward high performance

Here are some emotional intelligence skills you can build on:
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ot
N
o
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 Be Self-Aware and Self-Manage
Pay attention to what you are feeling (be self-aware).
Manage your emotions in a constructive way so you can build positive relationships (self-
manage).
Promote Psychological Safety

e
Create an environment of psychological safety where the team feels safe to express themselves

ut
and has a feeling of belonging.
Show empathy for others’ emotions and concerns to establish healthy working relationships.

ib
Embrace Diversity

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The team is a mix of unique individuals with differing communication styles and personalities.

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Help the team appreciate their differences.
Foster Joy

D
Recognize that a joyful team is a productive one.
Resolve Conflict
Recognize that some conflict can be constructive. or
Help dissenting parties reach mutually agreeable solutions.
e
A leader is the mediator who steps in, resolves the issue, and keeps the project on course.
at

Middle-Up-Down-Management
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A DASM supports the team by helping employees and stakeholders understand and work in
their environment. One way to do this is by following the lean management concept of
up

“middle-up-down management,” which can apply to the team lead, as well as to higher levels
of middle management.
Business stakeholders can clearly set the vision.
D

Mid-level managers create an ecosystem within which people work to implement that vision:
• They engage with business stakeholders.
ot

• They create an environment to facilitate the manifestation of management’s vision.

• They work with their teams to ensure the environment supports them.
N

• At the team level, people self-organize to implement the vision.

To learn more, see Nonaka, I. (1988). Toward middle-up-down management: Accelerating
o

information creation. MIT Sloan Management Review, 29(3), 9–18.

D

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 Team Working Agreements
Internal
A team working agreement defines their internal way of working and how they are willing to
interact with other teams.
External

e
External working agreements are sometimes defined in terms of service level agreements

ut
(SLAs).

ib
Types of Teams – Project versus Product/Long-Standing Team
The project versus product/long-standing team issue is critical to organizations.

tr
Most organizations will have both project and long-standing teams.

is
A long-standing team can take on short-term projects (it’s merely a big chunk of work).

D
Project Teams Long-Standing Teams
Bring the people to the work Bring the work to the team
Potential for significant budgeting
and tracking overhead
Motivates building teams based on
or
Budgeting is straightforward

Motivates thoughtful team building and evolution

e
who is available at the time
at

Significant overhead in the team Motivates desire to learn and improve the team’s
gelling way of working
lic

Short-term focus motivates quality Engenders a focus on long-terms issue such as

shortcuts advertisement, quality, and evolution.
up

Shared Team Services

D

Collaborative Enterprise Teams

Individuals are members of both a work team and an enterprise team.
ot

In some cases, the work teams will nominate who will be in the enterprise role for them.
In other cases, the enterprise team will assign one of their people to support a work team.
N

This requires a lot of people to be part of the enterprise team.

o

Shared Services Enterprise Teams

These teams fulfill requests for work from other teams.
D

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 Team Context and Scaling Factors
Every team is in a unique situation.
There is more to scaling than just team size.
The spider diagram below shows each scaling factor for tactical scaling. The further out you are
on each leg; the more complex your team’s context is. This means you will face more challenges

e
in scaling and may need to look at tailoring in more areas than if your context was near the

ut
center of the diagram.

ib
tr
is
D
or
e
at
lic
up
D
ot

Team Size – Scaling Factor

N

Key Concepts
• Large teams are organized differently than small teams.
o

• Globally distributed teams are organized differently than colocated teams.

Organizational distribution (some people working for an outsourcer) can also affect
D

•
things.
• Sometimes we need to bring in technical or domain experts to help us out for a
short period.

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 • Sometimes we’re supported by an independent tester due to regulatory compliance
concerns.
• The line with the diamond at the end is the UML notation for composition.
• Coordination within medium-sized teams can likely be accomplished via a “Scrum of
Scrums (SoS).”
• Each subteam builds a portion of the overall solution (features, components, etc.).

e
• Large teams: The leadership teams will self-organize and meet and coordinate with

ut
each other as they see fit.
• Large teams: The program manager/coordinator coordinates the overall program
and leadership subteams (called an RTE in SAFe®).

ib
Geographic Distribution – Scaling Factor

tr
As team members are more geographically dispersed, coordination becomes more difficult

is
and more sophisticated communication and coordination methods are required. Tools like
conferencing or messaging apps are vital here.

D
Organizational Distribution – Scaling Factor

or
e
at
lic
up
D
ot
N
o
D

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 Skill Availability – Scaling Factor

e
ut
ib
tr
is
D
or
e
at
lic
up
D
ot
N
o
D

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 Compliance – Scaling Factor

e
ut
ib
tr
is
D
or
e
at
lic
up
D
ot
N
o
D

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 Solution Complexity – Scaling Factor

e
ut
ib
tr
is
D
or
e
at
lic
up
D
ot
N
o
D

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 Domain Complexity – Scaling Factor

e
ut
ib
tr
is
D
or
e
at
lic
up

Tactical Agility at Scale

Using a tool like the spider diagram supports tactical agility at scale: scaling agile at the
team level. The aim is to apply agile deeply to address all the complexities/scaling factors
D

appropriately.
ot
N
o
D

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 Lesson 4: Choosing Your WoW!
Description
To be an effective DASM for a delivery team, you’ll want to have a firm understanding of the
Disciplined DevOps layer so that you can effectively help your team meet complex challenges

e
in producing high-quality solutions on time. With your understanding of the DA landscape

ut
and the DA tool kit, you can optimize how the team works with the Disciplined DevOps layer.
You are also equipped to identify and help resolve impediments that the team faces in this

ib
layer.

Objectives

tr
is
Describe what enterprise agility is and how it is core to the value proposition of Disciplined
Agile.

D
• Define enterprise agility.
• Identify the full range of enterprise agility.

•
•
or
Determine which situations each of the DA life cycles is best applied to:
Describe how DA supports a variety of life cycles.
Identify the three phases of the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) cycle.
e
• Describe the Agile life cycle and identify when to use it.
at

• Describe the Lean life cycle and identify when to use it.
• Describe the Continuous Delivery: Agile life cycle and identify when to use it.
lic

• Describe the Continuous Delivery: Lean life cycle and identify when to use it.
• Describe the Exploratory life cycle and identify when to use it.
• Describe the Program life cycle and identify when to use it.
up

• Describe business agile and business lean life cycles.

• Identify how to choose a life cycle and who chooses it.
D

Apply the DA practice of choosing a team's way of working (WoW).

• List the five steps for choosing your WoW.
ot

• Analyze the context using the spider diagram.

• List the factors impacting context when choosing a team's WoW.
N

• Select the best-fit life cycle using the decision tree.

Agenda
o
D

1. What Is Enterprise Agility?

2. What Is a Complex Adaptive System (CAS)?
3. Why Do We Want to Be Able to Choose Our Team's Way of Working?
4. What Are the Disciplined Agile Life Cycles?

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 5. How Do You Choose Your Way of Working?

Lesson Notes
What Is Enterprise Business Agility?
Enterprise agility is an organization’s ability to rapidly adapt to market and environmental

e
changes in productive and cost-effective ways.

ut
Enterprise agility focuses on value realized by having stakeholders identify, prioritize, and
sequence the work to be done and allocate it appropriately to the product/service teams.

ib
This is sometimes referred to as business or organizational agility.

tr
Enterprise agility enables the realization of the highest value in a shorter amount of time,
predictably, sustainably, and with high quality.

is
By working in small delivery increments, we continuously adjust to what is needed, enabling the

D
organization to change direction at low cost.

Why Do We Want to Be Able to Choose Our Team’s Way of Working?

or
We want to be able to choose our team’s way of working (WoW) so we give those teams the
flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances, which is at the heart of agility. It gives the pieces
of the organization—and, by extension, the organization itself—the ability to adapt.
e
And because your organization is a complex adaptive system, what works for some teams may
at

not work for others. And even if a specific WoW does work for another team, there may be
unintended consequences outside that team.
lic

Things to consider when choosing your WoW:

• Every team has a different WoW.
up

• We evolve our WoW to reflect what we learn when we work with other teams.
• We accomplish our goals by working with other teams.
D

What Are the Disciplined Agile Life Cycles?

