Module 2: Agile and Beyond

Question 1

Disciplined Agile

Answer 1

Allows users to look beyond prescriptive agile frameworks and tailor their approaches to achieve true business agility. DA enables you to increase your rate of process improvement by helping you to identify strategies that are more likely to succeed given your situation. Disciplined Agile helps you succeed early.

Question 2

Business agility

Answer 2

the quick realization of business value predictably, sustainably and with high quality. It is the ability of an organization to rapidly adapt to market and environmental changes in productive and cost-savings ways.

Question 3

Disciplined Agile Mindset, 3 items.

Answer 3

Principles, Promise, and Guidelines

Question 4

Principles

Answer 4

The principles provide a philosophical foundation for business agility. They are based on both lean and flow concepts. These principles are: Delight customers, Be Awesome, Context counts, Be pragmatic, Choice is good, optimize flow, organize around products/service, and enterprise awareness.

Question 5

Promis

Answer 5

The promises are agreements that we make with our fellow teammates, our stakeholders, and other people within our organization whom we interact with. The promises define a collection of disciplined behaviours that enable us to collaborate effectively and professionally. The promises are: Create psychological safety and embrace diversity, Accelerate value realization, Collaborate proactively, Make all work and workflow visible, Improve predictability, Keep workloads within capacity, and Improve continuously.

Question 6

Guideline

Answer 6

These guidelines help us to be more effective in our way of working (WoW) and in improving our WoW over time. These guidelines are: Validate our learning, Apply design thinking, Attend to relationships through the value stream, Create effective environments that foster joy, Change culture by improving the system, Create semi-autonomous, self-organizing teams, Adopt measure to improve outcomes, Leverage and enhance organizational assets.

Question 7

Continuous Improvement

Answer 7

Based on the Kaizen principle. A Kaizen loop is an approach where a team experiments with a small change in their way of working, adopting the change if it works in their given context and abandoning it if it doesn’t. referred to as PDCA—Plan-Do-Check-Act. Or Plan-Do-Study-Act PDSA.

Question 8

Kaizen Loop

Answer 8

1) Identify the problem.
2) Identify potential solutions.
3) Try the solutions and assess their effectiveness.
4) Adopt the solutions that work, abandoning the rest and then share what you have learned in your organization so your solution can be applied.

Question 9

Disciplined Agile Delivery Team

Answer 9

DA 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. Teams can vary by Purpose, Size, Approach, Culture, Geographic Distrubution, and Other factors. (Page 27 of Study Guide.)

Question 10

Primary DAD Team

Answer 10

The key roles on a delivery team. Every team needs these roles. roles are the Team Lead, Product Owner, Team member, Architecture Owner, and Stakeholder.

Question 11

Secondary DAD Team

Answer 11

Additional roles. Any one or more of these roles might be included on a team. There may be other secondary roles not included here. roles are the Specialist, Independent Tester, Domain Expert, Technical Expert, and Integrator.

Question 12

Complex adaptive system

Answer 12

a system in which a perfect understanding of the individual parts does not automatically convey a perfect understanding of the whole system’s behaviour. (page 21 Study Guide).

Question 13

Process Blade

Answer 13

addresses a specific organizational capability, such as finance, people management, data management, agile solution delivery or vendor management.
A process blade encompasses a cohesive collection of process options—including practices, strategies and workflows—that should be chosen and then applied in a context-sensitive Manner. (study guide page 22). A 𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗰𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗱𝗲 is called a blade to imply that it can be updated or even replaced.

Question 14

Foundation

Answer 14

Provides the conceptual underpinnings of the Disciplined Agile tool kit. This includes the principles, promises and guidelines of the Disciplined Agile mindset; fundamental concepts from both agile and lean; fundamental concepts from serial/traditional approaches; roles and team structures; and the fundamentals of choosing your way of working.

Question 15

Disciplined DevOps

Answer 15

Streamlining of solution development and operations, and Disciplined DevOps is an enterprise-class approach to DevOps. This layer includes Disciplined Agile Delivery and other enterprise aspects of DevOps.

Question 16

Value Stream

Answer 16

The sequence of activities an organization takes to deliver a product or service. A value stream begins and ends with the customer, in order to fulfill the customer’s problems.

Based on Al Shalloway’s Flow for Enterprise Transformation, or “FLEX.” 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 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.

Question 17

Disciplined Agile Enterprise

Answer 17

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 learning mindset in the mainstream business and underlying lean and agile processes to drive innovation. The Disciplined Agile Enterprise layer focuses on the rest of the enterprise activities that support an organization’s value streams.

Question 18

Process Goals

Answer 18

A process goal captures the detailed, process-related decisions and options for a cohesive subset of a team’s way of working (WoW). They provide guidance so that a team can tailor and scale agile strategies given the context of the situation they face. Sometimes called a process capability.

Question 19

Goal Diagram

Answer 19

visual depictions of the aspects you need to think through about the goal—which we call “decision points”—and several options for each decision point to choose 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. (Screenshot in folder, page 24 Study Guide).

Question 20

ordered option list

Answer 20

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.

Question 21

unordered option list

Answer 21

is depicted without an arrow—each option has advantages and disadvantages, but it isn’t clear how to rank the options fairly.

Question 22

Potential starting points

Answer 22

are shown in bold italics. These are good starting points for small teams new to agile that are taking on a fairly straightforward problem.

Question 23

Options Table and Trade-off’s

Answer 23

Often find that you need to examine the bade-offs associated with each option. The table lists each of options associated with a decision point, with a description of its trade-offs. An options table for each process goal can be found in the Choose Yow WOW! Book. (Screenshot in folder).