What approach should you use to manage your project? To answer this question most of us will go right to the Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide)®. But the PMBOK® is now a guide to delivering value and much less of process guide/framework. Sure, a framework can help, but the smartest path forward often borrows thinking from several.
Business agility comes from freedom, not frameworks. And when you pair freedom to choose from the best of agile, lean, and traditional sources with the guidance to make better choices, you get Disciplined Agile (DA) — a hybrid tool kit that harnesses hundreds of agile practices to guide you to the best way of working for your team or organization.[1]
DA adopts multiple life cycles including:
- Agile: A Scrum-oriented life cycle where teams focus on creating consumable solutions, based on short iterations (sprints)
- Lean: A Kanban-oriented life cycle where teams visualize their work, reduce work in process to streamline workflows, and pull work into the team based on available capacity.
- Continuous Delivery Agile: Common for stable/long-lived teams doing agile where iterations are typically 1-2 weeks, although 1 day is also common. At the end of the iteration, you release into production.
- Continuous Delivery Lean: A lean-based life cycle where work is released into the product whenever possible, often several times per day.
- Exploratory: A Lean Startup-based life cycle where work centers on a minimum viable product (MVP) to validate with customers; often applied to solve a wicked problem in a domain.
- Program: A scaling-based life cycle where a large team organizes into a team of teams.
The Disciplined Agile Scrum Master (DASM)® certification equips you to successfully lead agile teams, thereby future proofing your career in a world in which agile is fast
becoming the way forward. The Disciplined Agile® tool kit consists of proven practices, including Scrum, Kanban, SAFe®, and even some predictive approaches, and puts them into context[2].
[1] https://www.pmi.org/what-is-disciplined-agile
[2] https://www.pmi.org/certifications/agile-certifications/disciplined-agile-scrum-master-dasm