A life cycle is a process for planning, creating, testing, and deploying a product or service.
ot

DA life cycles provide teams with the flexibility to choose an approach that makes sense for
them. They are an essential tool for teams choosing their own WoW.
N

• Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) supports several life cycles, which are described below.
• DA also has life cycles for business teams.
o

• The flow aspects of process blades are described via either a life cycle or workflow
D

diagram(s).

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 Disciplined Agile Life Cycles—Agile
It extends Scrum’s construction life cycle. In addition to being a more detailed view of the life
cycle, we consider several other interesting aspects:
• It is iteration based.
• It uses non-Scrum terminology. Remember, Disciplined Agile is agnostic!

e
• It shows inputs from outside the delivery life cycle.
It includes explicit milestones. Along the bottom of the life cycle diagram, see the

ut
•
suggested lightweight milestones that teams should strive to meet. Such milestones are
an important aspect of agile governance.

ib
When to use the Agile life cycle:

tr
The work:
Is primarily enhancements or new features

is
•
• Can be identified, prioritized, and estimated early in the project

D
The team:
• Is new to agile practices
•
• Is typically working on a project or
Is familiar with Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP)
e
Disciplined Agile Life Cycles—Lean
There are several interesting features to this life cycle:
at

• It supports a continuous flow of work. In this life cycle, the solution is deployed as often
lic

and/or whenever it makes sense to do so. Work is pulled into the team when there is
capacity to do it, not at the regular cadence of an iteration.
• Practices follow their own cadences. With iterations/sprints, many practices (detailed
up

planning, retrospectives, demos, detailed modeling, and so on) effectively follow the
same cadence, which is that of the iteration. In a lean approach, the conventional
wisdom is to do something when it makes sense to do it, and not when the calendar
D

indicates that you’re scheduled to do it

• It has a work item pool. All work items are not created equal, although you may choose
ot

to prioritize some work by business value. Some work, particularly work resulting from
legislation, is date driven. Some work must be expedited, such as fixing a “severity one”
production problem. So, a work item pool, instead of a prioritized stack, makes a bit
N

more sense when you recognize these realities.

When to use the Lean life cycle:
o

The work is:

D

• Broken down into very small work items of roughly the same size
• Difficult to predict in advance

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 The team:
• Favors the lean approach of minimizing the batch and any planning in advance of doing
the work
• Is typically working on a project

Disciplined Agile Life Cycles—Continuous Delivery: Agile

e
There are several interesting features to this life cycle:

ut
• Common for stable/long-lived teams doing agile
• Iterations are typically 1–2 weeks, although 1 day is also common

ib
• At the end of the iteration, you release into production
• More like a “very regular delivery” life cycle than a continuous delivery life cycle

tr
When to apply Continuous Delivery: Agile life cycle:

is
• The work:
• Remains relatively stable within an iteration

D
• Consists of a series of releases over time
• The organization develops streamlined deployment practices and procedures.
• The team:
• Is long-lived and stable or
• Can deliver solutions to stakeholders on a frequent and incremental basis
e
• Can show value to stakeholders rapidly, especially before the completion of the
entire solution
at

• Forms mature DevOps practices including continuous integration, continuous

deployment, and automated regression testing
lic

Disciplined Agile Life Cycles—Continuous Delivery: Lean

up

There are several interesting features to this life cycle:

• It is a good end goal for your improvement efforts.
• The product is shipped into production or the marketplace on a very regular basis. This
D

could be as often as daily, although weekly or monthly is quite common too.

When to choose Continuous Delivery: Lean life cycle:
ot

• The work consists of a series of releases over time.

• The organization develops streamlined deployment practices and procedures.
N

• The team:
• Is long-lived and stable
o

• Can deliver solutions to stakeholders on a frequent and incremental basis

• Can show project value to stakeholders rapidly, especially before the completion
D

of the entire solution

• Forms mature DevOps practices including continuous integration, continuous
deployment, and automated regression testing

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 Disciplined Agile Life Cycles—Exploratory
It’s also referred to as the “Lean Startup” life cycle.
Sometimes it takes time to identify what your stakeholders need.
This life cycle is used by teams that find themselves in startup or research situations where
their stakeholders have an idea for a new product, but they do not yet understand what is

e
needed by their user base. As a result, they need to quickly explore what the market wants.

ut
This is best done using a series of short learning experiments. When the team is ready to
productize, they move to another life cycle.

ib
Apply the Exploratory life cycle when:
• The solution addresses high-incertitude cases, such as a new, unexplored market or a

tr
new product.
The stakeholders and delivery team are very flexible in adapting the solution as it is

is
•
being developed.
You have one or more valid hypotheses/strategies to test with clear go/no-go criteria for

D
•
when the test is over.
• You are willing to experiment and evolve your idea based on your learnings.

Disciplined Agile Life Cycles—Program or

There are several interesting features to this life cycle:
e
• It’s a best-fit life cycle for a team of teams.
at

• The subteams/squads may have their own ways of working.

• You need to coordinate the work (backlog), the architecture, and people across
lic

subteams.
• The subteams may be on their own cadence, although having a common cadence makes
the work easier.
up

The Program life cycle should be applied when:

• You need a large team of teams. Some problems require a large team, and in some
D

cases, you may even decide to organize that large team into a team of teams.
• You have the skills to implement agile at scale.
ot

Common Project Phases

You may have noticed that every Disciplined Agile life cycle has phases delineated, although not
N

every life cycle includes every phase.

That’s because project-based life cycles—even agile and lean ones—go through phases.
o

It all starts with Inception when the team envisions and plans the project, doing just enough
D

work to get organized and get going in the right direction. The team will initially form itself,
then invest some time in initial requirements and architecture exploration, as well as initial
planning, aligning itself with the rest of the organization, and securing funding for the rest of
the project.

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 The process continues with Construction. The team produces a consumable solution with
enough functionality to be valuable to stakeholders. During this phase, the team will be
performing analysis, design, programming, testing, and management activities every single day.
And finally, the process concludes with Transition. The team releases its solution into
production. This includes both determining whether the solution is ready to be deployed and
then actually deploying it.

e
In addition to these three phases, many projects include several Ongoing activities that occur

ut
continuously through the other three phases.

ib
Disciplined Agile Milestones
Milestone Fundamental Question Asked

tr
Stakeholder vision Do stakeholders agree with your strategy?

is
Proven architecture Can you build this?

D
Continued viability Does the effort still make sense?
Sufficient Has the team produced (at least) a minimum business increment
functionality
Production ready
(MBI)?
or
Will the solution work in production?
e
Delighted Are stakeholders happy with the deployed solution?
stakeholders
at

This is what it looks like when you combine these critical views into a single diagram, like one
below.
lic
up
D

Ideally, we want to streamline the overall flow between all these activities.
And that is the essence of Disciplined DevOps.
ot

How Do You Choose Your Way of Working?

N

There are five steps that will help you choose your team’s way of working (WoW):
1. Analyze the context: What context does your team face? Factor in your team’s size,
o

geographic distribution, organizational distribution, compliance requirements, technical

complexity, and domain complexity.
D

2. Select the best-fit life cycle: Given the team’s context, which life cycle is the best fit?
Remember: The life cycle is a starting point that can be changed later when it makes
sense.

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 3. Connect the dots: Given your context and life cycle, which process goals and diagrams
should you consider first? Which process goals are the least relevant given your team’s
situation?
4. Make some choices: Within the relevant goal diagrams, make some choices for the
team’s WoW. Refer to the options table in Choose Your Wow! to learn more and to
review the pros and cons of each option.

e
5. Practice continuous improvement: With the WoW established, create the habit of

ut
continuously improving.

ib
tr
is
D
or
e
at
lic
up
D
ot
N
o
D

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 Lesson 5: Tailoring Your Practices: Inception Phase
Description
The agile journey continues. As a DASM, you’ll coach your team to improve your way of
working at a process level. This lesson introduces you to process goals associated with the

e
Inception phase and shows where to look for alternatives to some of the agile practices

ut
covered previously. You’ll try working with the DA tool kit to select new strategies based on
a team’s context.

ib
Objectives

tr
Describe the inception phase and why it is important.

is
• Define Inception.
• Identify the process goals associated with the Inception phase.

