In a nutshell: One of the fundamentals of Agile is people and teams operating in self-organising and self-supporting ways. In place of traditional management practices (imposed from the outside) the team requires its own internal management capability. To do this, the team can develop disciplines that help direct their attention, focus their work and improve their performance. The more rigorously these disciplines are followed, the better the disciplines will enable the team to manage itself.

  • Rigour is the extent to which we apply ourselves to the disciplines we have created.

    As an example, by applying the right level of rigour to developing user stories, we are able to create something that truly reflects the ‘need’ of the end user. If we don’t, we potentially get something that looks more like a task on a to-do list. If the user story looks more like a task, we may complete the task but not achieve the value the user demands.

    Critics of Agile argue that ‘creating user stories doesn’t work’. However, the problem really reflects the lack of rigour that many teams bring to the preparation and refinement of user stories.

    The issue of rigour was raised during an interesting piece of work carried out by Ryan Lockyard. He interviewed a number of the authors of the Agile Manifesto and their frustration at the lack of rigour was clear to see. One of the standout quotes was from Andy Hunt who said: “Agile now means, we do half of Scrum poorly and use JIRA.” To see more, take a look at his Slide Share presentation: Secrets from the Agile Manifesto Authors on Flow

    So, discipline and rigour go hand in hand - there is no point putting in place a discipline if we do not apply ourselves to it. If we do however, the discipline is more likely to guide us towards higher levels of self-organisation and high value, sustainable delivery.

  • Putting in place a set of disciplines can help organise the team and guide them towards delivering sustainable results. Disciplines could include the way we define our roles, the practices we use, our definition of ‘done’, the way we engage with customers and the delivery cycles we set for ourselves. Disciplines help the team to develop. The better we master the disciplines, the better we become at organising ourselves.

    As the team develops, disciplines can also help the team to scale its activities. When this happens, other teams might adopt our disciplines, as we adopt theirs, and agile gets the chance to scale throughout the organisation.

    So, discipline and rigour go hand in hand - there is no point putting in place a discipline if we do not apply ourselves to it. If we do however, the discipline is more likely to guide us towards higher levels of self-organisation and high value, sustainable delivery.


Customer Focus

 

Team Focus


Contextual Focus


Supporting Principles