What is Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)?
Definition – Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
It is a toolkit that contains agile strategies that will guide you to the best way of working (WoW) based on your context. A team/organization is more aware of its context, hence choosing the agile strategies that best suit its context and fit for purpose for your organization. One of the important points to know about DAD is that it comes from the Project Management Institute (PMI). PMI acquired the DAD Agile Delivery in 2019 to get a foothold in the world of agility. Disciplined Agile Delivery: A Practitioner’s Guide to Agile Software Delivery in the Enterprise by IBM software engineers Scott Ambler and Mark Lines. This is NOT a framework, unlike other frameworks in agile like Scrum/Kanban.
Foundation of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
The Foundation is based on the following –
The mindset of Disciplined Agile Delivery –
The mindset is based on the freedom to choose practices suited for the team’s context as per PMI.org, Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is based on three pillars (1) Principles (2) Promises and (3) Guidelines.
People – The way you collaborate and how you are organized in your teams or enterprises can impact your ability to deliver value. Disciplined Agile Delivery has two roles – Primary and Secondary. Primary roles are commonly found on DAD teams and supporting roles are there to help the primary role takers in delivery.
Agile – Agile is the way that you choose to think and act.
Lean – 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.
Serial – Serial captures the essence of the strategy, to work through a progression of phases or stages in a linear manner. DA principle Be Pragmatic supports using whatever approach or life cycle necessary to achieve the desired outcomes. For all life cycles, DA provides a robust set of choices and tools to help teams and organizations be more effective.
WoW ( Way of Working) – Every team is unique and the context is different. The Disciplined Agile® (DA™) tool kit enables teams to choose and later evolve a fit-for-purpose way of working (WoW).
Source – pmi.org
Adoption of Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)
Similar to Kanban, Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) recommends starting from the current state and then focusing on continuous improvement.
Conclusion –
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is a tool kit from the house of PMI. It is like a buffet lunch and PMI provides you with the buffet, it is up to the team to customize and decide what works for them. It is prescriptive in terms of the buffet provided by PMI and you have to select from the buffet menu on the other hand it gives the freedom to choose the item as per your interest.
Learn about agile scaling frameworks- What are the agile scaling frameworks?