D
Discuss how to use the DA tool kit to tailor your way of working within a select phase according
to context.
•

•
context.
or
Rank and select process goals according to their relevance to the phase and the team’s

Identify key practices for the team to try when using goal diagrams.
e
at

Agenda
lic

1. Disciplined Agile Categories

2. Disciplined Agile Process Goals in Each Phase
3. Agile Practices: Plan the Release (Agile Life Cycle)
up

4. Choices in the Inception Phase

Lesson Notes
D

Disciplined Agile Categories

ot

The DA phases are: Inception, Construction, and Transition. Long-standing teams also have
ongoing considerations.
N

• Inception: Get the team going in the right direction. Initiate the endeavor in a
streamlined manner, including initial planning and modeling, and obtain agreement
o

regarding the vision with the primary stakeholders.

Construction: Develop a consumable solution in a collaborative and incremental
D

•
manner. The team requests feedback on a regular basis, which they then act on
accordingly.
• Transition: Release/deploy the solution to stakeholders, ideally to the point where a
new minimum business increment (MBI) has been developed.

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 Ongoing is not a phase, but a category that spans the phases.

Disciplined Agile Process Goals in Each Phase

e
ut
ib
tr
is
D
• Disciplined Agile is goal driven.
or
e
• The DA tool kit guides people through process-related decisions.
• Types of decisions are organized under process goals.
at

• There are 24 process goals under Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD).

• If a team is having a problem in a certain phase, they can find a list of areas where they
lic

can look for options to try.

Agile Practices: Plan the Release Cycle (Agile Life Cycle)

up

Writing User Stories

During the Inception phase, teams practicing the Agile life cycle plan their release.
D

Part of planning the release means exploring the scope of the upcoming work.
ot

One tool teams often use is the user story.

How do you choose an option if you don’t know what each of them means?
N

Your Choose Your WoW! book tells you about each of them when you look up Explore Usage in
Chapter 9 "Explore Scope" and review the options table.
o

Estimating User Stories

D

Explain that once a story is written, we need to estimate how much effort it will take. How easy
or difficult will it be to implement?
User story estimates help teams plan their iterations.

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 There are many different estimation strategies, which fall under the Plan the Release process
goal under Choose Estimation.
Read about each alternative in the options table in Chapter 11 of your Choose Your WoW!
book.

Knowing When a Story Is Done

e
Another important practice for Agile life cycle teams is determining how they will know when

ut
each piece of work is done. The item should achieve a level of quality according to parameters
set by the team. One way to accomplish this is with acceptance criteria, which are developed

ib
for each item during the Inception phase.
Determining when a story is done falls under the Explore Scope process goal, under the Explore

tr
Quality Requirements decision point. You can learn more about these options and the risks
each entails by reading the options table in the Explore Quality Requirements section of

is
Chapter 9 in your Choose Your WoW! book.

D
Choices in the Inception Phase
Here is an example you can use or adapt if you wish.
or
The Tiger team works for a large retailer. Their context has changed over the years.
They have grown to 20 people, including some contractors.
e
Their work on a retail website is more complex and now includes mobile apps.
at

The complexity includes not only architecture, but also regulatory requirements as they deal
with customer and financial data.
lic

The team is now distributed across the continent.

They are expected to create an environment conducive to collaboration.
up

Connect the Dots

Given the team’s context and life cycle, which goals are most relevant?
D

Make Some Choices

ot

Review the steps for the Develop Common Vision goal diagram using your example or the Tiger
team:
N

1. Choose a decision point.

2. Review the options.
o

3. For more information, look up the options in the options table in your Choose Your
WoW! book. If necessary, look up any options you need to know more about on the
D

internet, in blogs, or in books.

4. Select an option you believe will work best, given a team’s context and life cycle choice.

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 Lesson 6: Tailoring Your Practices: Construction Phase
Description
As a DASM, you’ll want to help your team tailor their way of working in every phase of your
life cycle. This lesson covers the Construction phase, including lean concepts and tools that

e
can help your team excel. You’ll use the DA tool kit to improve a team’s Construction phase

ut
processes.

ib
Objectives
Describe the Construction phase and why it is important.

tr
• Define Construction.

is
• Identify the process goals associated with the Construction phase.

D
Discuss how to use the DA tool kit to tailor your way of working within a select phase according
to the context.
• Rank and select process goals according to their relevance to the phase and the team’s
context.
or
• Identify key practices for the team to try when using goal diagrams.
e
Explain how to eliminate waste and build quality in (Lean principles).
at

• Identify the causes of waste and delays.

• Describe how to minimize waste through value stream mapping.
lic

• Describe the push and pull methods of moving work.

• Describe the Kanban approach to managing work in process.
• Explain how to build and validate quality in the delivery process.
up

Explain how to deliver value quickly (Lean principle).

• Explain the cost of delay.
D

• Describe how to realize value.

• Explain the importance of delivering incrementally.
• Contrast minimum business increments (MBIs) with minimum viable products (MVPs).
ot

Agenda
N

1. Disciplined Agile Construction Phase Process Goals

o

2. Agile Practices (Agile Life Cycle)

3. Lean Tip: Deliver Value Quickly
D

4. Lean Tip: Visualizing the Value Stream

5. Cost of Delay
6. Lean Tip: Deliver Value Incrementally Using Minimum Business Increments
7. Lean Tip: Ensure Value by Building Quality In

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 8. Lean Tip: Eliminating Waste

Lesson Notes

Disciplined Agile Construction Phase and Process Goals

The Construction phase is when we incrementally build a consumable solution.

e
This phase begins as soon as we complete the Inception phase. We have done the planning to

ut
get our team moving in the right direction. Now we’re ready to start work.
The Construction phase ends when the solution is ready for release and advances to the

ib
Transition phase.

tr
Agile Practices (Agile Life Cycle)

is
Planning the Work

D
In agile, the main part of Construction is the iteration.
It all starts when the team gets together to plan the work.

the Work. or
Planning the iteration falls under the process goal Produce a Consumable Solution under Plan

Chapter 17 in your Choose Your WoW! book provides more information about each option and
e
the associated risks.
at

Defining “Done”
lic

During the Construction phase, the team collaborates to create a definition of “done”, or DoD,
which they will apply to every work item to determine when they are finished.
up

The DoD falls under the process goal Accelerate Value Delivery under Verify Quality of Work.
You can look up the various strategies listed and the risks they entail in Chapter 19 of your
Choose Your WoW! book.
D

Demonstrating an Iteration
ot

At the end of an iteration, the team conducts an iteration review, which includes a demo. The
team demonstrates each work item to stakeholders to obtain feedback and determine whether
it is ready to move forward to the Transition phase, where it will be deployed.
N

Demonstrating the iteration falls under the process goal Produce a Consumable Solution under
Ensure Consumability.
o

You can look up what the options mean and the risks they entail in Chapter 17 in your Choose
D

Your WoW! book.

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 Lean Tip: Deliver Value Quickly
Lean is an approach that produces value for customers quickly through a focus on reducing
delays and eliminating waste, which results in increased quality and lower cost.
To deliver value quickly, deliver the smallest unit possible that will create value for the
customer.

e
The key is to:

ut
• Focus on time instead of cost.
• Focus on removing delays rather than on going fast.

ib
• Achieve flow by working on smaller things and with people fully allocated to the work.
• Limit batch size.

tr
Lean Value

is
In Lean, value is:

D
• What the customer considers important;
• What the business invests in; and
• What is most useful to the customer upon release.

Realizing Value or
What does it mean to realize value? When is value realized?
e
A product, feature, or service has value if the customer considers it important at the time it is
at

delivered. Value is realized when it is used.

lic

Lean Tip: Visualizing the Value Stream

To realize value, we need to look at the value stream: the path from ideation of a product or
up

feature to delivery to the customer. The Construction phase is an important part of the value
stream, during which we focus on building features that will have value for the customer.
D

Cost of Delay
What is the cost of delay?
ot

The cost of delay is the lost revenue or opportunity caused by the delay between conceiving the
idea and having customers realize value from it.
N

The longer the period between the two, the greater the loss in revenue.
Every day without realizing the value is a day without revenue from it. So, the delay costs
o

money, and the cost increases with each day. There is also the cost of more time and effort
D

expended during this period.

