Every team has unique needs, but project management methodologies often aren’t one-size fits all.

While not a methodology itself, disciplined agile is a toolkit that leverages various methodologies in order to help you identify the best ways to work and select the right tools and processes for the job. It’s built on the idea that teams should be able to choose and tailor the right process for their team for any given challenge, whether it’s devops or a business-wide framework.

Here’s a high-level view of its benefits and how monday.com supports digital agile processes. By understanding the benefits and principles behind disciplined agile, as well as the importance of leveraging the right tools and platforms to enable this approach, companies can adopt this way of working and drive better results.

The Principles of Disciplined Agile

The principles behind the disciplined agile toolkit serve to promote business agility and empower teammates and other stakeholders to do their best work. Some of the most relevant ones include:

• Recognizing context: Teams and processes are unique, and the methods chosen need to fit the given context while also leaving room for evolution.
• Be pragmatic: Teams must use the framework that ultimately leads to the most success.
• Choice is good: Know and understand the trade-offs associated with the options a team has at their disposal.
• Organize around products and services: To truly delight their customers, the goal of any strategy should be to provide the best offerings possible.
• Enterprise awareness: 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 behind them. Having an agile coach may help implement these methods more smoothly.

Potential Benefits

Building an agile organizational culture has known benefits. One study found that it can even boost commercial performance by a staggering 237%. Disciplined agile delivery offers a variety of advantages over other methodologies and frameworks, including increased competitiveness through a focus on delighting customers. By keeping continuous improvement and customer experience at the center of the strategy, it helps businesses gain brand loyalty and retention.

It also has internal benefits. By embracing flexibility rather than prescriptive processes, disciplined agile allows teams to decide which ways of working are best for them. This improves efficiency while also supporting self-ownership and higher engagement from team members.

Finally, although this type of toolkit started within software development teams, its inherently flexible nature means that it’s relevant to any aspect of business, and works across any type of team, including sales, marketing, and human resources.

View all

Choosing the Right Tool

In order to reap the benefits of disciplined agile, companies need a work management tool like monday.com that truly enables flexibility and adaptability. If you’re currently using a digital work management platform for your disciplined agile team, consider whether you have the ability to do the following:

• Visualize progress and budgets via dashboards
• Track issues
• Collaborate quickly and clearly
• Estimate workloads and task time
• Create a customer portal
• Manage project portfolios

If your current tool can’t handle all of the above tasks, it might be time for a change.

Also evaluate whether your current tool offers templates that further aid a disciplined agile approach. Two particularly useful ones from monday.com are a scrum planning template and a product roadmap template. Product roadmap templates give a high-level overview of your product development so you can ensure your team is following the right path in order to create delightful products and experiences. Meanwhile, a scrum planning template enables you to plan, track and manage your sprints without becoming distracted.

Conclusion

Disciplined agile is a great model for teams that are already highly agile but want additional flexibility. For organizations new to agile approaches or still trying to fully roll out the model or adopt its philosophy, having the right technology in place can enable much easier, faster success. monday.com’s support for disciplined agile puts the technology at your command, with templates and integrations designed to let your team work their way.

Sign up to unleash the power of disciplined agile for your business at monday.com.