Rebalancing Your Organization’s Agility and Discipline

Abstract

In these days of rapid change, many organizations find that their current balance between using agile and disciplined methods is not what it should be. (We realize that “disciplined” is not the opposite of “agile,” but it is our working label here for methods relying more on explicit documented knowledge than on tacit interpersonal knowledge). In a forthcoming book [1], we have analyzed many organizations’ experiences with agile and disciplined methods, and have elaborated our previous characterization [2] of the “home grounds” in which agile and disciplined methods have been most successful. This analysis has enabled us to determine five critical decision factors that organizations and projects can use to determine whether they are in either the agile or disciplined home grounds, or somewhere in between. These five decision factors are size, criticality, personnel, dynamism, and culture. In this paper, we set the context by characterizing the agile and disciplined home grounds. We then define the five decision factors and their rating scales; provide a stepwise approach for assessing your organization’s or project’s location in the decision space and developing a strategy for rebalancing its agility and discipline; and illustrate its use with a representative organizational example.