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 Lean Tip: Deliver Incrementally Using Minimum Business Increments

Minimum Business Increment versus Minimum Viable Product

Minimum business increments (MBIs) are:
• The smallest viable enhancement to an existing product or service that delivers

e
realized value for an internal or external customer
• Investment in potential value

ut
Minimum viable products (MVPs):

ib
• Take the smallest step to determine the viability of a new product without a customer
base

tr
• Investment for discovery

is
MBI Sequencing
Sequence jobs, not in order of priority, but in order of which MBI can realize the most value

D
more quickly than the others.
MBIs are perfect for this because they are, by nature, deployable and consumable.

Lean Tip: Ensure Value by Building Quality In or

Building quality in means continuously checking quality because delays in doing so will cost
e
more in the short and long term.
at

“Build quality in” means:

Continuous validation: Test the work being done.
lic

•
• Continuous integration: Test the dependencies.
• Continuous deployment: Test the value of the work being done.
up

Lean Tip: Eliminating Waste

Eliminating waste starts with looking at areas where waste tends to occur. For delivery teams,
D

waste is most often manifested as delays. Let’s look more closely at how to eliminate waste.
ot

Sources of Waste
These are some of the most common sources of waste in our work:
N

• Miscommunication
• Building the wrong thing
Building items of less importance
o

•
• Lost realization due to delays
D

• Aging information
• Relearning
• Handoffs and hand backs
• Defects

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 Value Stream Mapping to Find the Cause
Value stream mapping helps teams look at the path followed to realize value and then pinpoint
problem areas where there is waste or delay.
Note that you need to look beyond the construction phase and beyond your own part of the
value stream.

e
“Five whys” analysis is a variant of “who, what, when, where, why” by Taiichi Ohno, creator of

ut
the Toyota Production System.
He suggested that continuing to ask “why” several times would get you insights into the root

ib
cause of things.
The “five” is a rule of thumb to encourage you to keep digging. It doesn’t have to be five

tr
questions exactly.

is
D
or
e
at
lic
up
D
ot
N
o
D

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 Lesson 7: Tailoring Your Practices: Transition Phase
Description
This lesson takes you to a new level in preparing to be a DASM. You’ll apply what you have
learned to your own team by selecting a Transition phase process you’d like to improve and

e
then determining an option to try as part of your continuous improvement efforts.

ut
Objectives

ib
Describe the Transition phase and why it is important.

tr
• Define Transition.
• Identify the process goals associated with the Transition phase.

is
Discuss how to use the DA tool kit to tailor your way of working within a select phase according
to context.

D
• Rank and select the process goals according to their relevance to the phase and the
team’s context.
•

Agenda
or
Identify key practices for the team to try when using goal diagrams.
e
at

1. The Transition Phase Process Goals

2. Choosing a Process Goal, a Decision Point, and an Option
lic

Lesson Notes
up

Transition Phase Process Goals

The Transition phase has two process goals:
D

• Ensure Production Readiness

• Deploy the Solution
ot

Ensure Production Readiness

The aim of the Ensure Production Readiness process goal is to determine whether you can
N

safely deploy your solution into production. Remember, your team is producing a consumable
solution—that is, usable and desirable and functional. Something that gets the job done.
o

Although your team should have produced a potentially consumable solution all the way
D

through the Construction phase, this is your last chance to ensure the solution is consumable
before deploying it to stakeholders. This goal is important because it reduces the risks
associated with deployment by ensuring that the team is technically ready to deliver and that
stakeholders are prepared to receive the new functionality.

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 It's important to note that this goal reflects the realities faced by teams that are following
project-based life cycles:
• Scrum-based, Agile life cycle
• Kanban-based, Lean life cycle
Teams following these life cycles tend to release into production every few months (or more)

e
and have not yet completely automated their regression tests nor adopted the continuous
integration/continuous deployment pipeline required to evolve into one of the two continuous

ut
delivery life cycles.

ib
Deploy the Solution
The aim of the Deploy the Solution process goal is to provide options for how to successfully

tr
release your solution into production. A typical disciplined agilist may react with “Well, why
don’t we just completely automate this?”

is
And they're right, they should fully automate deployment.

D
This process goal is important because:
• It captures several strategies for automating deployment.
•
•
•
or
It provides several strategies for releasing your solution into production.
It describes what needs to be performed to successfully release into production.
It describes options for how you can ensure your release was, in fact, successful.
e
To effectively deploy your solution, you should consider several important questions:
at

• To what extent will you automate the deployment process?

• What strategy will you follow to release into production (this time)?
lic

• What activities must you perform to release your solution?

• How will you validate that the release was successful?
up
D
ot
N
o
D

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 Lesson 8. Tailoring Your Practices: Ongoing
Description
A DASM looks beyond phases to the ways their team can improve overall. This lesson
explores Ongoing process goals. You’ll look at lean concepts and tools your team can

e
implement across the phases and explore ways for your team to continue learning and

ut
improving.

ib
Objectives
Describe the Ongoing category and why it is important.

tr
• Define the Ongoing category.

is
• Identify the process goals associated with the Ongoing category.
Discuss how to use the DA tool kit to tailor your way of working within a select phase according

D
to context
• Rank and select process goals according to their relevance to the phase and the team’s

•
context. or
Identify key practices for the team to try when using goal diagrams.
e
Explain how to learn pragmatically (Lean principle).
at

• Define “standard work” and its use as a baseline for continuous improvement.
• Explain the benefits of explicit workflow.
lic

• Describe how to use Kaizen loops and PDSA (plan-do-study-act) techniques for
continuous improvement.
• Define the options for cross-team learning: community of practice (CoP) and centers of
up

excellence (CoE).

Agenda
D

1. Understanding Ongoing Process Goals

ot

2. Ongoing Lean Practices

3. How Does an Agile Organization Support Cross-Team Learning?
N

Lesson Notes
o

Ongoing Category
D

The Ongoing category includes those activities that occur continuously through the other three
phases.

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 Ongoing Category Goals
There are nine process goals associated with the Ongoing phase:
• Grow Team Members
• Coordinate Activities

e
• Address Risk

ut
• Evolve Way of Working (WoW)
• Leverage and Enhance Existing Infrastructure

ib
• Govern Delivery Team
• Intake Work

tr
• Organize Metrics

is
• Measure Outcomes

D
Grow Team Members
The Grow Team Members process goal captures options for providing opportunities for people
or
to improve. This process goal is highly related to the People Management and Continuous
Improvement process blades which focus on helping people at the organization level. There are
several reasons why this goal is important:
e
1. People—and the way we work together—are key to success. Remember the agile value
at

of "individuals and interactions over processes and tools.”

2. Motivated people are effective people. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What
lic

Motivates Us (2011), Daniel Pink argues that people are motivated by autonomy,
mastery, and purpose. This process goal focuses on providing opportunities for people
to master their craft.
up

3. Solution delivery is a team sport. Great teams are composed of people who want to
work and improve together.
D

This Ongoing process goal describes how we will support our team members in their personal
and professional growth. To be effective, we need to consider three important questions:
ot

• How will we help people improve their skill sets?

• How will we provide feedback to team members to help them grow?
How will we sustain the team over time to enable people to grow?
N

Coordinate Activities
o

The Coordinate Activities process goal provides options for coordinating both within a team and
D

with other teams within our organization. There are several reasons why this goal is important:
• Support effective collaboration. It is rare to be completely autonomous because we
often need to collaborate with others, hence the need to coordinate with one another.
This will help to reduce, and hopefully eliminate, several sources of waste, particularly
wait time and rework.

