Disciplined agile is a toolkit that leverages hundreds of strategies from other project management methodologies, including Agile, Lean, Kanban, Scrum, and more. It’s a hybrid approach that’s designed to respond to the team as well as the context. In short, this toolkit helps you identify the best ways to work and select the right tools and processes for the job.
In this guide, you’ll learn about the benefits of disciplined agile as well as the principles that form the toolkit’s foundations. We’ve also provided some monday.com templates for getting up and running with disciplined agile. But first, let’s explore why you might want to use this people-centric toolkit for project management.
Why use disciplined agile?
Disciplined agile delivery focuses on the way you work and provides a robust toolkit that incorporates hundreds of agile practices that give your team processes that fit the appropriate context. This approach is built on the idea that true agility comes from the freedom to choose the right process for any given challenge. It’s about picking the right next step for your team whether you’re engaging in disciplined devops or embracing an agile framework for your entire business.
By recognizing that every team is unique and that every framework and process has value depending on the context, disciplined agile puts people first.
An important part of the disciplined agile toolkit is its easily digestible process goal diagrams. These diagrams enable teams to easily identify and choose the process and way of working that fits the challenge at hand to support better solution delivery. These better process decisions naturally lead to better project outcomes, among other benefits.
The benefits of disciplined agile
The practical benefits of a tool kit that conforms to the way your team works are obvious. And quantitatively, these benefits have some serious numbers to back them up: By building an agile culture within your organization, you can boost commercial performance by 237%.
But the qualitative benefits are even better. Disciplined agile delivery offers a variety of advantages over other methodologies and frameworks, including:
- Increased competitiveness: Disciplined Agile is all about ensuring you delight your customers with your products and services. Delighted customers are happy customers, and happy customers are more loyal, which means your competition has a tough time stealing them from you. It’s better business, plain and simple.
- More team engagement: The principles of disciplined agile embrace flexibility rather than prescriptive processes, allowing your team to choose the way of working that works best for them. Aside from providing improved efficiency, this also supports ownership and higher engagement from team members across the board.
- Adapts to any type of team: Traditional agile started as an approach to software development and was a tool used by product owners and project managers in that space. But disciplined agile is relevant to any aspect of business, and it’s flexible enough to work across any type of team, including sales, marketing, and human resources.
These benefits extend from the numerous promises and guidelines put forth in the Disciplined Agile mindset. And these, in turn, are built on the tool kit’s eight core principles that define a Disciplined Agile team.
8 principles of disciplined agile
Put simply, the disciplined agile principles are foundational to the tool kit and mindset. Built on both lean and flow concepts, they serve as the philosophical topsoil from which business agility grows. The eight principles are:
- Delight customers: The first principle is all about going beyond basic expectations and striving to wow your customers. This goes beyond external customers and includes internal customers as well.
- Be awesome: Being awesome is about always striving to be better, do better, and produce better. Put simply, it’s about creating an awesome environment with awesome people and an awesome company.
- Context matters: This principle is about recognizing the uniqueness of teams and processes. The idea is that teams must find the methods that reflect the given context while leaving room to evolve those methods across different contexts.
- Be pragmatic: Being pragmatic means using the strategy that makes the most sense. Whatever helps the team be as effective as possible, whether it’s agile, lean, or even traditional methods, is the one that makes the most sense.
- Choice is good: Building on contextual and pragmatic work methods, the principle of choice is about knowing and understanding the trade-offs associated with the options a team has at their disposal.
- Optimize flow: This principle is all about optimizing flow to effectively respond to the needs of the customer. It encompasses processes across the value stream all the way up to the organizational level.
- Organize around products and services: To truly delight their customers, teams need to put their products and services at the center of their strategies. Their focus should be on providing the best offerings possible and engage in project portfolio management using Agile philosophies.
- Enterprise awareness: Lastly, every team should work in a way that holds enterprise awareness in mind. Every team does what’s best for the entire organization.
Disciplined agile teams promise to adopt and uphold these principles as well as the guidelines and behaviors that define disciplined agile. They may have an agile coach to help them implement Agile methods. While these are foundational to business agility, they’re equally essential to fellow teammates and other stakeholders.
As an approach to agile, the DA framework offers immense flexibility to teams willing to adopt the mindset. But those teams also need the same level of flexibility across their tools.
How monday.com works with disciplined agile
Disciplined agile is all about choosing your processes based on the context. But to truly choose your way of working based on the task at hand, you need tools that reflect this level of adaptability. That’s where monday.com’s Work OS comes in. It has customization and flexibility built into its core.
With hundreds of templates and dozens of built-in processes to choose from, you’ll never have to look far for the perfect tool to match your disciplined agile workflow.
You can use monday.com templates, automations, integrations, and unique columns to:
- Visualize progress and budgets via dashboards
- Track issues
- Collaborate quickly and clearly
- Estimate workloads and task time
- Create a customer portal
- Manage project portfolios
Of course, a lot of teams already have tools in place for specialized workflows. But with over 40 integrations at your fingertips, you’ll have no problem pulling the relevant information into monday.com. You can easily connect development teams using Jira or customer service teams using Zendesk with the rest of the organization. After all, one of the tenants of being awesome in Disciplined Agile is sharing. monday.com makes it easy to do so.
Related templates for disciplined agile
If you’re wondering how your workflow would look with disciplined agile, check out these templates. They’ll fit right into any agile organizational approach.
Scrum Sprint Planning Template
Looking for the tools to be the best Scrum Master you can be? Organizing your sprints just got a lot easier with this Scrum Sprint Planning Template. Let your team focus on the tasks at hand while you plan and track every sprint with precision and ease. With built-in automations, you can set alerts when your team members hit roadblocks, so you can be on hand when you’re needed most.
Product Roadmap Template
Disciplined agile is about creating delightful products. With this Product Roadmap Template, you have a high-level overview of your product development so you can ensure your team is following the right path. From planning and execution to launch and monitoring, you can keep tabs on your product every step of the way. And with integrated Gantt charts, you can follow your product’s progress visually.
FAQs about disciplined agile
What’s the difference between agile and disciplined agile?
Agile is a project management methodology that emphasizes adaptability in responding to change. Disciplined agile takes the ideas behind agile and expands them into a toolkit that leverages Agile practices as well as others to provide guidance based on the context your team is working within. The principles, promises, and guidelines are designed to spread agility across an entire organization.
What are the 4 views of disciplined agile?
Disciplined agile addresses four views:
- Mindset
- People
- Flow
- Practices
What is a disciplined agile scrum master?
As with Agile project management, Disciplined Agile relies on Scrum Masters to help lead projects. The Scrum Master is responsible for facilitating Scrum and disciplined agile to the rest of the team as well as the organization by making sure everyone adheres to the principles and guidelines. Scrum Masters are committed to the principles of disciplined agile and champion openness to opportunities for context-appropriate improvements.
Combine the power of disciplined agile with monday.com
The vast majority of organizations see adopting Agile as a strategic priority. Out of all the frameworks and methodologies out there, disciplined agile might be the most flexible and adaptive.
But don’t forget about your tools. Once you begin adopting a culture of agility and flexibility, you’ll want solutions that likewise adapt to your best way to work. With monday.com, you have that and more.
Try monday dev