The WoW Factor

Could Choosing our Way of Working (WoW) revolutionize project results in all types of organizations?

Photo by Josh Eckstein on Unsplash

A couple of years ago I wrote a Project Methodology Series in BlueProject (Project Methodology in 2020: :Project Methodology in 2020 (Part I), Project Methodology in 2020 (Part II): Speaking Of Agile, Project Methodology in 2020 (Part III): Disciplined Agile? ). In setting out to write this series, I learned about one of the newer software development methodology evolutions: Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD). One of DAD’s core tenants is the value created by encouraging different Ways Of Working (WoW).

The Concept of WoW in DAD

In Choose Your WoW!, Scott W. Ambler and Mark Lines introduce how choosing your own Way of Working (WoW) can really transform the Agile development and delivery processes within an organization. As the authors point out “that there is no easy answer” when it comes to software development:

What we do as professionals is challenging, otherwise we would have been automated out of jobs by now. You and your team work within the context of your organization, using a collection of technologies that are evolving, and for a wide variety of business needs. And you’re working with people with different backgrounds, different preferences, different experiences, different career goals, and they may report to a different group or even a different organization than you do.

What WoW in DAD builds out — as the authors describe in “Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) in a Nutshell” — is a meta-process (a process for defining and executing process) for Agile within a specific organization:

1. People first. People, and the way we work together, are the primary determinants of success for a solution delivery team. DAD supports a robust set of roles, rights, and responsibilities that you can tailor to meet the needs of your situation.
2. Hybrid. DAD is a hybrid tool kit that puts great ideas from Scrum, SAFe, Spotify, Agile Modeling (AM), Extreme Programming (XP), Unified Process (UP), Kanban, Lean Software Development, and several other methods into context.
3. ​Full-delivery life cycle. DAD addresses the full-delivery life cycle, from team initiation all the way to delivering a solution to your end users.
4. ​Support for multiple life cycles. DAD supports agile, lean, continuous delivery, exploratory, and large-team versions of the life cycle. DAD doesn’t prescribe a single life cycle because it recognizes that one process approach does not fit all….
5. Complete. DAD shows how development, modeling, architecture, management, requirements/outcomes, documentation, governance, and other strategies fit together in a streamlined whole. DAD does the “process heavy lifting” that other methods leave up to you.
6. Context-sensitive. DAD promotes…a goal-driven or outcome-driven approach…(providing) contextual advice regarding viable alternatives and their trade-offs, enabling you to tailor DAD to effectively address the situation in which you find yourself. By describing what works, what doesn’t work, and…why, DAD helps you to increase your chance of adopting strategies that will work….
7. ​Consumable solutions over working software. Potentially shippable software is a good start, but what we really need are consumable solutions that delight our customers.
8. ​Self-organization with appropriate governance. Agile and lean teams are self-organizing, which means that the people who do the work are the ones who plan and estimate it. But that doesn’t mean they can do whatever they want. They must still work in an enterprise-aware manner that reflects the priorities of their organization…governed appropriately by senior leadership….

Reflecting on the DAD approach for software, you can see how much sense it makes to work this way:

• You put actual effort into determining the best approach — or Way of Working — for each project
• Instead of blindly accepting one corporate standard for how software projects are done, you actually work with your Project Management Office (PMO) or other project office function, including the project / software process experts who are part of this function, to determine the best approach.
• You evolve your WoW as needed during the course of your project. As Ambler and Lines point out: “DAD teams will often evolve from one life cycle to another.”

How WoW Can Be Applied to All Project Work

So if all of this flexibility is possible within Agile software projects, why can’t this type of approach be applied to all projects?

Well, it can.

There is absolutely nothing in the above items 1–8 that Ambler and Lines call “Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) in a Nutshell” that cannot be applied to the way all projects in an organization are managed. Even item (7), above, that specifically refers to “Consumable solutions over working software” can be thought about more abstractly: what we need are work-in-progress solutions that are already usable and that delight our key customers.

In short, we can learn from DAD’s great example and implement something I’ll call Disciplined Project Delivery (DPD); because what we need are flexible Ways of Working (WoW), and it really is worth thinking about how we can do this on each and every project.

When I think about a full blown implementation of DPD, it occurs to me that it would require a much different organizational structure than the structures that we have in most PMOs and other project office functions today. We would need at least two major changes in these project office functions:

1. An increased investment in Project Management Coaches (PMCs). These PMCs would need to include the Disciplined Agile Coaches (DAC) that Ambler and Lines recommend to support Project Managers (PMs) and Scrum Masters (SMs) on Agile projects, but we’d also want some expert coaches to support our process and non-agile projects (you cannot construct a building through a purely Agile process).
2. The other thing we’d need to do is to rethink the types of leaders we have in our project office organization. These leaders can no longer be the scolding, gate-keeper types who enforce rigid project methodologies. The type of leader required for DPD would have to have a much more open minded and facilitative style, since, like in DAD, in DPD, teams would ultimately select their Way of Working (WoW).

Disciplined Project Delivery (DPD): I think it could work. At least if enough organizations have the patience and the discipline to make it work.