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 • Support autonomy. In Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2011),
Daniel Pink argues that autonomy, mastery, and purpose are what motivates people.
One aim of this process goal is to suggest ways of working that enable both people and
teams to work as autonomously as possible, yet still collaborate effectively with others
as needed. Note that the Develop Common Vision process goal promotes the idea of
teams with purpose and the Grow Team Members process goal provides opportunities

e
for gaining mastery.

ut
• Working agreement within the team. A team's working agreement describes how it will
work together as well as with others. An important aspect of our team's working
agreement is how we intend to coordinate our activities internally within our team.

ib
• Working agreement with other teams. Similarly, indicating how others may interact
with our team is also an important part of our team's working agreement. Having

tr
effective coordination strategies in place enables our team to collaborate effectively
with others.

is
Address Risk

D
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) has several risk mitigation strategies built in:
The Address Risk process goal. Originally, DAD had two risk-focused process goals,
•

or
this one and Identify Initial Risks, but due to the significant overlap between the two
we decided to simplify the framework by combining them into a single process goal.
Support for a risk-value life cycle. DAD promotes a risk-value life cycle approach
e
•
where we recommend that risk be considered when prioritizing work in addition to
at

stakeholder value—many agile methods focus just on value to their detriment. The
risk-value profile for a DAD team shows how DAD teams address a lot of risk very
lic

early in the life cycle via addressing the Stakeholder Vision and Proven Architecture
milestones.
• Support for ordered ways of working (WoW). As you've seen here, within each
up

process goal diagram many of the decision points have ordered option/choice lists.
This makes the lower-risk ways of working explicit because the more effective
options tend to be toward the top of the lists.
D

• The Address Risk process goal provides options for how we will approach risk
within our team. Although the project management community prefers the term
ot

“manage risk” rather than “address risk,” not surprisingly, we find that the word
manage comes with too much baggage—managing risk leaves the door open to
needless bureaucracy, whereas addressing risk motivates us to focus on dealing with
N

the challenges we face.

There are several reasons why the Address Risk goal is important:
o

• We face many risks. Many risks are addressed within the team, but some risks we'll
D

need help from outside the team to address. Disciplined teams make risks transparent,
making it easier for them to garner the help they need.
• Understanding the level of risk is a critical decision factor for moving forward. Two of
the questions that we should ask at the Stakeholder Vision milestone are whether the
team understands the risks that it faces and if so, does it have a viable strategy to

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 respond to them? Similarly, any go-forward decision made during Construction should
take the current level of risk faced by the team into account.
• Reducing risk increases our chance of success. Enough said.
• It's usually better to deal with risks early (in other words, shift risk mitigation left).
Risks tend to grow (but not always). If a risk proves to be a problem, it's better to know
that early when we still have time and budget to fix it, or if the risk proves

e
insurmountable, it's better to cancel or go in a different direction and thereby not waste

ut
time and money.

Evolve Way of Working (WoW)

ib
The Evolve Way of Working (WoW) process goal provides options for identifying and
evolving how we will work together as a team. The focus of this goal is on the WoW for a

tr
team. The focus of continuous improvement is to support and enable teams to choose their

is
WoW and share learnings across the organization. There are several reasons why this goal is
important:

D
• Every team is unique and faces a unique situation. Because people are unique,
teams are therefore also unique. Every team faces a unique configuration of

or
complexity factors including team size, geographic distribution, technical complexity,
regulatory compliance, and other issues. The implication is that a team needs to
tailor their WoW to address the situation that it faces.
We are constantly learning. As individuals, we learn every day—maybe we learn a
e
•
new skill, something about the problem we face, something about how our
at

colleagues work, something about our technical or organizational environment, or

something else. These learnings will often motivate us to evolve the way that we
lic

work.
• The other teams we collaborate with are evolving. Very few agile teams are
“whole” in practice. They must collaborate with others to achieve their mission.
up

Because these other teams are evolving their WoW over time, the implication is that
the way that they interact with us will evolve too, something that we may be able to
learn from.
D

• Our environment is constantly evolving. Our external environment is constantly

changing, with our competitors evolving their offerings, the various levels of
ot

government introducing new legislation (including regulations that we need to

comply with), new and evolving technical offerings in the marketplace, and world
events in general. Our internal environment also evolves, with people joining and
N

leaving our organization, our organizational structure evolving, and our IT ecosystem
evolving as other teams release their solutions into production. We may need to
o

evolve our WoW to reflect these changes.

The team needs somewhere to work. On some teams, everyone is dispersed and
D

•
working from home; the rest will need space for some or all team members.
• The team needs sufficient tooling. The team needs access to physical and digital
tools so we can do our work.

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 • These strategies are applicable to a wide range of teams, not just solution delivery
teams. We've applied these strategies with leadership teams, marketing teams,
finance teams, enterprise architecture teams, data management teams, and many
others. Having said that, the focus is on how solution delivery teams can choose
their WoW. Although this process goal applies to all those teams, the rest of the
goals may not. Each of these domains (marketing, leadership, etc.) requires domain-

e
specific advice.

ut
Leverage and Enhance Existing Infrastructure
The Leverage and Enhance Existing Infrastructure process goal provides options for reusing,

ib
and hopefully improving, existing assets within our organization. These assets may include
guidance, functionality, data, and even process-related materials. This process goal is

tr
related to the Improve Quality process goal, which focuses on strategies to pay down

is
technical debt in such assets and the Reuse Engineering process blade, which focuses on the
reuse of existing assets. There are several reasons why this goal is important:

D
• A lot of good work has occurred before us. There is a wide range of assets within our
organization that our team can leverage. Sometimes we will discover that we need
to first evolve the existing asset so that it meets our needs—which often proves

•
or
faster and less expensive than building it from scratch.
We can reduce overall technical debt. The unfortunate reality is that many
organizations struggle under significant technical debt loads. By choosing to reuse
e
existing assets, and investing in paying down some of the technical debt that we run
at

into when doing so, we'll slowly dig our way out of the technical debt trap that we
find ourselves in.
lic

• We can provide greater value quicker. Increased reuse enables us to focus on

implementing new functionality to delight our customers instead of just reinventing
what we're already offering them.
up

Govern Delivery Team

The Govern Team process goal provides options for governing agile and lean delivery teams.
D

Governance establishes chains of responsibility, authority, and communication in support of

the overall enterprise's goals and strategy. It also establishes measurements, policies,
ot

standards, and control mechanisms to enable people to carry out their roles and
responsibilities effectively. You do this by balancing risk versus return on investment (ROI),
N

setting in place effective processes and practices, defining the direction and goals for the
team, and defining the roles that people play within the team.
o

The Govern Team process goal is supported by both the IT Governance and the Control
process blades. There are several reasons why this goal is important:
D

• We are going to be governed. Many in the agile community believe that governance
is a swear word, likely because they've had negative experiences when traditional
governance strategies were applied to agile teams. Although we understand this
attitude, we find it to be counterproductive because someone is going to govern our

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 teams, like it or not. Someone will govern the finances, they will govern the quality,
and they will govern what we produce—just to name a few issues.
• We deserve to be governed well. Our team is made up of intellectual workers,
people who are smart and skilled at their jobs. They respond well to leadership—
deciding for themselves what to do—and not very well to management—being told
what to do. As a result, effective governance is based on motivation and

e
enablement, not command and control.

ut
• Governance is context-sensitive. A traditional waterfall team is governed in a very
different way than an agile project team, which in turn is governed in a different way
than a team following the Continuous Delivery: Lean life cycle. Teams that are less

ib
experienced or facing significant risk will require more governance than those that
are not.

tr
• Our team is part of a larger organization, and we need to leverage that. Our
organization is a complex adaptive system (CAS), a collection of teams working

is
together in an adaptable and constantly changing manner. And we've been doing
this for a very long time, in some cases decades and even centuries. We have a

D
wealth of experience, skills, intellectual property, and physical assets available to us
that we can use in new ways to delight our customers. The point is that we don't

•
or
need to work on our own, and in fact we likely can't—given the complexity that we
face, and we certainly don't need to build everything from scratch.
Effective governance enables collaboration. Given that our organization is a CAS, the
e
leaders who are governing us must focus on helping our teams to be successful. This
includes ensuring that we have the resources we require to accomplish our mission
at

and ensure that we're collaborating effectively with the other teams that we need
help from.
lic

• We have responsibilities to external stakeholders. Our team has stakeholders to

whom we are beholden, and one aspect of governance is to ensure that our team
meets their needs. These stakeholders include auditors who need to ensure that
up

we're compliant to any appropriate regulations or internal processes, legal

professionals who help us to address appropriate legal issues, and company
shareholders (citizens when we work for a government agency or nonprofit) whom
D

we effectively work for.

