What is Disciplined Agile (DA)?

- In today's business environment, companies realize they need to be more agile to stay competitive. But the use of agile methods tends to be one-size-fits-all, leading to frustration and wondering why they should even use it. This is where Disciplined Agile, or DA, can help. To put it simply, DA helps teams to decide which agile methods to use based on their situation. It also provides flexibility to change it whenever needed, and it helps teams streamline their processes. I'm Sandy Mitchell, and I've been teaching and working as a project manager for 25 years. In this short course, I'm going to give you an overview of Disciplined Agile. Before we get into the specifics about DA and how it works, I'd like to provide a little history on what DA is and where it came from. You might be surprised to know that DA isn't new. It was created by Mark Lines and Scott Ambler in 2012. The first DA delivery book was published the same year. And the first version of the toolkit was released in 2015. In 2019, the DA delivery book was replaced with "Choose Your WoW: a Disciplined Agile Delivery Handbook for Optimizing Your Way of Working", or WoW. In the same year, Disciplined Agile merged with the Project Management Institute or PMI. And not long after that in 2020, the "Choose Your WoW" book was updated. Now that you know the history of DA, let's go into more detail on what DA is and how it can be used to help your team and the organization. DA is a toolkit that uses hundreds of agile practices to help teams and organizations find their best way of working. DA guides you in identifying the needs of a specific project and then helps you choose the methodology and framework that works best for the team and the project. Choosing your WoW, or your way of working, lets teams evolve their processes based on their current situation, instead of locking them into a set practice. This promotes business agility and helps to improve project success. This is done by using a toolkit that leverages strategies from Scrum, Lean, Extreme Programming, Kanban, SAFe and many others. These approaches help organizations streamline their processes in a context-sensitive manner, providing a solid foundation for business agility. DA also shows how various activities, like finance, portfolio management, software development, IT operations and vendor management work together. Teams are encouraged to try different agile practices or strategies that work for them. For example, instead of only using Scrum to manage your project, you might discover that parts of your project are better managed using Extreme Programming or XP. What's really nice about DA is that it recommends starting where you are and doing the best you can with the current situation, and then striving to get better. Meaning, if agile is new to you, start out small. Learn from what you're doing and continue to improve your way of working. So there you have it. You now know the basics of what Disciplined Agile is and how it can help companies become more agile. I hope this has peaked your curiosity to learn more about what Disciplined Agile offers and to continue learning how it can help your projects and your organization.