Our focus in this process goal is on delivery/development governance, but as you can
ot

imagine, other governance categories influence it. For example, solution delivery teams will
still need to be governed in their use of data, guided by user experience (UX) standards, and
N

funded in accordance to finance guidelines, while fulfilling roles supported by people

(management) governance.
o

In this process goal we use several terms that we want to define now:
D

• Leadership. People within our organization, often senior management, who are
leaders.
• Enterprise groups. Teams responsible for information technology (IT) or enterprise-
level activities such as enterprise architects, finance, security, and procurement.

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 • Enterprise professionals. People such as enterprise architects, finance professionals,
security engineers, and procurement specialists.

Intake Work
The Intake Work process goal examines how a team pulls in work from their "upstream"
stakeholders. The incoming work is examined and if ready it is prioritized and put on the

e
team's work backlog. Incoming work could take on range of granularities, from very high

ut
level to very detailed. The appropriateness of the level of detail is determined by the team
accepting the work.

ib
There are several reasons why this goal is important:
• Teams take work in in a manner that reflects their capacity. To work effectively,

tr
teams must be able to intake work that is sufficiently defined, appropriate for them,
and at a rate at which they can accomplish it.

is
• Control of the flow of work is where the work is being done. The people who are
best suited to decide how to take in work are the people who actually do the work.

D
• It enables teams to streamline their overall way of working (WoW). If a team is to
streamline how they work, they must have control over all aspects of their work,

or
including how it is brought into the team.
Every team should control how they intake work, enabling them to streamline their overall
process. Incoming work may need to be reorganized into more granular work items, some
e
of which may need to be handed back to the originating source for further improvement.
at

Organize Metrics
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The Organize Metrics process goal describes strategies to organize the metrics strategy
within your team. This strategy will be driven both by your team's culture and skills as well
as the needs of your stakeholders - your metrics will likely need to "roll up" to the program
up

or portfolio level.
Your metrics strategy is influenced what your focus for the strategy is, your overall
D

measurement strategy, how your organization aggregates measures, how those measures
are communicated and what measure we take.
ot

There are several reasons why this process goal is important:

• Metrics should be driven by context, not by mandate. Every team has unique
N

outcomes and improvement goals to measure. This observation is the critical driver
for context-based metrics strategies such as objectives and key results (OKR) and
goal question metrics (GQM). Where these strategies walk you through how to take
o

a contextualized approach to measurement, they don’t go that final step to help you
D

to select metrics that are right for you (supported by the Measure Outcomes process
goal) or to how you’ll communicate them (supported by this goal).
• Process improvement requires contextualized measurement. With validated
learning strategies such as Guided Continuous Improvement (GCI), part of running
an improvement experiment is to assess the effectiveness of the new way of

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 working (WoW), and to do that you need to measure what you’re hoping to affect.
Your context will drive what you measure, how you measure, and how you
communicate your measures.
• Effective governance requires contextualized measurement. You need to provide
visibility to whomever is governing you, thereby providing them the information that
they need to govern well. An important aspect of that visibility is access to metrics,

e
ideally in real-time. This process goal provides options to aggregate and report

ut
measures.
You need a metrics reporting strategy that reflects both your team’s needs and your

ib
organizational needs. It is a good idea to allow teams to have a fit-for-purpose metrics
strategy. Automated are generally preferable to manual measures. Leading measures are

tr
generally preferable to trailing measures. Trends and ranged measures are generally
preferable to scalars.

is
Measure Outcomes

D
The Measure Outcomes process goal describes potential improvement outcomes, or
improvement goals, and suggests potential metrics to measure progress against those

or
outcomes. Although all of these outcomes are important you will want to focus on a subset
at any given time, and that subset is likely to evolve as your improvement focus evolves. As
we’ve said before, Context counts.
e
There are several reasons why this goal is important:
at

• Metrics should be driven by context, not by mandate. Every team has unique
outcomes and improvement goals to measure. This observation is the critical driver
lic

for context-based metrics strategies such as objectives and key results (OKR) and
goal question metrics (GQM). Where these strategies walk you through how to take
a contextualized approach to measurement, they don’t go that final step to help you
up

to select metrics that are right for you.

• There are many things you could measure, but only a few things you need to
measure right now. This is why an outcome/goal driven approach is critical – you
D

want to focus on collecting the metrics that will provide insights into the decisions
you need to make.
ot

• Process improvement requires contextualized measurement. With validated

learning strategies such as Guided Continuous Improvement (GCI), part of running an
improvement experiment is to assess the effectiveness of the new way of working
N

(WoW), and to do that you need to measure what you’re hoping to affect.
• Effective governance requires contextualized measurement. You need to provide
o

visibility to whomever is governing you, thereby providing them the information that
they need to govern well. An important aspect of that visibility is access to metrics,
D

ideally in real-time.
The measurements take for a team should be driven by the outcomes or improvement goals
they are trying to achieve. Every team is unique, therefore each will potentially collect and

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 report a unique set of metrics. Your metrics strategy must evolve over time as your
situation evolves.

Lean Practices for the Ongoing Category

Lean Practice: Standard Work

e
The first of these practices is standard work.

ut
Standard work is the work process agreed to by the team doing it. This is the standard that the
team agrees is the best way to do something.

ib
It is defined by explicitly expressing the team’s workflow.
Standard work acts as a backdrop for doing our job and immediately seeing how well we are

tr
doing. It gives us an ideal to strive for.

is
Standard work is not static. When a better way is found, the standard should be updated. That's
one of the purposes of a standard: to set a baseline from which to improve, while adhering to

D
its original purpose.
Test out new ideas right away. Any that prove their worth in the real world should become part
of the new standard.
or
Standard work should create tension. It provides the means for doing our job and immediately
seeing how well we are doing. One of its purposes is to create tension between what we’re
e
currently doing and what we’re supposed to be doing. This tension promotes learning and
at

innovation.
Standard work reinforces innovation and makes improvement possible. It is essential for
lic

continuous improvement—moving from one standard to a better standard without slipping

back.
up

Standard work articulates who, what, when, and where work is done. It focuses on content,
sequence, timing, and outcomes needed. As mentioned previously, it is intended as a basis for
improvement.
D

It is not a prescription or record of what’s to be done. Rather, it is an identification of steps or

activities of the best currently known approach to achieving a solution, within the boundaries
ot

established by the organization; it entails visibility (visual controls) and discipline.

Standard work is not static, and when a better way is found the procedure is updated. To
N

continually improve, one must understand the purpose of the standard, and improve the
standard, while adhering to its purpose. As you perform standard work, you will find things you
don’t like, and you will think of one improvement after another. You should implement these
o

ideas right away and make this improved description the new standard. Embrace those
D

practices that prove themselves in real life.

Explicit workflow is closely related to standard work.
Explicit workflow policies act as guidelines for how a team should perform their work. In their
simplest form, they're checklists used to define when the team can pull work from one process

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 step to another. They govern the team’s process and serve as boundaries for the execution of
their work.
Explicit workflow policies:
• Go beyond enabling everyone to understand what other team members are doing.
• Make visible any gaps between what we’ve agreed to and what happens.

e
When we can’t follow the explicit workflow, the difference between the two assists learning.

ut
Lean Practice: Continuous Improvement

ib
Kaizen is a Japanese term meaning “improvement.”
A Kaizen loop is an approach where a team experiments with a small change in their way of

tr
working, adopting the change if it works in their given context and abandoning it if it doesn’t.

is
Some students may have heard this referred to as PDCA (plan-do-check-act). W. E. Deming
went back and forth between PDCA and PDSA (plan-do-study-act). He finally settled on PDSA.

D
Continuous improvement is the act of applying a series of Kaizen loops to improve your way of
working over time.

or
Guided continuous improvement (GCI) extends the Kaizen loop strategy to use proven guidance
to help teams identify techniques that are likely to work in their context. This increases the
percentage of successful experiments and thereby increases the overall rate of process
e
improvement.
at

Here’s how that works:

First, an organization identifies a problem that needs fixing. It does some root cause analysis to
lic

figure out what the problem is.

Next, the organization identifies a potential improvement—such as a new practice or strategy—
up

that they want to experiment with to see how well it works in their situation.
Then they try it out. They implement the change.
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After a brief period, they’ll assess whether the change has been effective. They’ll measure it
against clear outcomes.
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If the new way of working is effective, they adopt it; if it isn’t, they abandon it, for now at least.
But they’re not done. At that point they share what they’ve learned with others—other
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members of their team and other teams throughout their organization.

Then they start the process over. It is continuous improvement, after all.
o

Disciplined Agile enables you to increase your rate of process improvement by helping you to
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identify strategies that are more likely to succeed given your situation.
If we get better at this, we will succeed more often, and we will improve faster. We can do this
if:
• We have access to an experienced agile coach, but they’re expensive and hard to find.

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 • We have access to a process knowledgebase, like the DA tool kit.
Some experiments fail. You’ll learn something, but it’s still a failure.
Failing fast is fine but succeeding early is better.

Communities of Practice

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One approach to remedying this situation is to establish communities of practice (CoPs).

ut
In many ways, a CoP is a collection of people who share a craft or profession who have banded
together to “learn” from each other to develop themselves and the organization. CoPs are also

ib
known as centers of excellence, interest leagues—not to be confused with The Justice League—
or even guilds. We’ve seen CoPs focused on agile software development, testing, architecture,

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management, coaching, business analysis, DevOps, and many more.
CoPs form on a volunteer basis, although in some organizations the CoP lead may be a

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budgeted position.

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Establishing and participating in CoPs provides a conduit to leverage knowledge across the
organization. A CoP forms when people recognize the need to help one another learn a topic.
This falls into three major areas:
• or
To share techniques with one another. CoP members will often share techniques with
one another through face-to-face chatting in discussion forums and practitioner
presentations—such as a lunchtime presentation.
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• To support one another’s learning. The goal diagram also captures several strategies
at

that CoP members may choose to employ to support one another—coaching and
mentoring. Although a center of excellence within your organization may officially be
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responsible for coaching and mentoring—and for most of the potential activities
captured by the goal diagram—you will often see members of a CoP doing this as well in
an informal manner. This is particularly true when no center of excellence (CoE) exists
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for a given topic.

• To capture techniques. Some CoPs will choose to start capturing the techniques and
strategies that they learn and share with one another, typically in an informal manner
D

using either a wiki or documentation repository such as Microsoft SharePoint.

CoPs are typically formed through one of two strategies:
ot

The first, and most common, is in an ad hoc manner when practitioners realize that they have a
common interest in learning and decide to support one another in doing so. The group will
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typically start meeting physically, perhaps in the cafeteria or cafe, or perhaps one of the
meeting rooms. When it becomes clear that a CoP is needed, the next step is to start putting
o

internal support mechanisms in place such as discussion forums.

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The second strategy is when an existing center of excellence around a topic decides to support
a CoP around the topic they have been tasked with supporting within their organization.
Structures of CoPs tend to be fluid, with a leadership team initially composed of the most
experienced members who work together to organize and support the overall effort. The CoP

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 leader—if there is one—typically emerges from within, although sometimes that person is
assigned at first if the team has been created by a community of excellence.
Membership in CoP is voluntary. Members will come and go as they see fit and participate as
much as they are willing to or have the time to.

Centers of Excellence (CoEs)

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Centers, or communities, of excellence (CoE) are closely related to communities of practice

ut
(CoPs).
A center of excellence—sometimes called a community for excellence—is a group of people

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with specialized skills and expertise whose job is to provide leadership and purposely
disseminate that knowledge within an organization. CoEs should not be confused with CoPs. In

tr
the last few years, we’ve seen agile centers of excellence, testing centers of excellence, DevOps
centers of excellence, and architecture centers of excellence created within organizations to

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help their continuous improvement efforts.

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A CoE is typically formed to address a skills or knowledge deficit within an organization. The
members of a CoE are typically coaches. CoEs, or excellence coaches, will be involved with
many of the activities of continuous improvement:
• or
Identify techniques. Coaches will work with one another, and with the people they are
coaching, to identify potential techniques (practices, strategies, principles) that they can
e
help people to adopt to improve the way they work.
at

• Share techniques. Coaches will help practitioners to share techniques that they find
effective with one another. Helping to build a learning organization is the primary way
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for CoE coaches to scale their efforts, or better yet, work their way out of a job.
• Capture techniques. CoE coaches work with practitioners to capture viable techniques
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to build organizational memory around their processes and strategies.

• Support teams. The primary mission for CoE coaches is to support individual and team
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learning.
• Organize communities of practice (CoPs). Very often, a CoE will initiate—or at least
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support—the initiation of one or more CoPs to aid their educational efforts.

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• Governing improvement. A CoE will often collect and track a set of metrics to help them
both govern and justify the organization’s investment in the CoE.
o
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 Review the following information with your learners:
Strategy: Hire from within.
Advantages:
• The person is known and respected within the organization.
• The person knows how to navigate the environment.

e
Disadvantages:

ut
• The person may not have experienced the topic outside the organization; they may
struggle with “that’s the way it’s done here” issues.

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• The person may be wrapped up in the activities of their existing position.
• They are often new to being a coach.

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Strategy: Hire new employees.

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Advantages:

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• These employees can bring new viewpoints and fresh experiences into the organization.
• They often have coaching experience.
Disadvantages:
•
•
or
These employees can be very difficult to find.
It can be difficult to get rid of a full-time employee if they don’t work out.
e
Strategy: Hire consultants/contractors.
at

Advantages:
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• It is easier to find candidates because many experts choose to become consultants.

• There may be an opportunity to hire the person as a full-time employee once you’ve
tried them out.
up

Disadvantages:
• It can be difficult to identify this type of person if you don’t already have people who are
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experienced in the center of excellence to help you identify viable candidates.

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N
o
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 Lesson 9. Influence Outside the Team
Description
Since DA is based on both agile and lean, a DASM should have a firm grasp of lean principles
and how they function at a systems level. In this lesson, you’ll gain a deeper understanding

e
of how lean principles and tools impact the organization, which will inform your work with

ut
your team.

ib
Objectives
Describe how Lean takes a system view rather than a team view.

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• Contrast the Lean aspects of knowledge work with work in the real world, including

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sources of waste and delay.
• Describe the aspects of regular work that affect quality and efficiency, including sources

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of waste and ways to improve.
Recognize when to be resilient.
•
•
or
Describe how resiliency supports lean thinking.
Explain when to build workflow according to resiliency outcomes.
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Agenda
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1. What Is Lean?
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2. Lean Knowledge Work versus Manufacturing

Lesson Notes
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Looking Beyond the Team

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Key Concept:
Sooner or later, anyone who’s serious about improving their team’s performance will come up
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against the realization that they’ll have to look beyond their team.

What Is Lean?
N

As we move toward organization-level thinking, we move into the realm of Lean. The term
“lean” was coined to describe Toyota's business during the late 1980s by a research team from
o

MIT's International Motor Vehicle Program. Three members of that team—James P. Womack,
D

Daniel T. Jones, and Daniel Roos—first defined the term in a book about their project, The
Machine That Changed the World.

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 Some Key Points:
• Henry Ford revolutionized mass production, making it possible for minimally trained
workers to assemble cars quickly and efficiently.
• Toyota eliminated much of the waste inherent in Ford's system by making smaller
batches of parts to be used as needed instead of stockpiling larger quantities.
• Toyota also empowered its workers to improve the process and stop the line when

e
issues and errors occurred.

ut
Key Lean Concepts

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• Lean has been expanded to virtually all industries.
• Lean is based on systems thinking.

tr
• Lean involves continuous learning.
• Lean is not about building cars but about building great organizations via learning.

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Wastes in Lean

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The virtual world is not the same as the physical (or real) world, but many of the same
principles apply.
•
customer.
or
Defects. Defects are defects and considered waste because they provide no value to the

• Overproduction. In manufacturing, this is making more things than you need. In

e
knowledge work, this is building features that are not needed. It adds complexity and
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delays value delivery.

• Inventory. In manufacturing, this is stocks of goods and raw materials. In knowledge
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work, this is unfinished work. Unfinished work has at least two significant wastes/risks
to it. First, when it just sits there, dependencies between it and other work may be
forgotten. When other things change, these changes may not be reflected in this
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unfinished work. Also, bugs may not be detected until later, making them harder to fix.
• Waiting. In software, it’s worth including all types of delays: workflow and feedback.
These delays cause unplanned work.
D

• Transportation. In manufacturing, transportation means moving work-in-process (WIP)

around. In knowledge work, it’s moving work to different people. Handoffs always lose
ot

information; hand backs lose time.

• Motion. In manufacturing, motion is moving people. Transportation is about moving
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inventory. In knowledge work, it’s about switching projects, which can happen easily
(just a few strokes of a keyboard) but can switch the mind of the developer
(multitasking) and become very costly.
o

• Excess Processing. With big batches, we do a lot of analysis before we need to—or a lot
D

of development. Incremental delivery can reduce excess processing.

• Nonutilized Talent. Using less-skilled people than those available lowers work quality.
This also includes people knowing things that others don’t, but not having a way to
share that knowledge, which forces relearning.

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 Manufacturing versus Knowledge Work

Manufacturing Knowledge Work

Defects Defects
Overproduction Creating unnecessary features (adds complexity, delays value)

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Inventory Partially done work (hides risk of errors)

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Waiting Delays (causes unplanned work)
Transportation Handoffs (loss of information) and hand backs (loss of time)

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Motion Motion (shifting from value stream to value stream)

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Excess Processing Doing more work than needed

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Nonutilized talent Lower quality work (requires relearning)

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Lean Principles: Software Development and Knowledge Work

•
• Eliminate Waste
or
These are the principles of Lean as they apply to software development and knowledge work:
Build Quality In
e
• Learn Pragmatically
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• Keep Options Open

• Deliver Value Quickly
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• Respect People
• Optimize the Whole
• Build in Resilience
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Lean Principle: Build Quality In

D

Key Concepts:
• Lean teams build quality into everything they do.
ot

• Lean teams adopt practices that ensure that each element of their solution, at every
increment, meets appropriate quality standards.
N

Building quality in means:

• Continuous validation (test work being done)
o

• Continuous integration (test dependencies)

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• Continuous deployment (test value)

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 Four Stages of Lean Validation Process
Four distinct stages make up the lean validation process. Only once you’ve passed all four, can
you be confident that your product idea is worth developing.
1. Validate the problem: Is this a problem worth solving? If users don’t think this is a major
problem, your solution won’t be appealing.

e
2. Validate the market: Some users might agree that this is a problem worth solving. But
are there enough of them to make up a market for your product?

ut
3. Validate the product: The problem might exist, but does your product solve it?
4. Validate willingness to pay: There might be market demand and a great product. But

ib
will people be willing to reach into their wallets and pay for it?

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Lean Principle: Eliminate Waste
In lean thinking, any activity that doesn’t directly add value to the finished product is waste.

is
To reduce waste, it’s critical to allow teams to self-organize and operate in a way that reflects

D
the work they’re trying to accomplish.
The most common causes of waste within a team are:
•
•
•
Multitasking
Rework
Building work of lesser value
or
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• Relearning
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• Miscommunication
• Errors and poor quality
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Lean Principle: Learn Pragmatically

Key Concepts:
up

Lean teams continuously strive for perfection. Experimentation and reflection are the driving
forces; they continuously run practical experiments and pragmatically apply what they learn—
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freely sharing this new knowledge with other teams.

Lean Principle: Keep Options Open

ot

Key Concepts:
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It's not necessary to start projects by defining a complete specification.

Delay detailed discussions of future features—and decisions about them—until the last
responsible moment, when more information will enable them to make a better decision.
o
D

Lean Principle: Deliver Value Quickly

Limiting the work of a team to its capacity enables a reliable and repeatable flow of work.
Constraining a team to regularly delivering potentially shippable solutions motivates them to
stay focused on continuously adding value.

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 Keys to Delivering Value Quickly:
• Focus on time instead of cost.
• Focus on removing delays rather than going fast.
• Achieve flow by working on smaller things and with people fully allocated to the work.
• Limit batch size.

e
Lean Principle: Importance of Incremental Delivery

ut
Key Concepts:
Solution development has specific timing issues. It is not realistic to build an entire product and

ib
then release it. Instead, build small, functional features so that they can be tested and released.
In that way, you can deliver value quickly.

tr
Lean Principle: Respect People

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Key Concept:

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Lean teams respond to people promptly, listen attentively, hear their opinions, and do not
dismiss them even when they are different from their own. Lean recognizes that teams work

or
best when they are empowered to make decisions where the work is.
Keys to Respecting People:
• Culture is the context in which all change must happen.
e
• Recognize all who consume your work as customers.
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• Attend to people’s needs and wants.

• Focus on understanding others’ views and perspectives.
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• Build partnerships based on trust.

• Create an environment of mutual influence.
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Lean Principle: Optimizing the Whole

Key Concepts:
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A lean organization seeks to optimize the whole value stream, not just individual functions or
teams.
ot

It understands that high-level business processes often cross multiple systems and teams and
seeks to optimize the entire process, not just the work of a single team.
N

Which Part of an Airplane Is Responsible for Flight?

Key Concepts:
o

You need an engine for power, wings for lift, controls to direct it, a place for the pilot, a
D

navigation system, and many other things—no single part is responsible for flight. They’re all
responsible. Improving just one of them may reduce the plane’s ability to fly.
You must think of an airplane as a system.
This illustrates a couple of key points:

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 • Systems work as a whole; improving one part may degrade the performance of the
whole.
• Local optimizations don’t always make system-wide improvements.
• It’s more important to see how parts of a system fit together than to focus on individual
parts.
• It’s the same with any complex system. If you’re trying to improve—or even influence—

e
the system, it’s much more important to see how all the parts work together than it is to

ut
focus on the individual parts.
The System Is the Source of Most Problems

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Key Concepts:

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Poor systems will defeat almost all but the greatest of people.
If we trust people, we don’t need to work on them; we need to improve the system.

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The role of management is to create great systems so that people can work autonomously to

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achieve the vision of leadership.

Lean Principle: Build in Resilience

Key Concept:
or
Lean teams constantly strive to build in the capability to survive, adapt, and sustain the
e
business in the face of change.
at

Lean Principles Enhance Resilience

The most common causes of waste within a team are:
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Cause of Waste Explanation

Optimizing the Whole Is important because the entire system needs to be resilient
up

Eliminating Waste Helps Identify when we’re going down the wrong path
Building Quality In Avoids many problems that would otherwise occur
D

Delivering Value Quickly Provides us with pivoting points between a recent delivery and
starting the next ones
ot

Keeping Options Open Enables us to quickly pivot when our current path becomes less
desirable
N

Learning Pragmatically Helps us understand the challenges we need to overcome as

well as how to do that
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Respecting People Avoids many problems that would otherwise occur

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 Lean: Focus on Realizing Value
Key Concepts:
Lean focuses on realizing value—both for the organization and for the customer.
This simple mantra can be used to drive the realization of value:

e
• Work on fewer things.
• Work on smaller things.

ut
• Work more efficiently.
• Create better workflow.

ib
How Do You Define Value?

tr
Key Concepts:

is
• Value must be defined by the customer, but business stakeholders decide which value
to go after.

D
• We must also attend to who our customers are. We’re not going after all of them—
we’re going after those that our company is going after.
An example:
or
Southwest Airlines had a customer who always wrote complaint letters after a flight. She
didn’t like the boarding process, she didn’t like that no meals were served, and the litany
e
went on. She ended her letters by saying that she could no longer fly Southwest Airlines
at

unless they made changes. Responding to her eventually got bumped up to the late Herb
Kelleher—then the CEO of Southwest Airlines.
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His response: “Dear X: We will miss you

Types of Business Value

up

Key Concepts:
It’s important to realize that we can also create value for the business even if that value is not
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released to the customer.

In knowledge work, creating value for the business includes the following:
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• Value delivered to the customer

• Discovering what is of value
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• Discovering how to build it

• Building it
• Preparing for consumption
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• Improving our own internal methods

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• Mitigating risk
• Learning something new

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 What Is Role Management?
Key Concept:
We have teams that are self-organizing and that choose their own ways of working. Across the
organization, these can be dramatically different.
What, then, is the role of management?

e
Managers are no less committed to the work than any member of the team.

ut
Their role is to create the environment for teams to be awesome.

ib
Part of this entails:
• Listening and watching for the needs of the team and removing problems

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• Communicating with other managers to provide the bigger picture

is
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or
e
at
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up
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N
o
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