For some time now, the Disciplined Agile (DA) team at PMI has been deeply engaged in listening to your feedback, understanding your evolving challenges, and working diligently to enhance how DA supports your organization’s pursuit of agility. Today, we are excited to share the initial results of this journey: Disciplined Agile Next.
From Teams to Enterprise: A Strategic Evolution
DA Next marks a strategic shift—from focusing on individual practitioners to supporting the broader needs of organizations pursuing true enterprise agility. While team-level agility remains essential, the greatest challenges and opportunities lie in optimizing the end-to-end flow of value delivery. Elevating agility across the entire value stream is what truly enables agility at the organizational level.
What’s Different About DA Next?
1. Focus on Organizational Agility
DA Next extends beyond team-level practices to embrace enterprise-wide agility. We’ve significantly enhanced our content and knowledge base with guidance on value stream management, end-to-end flow optimization, and accelerated value delivery.
2. Value Acceleration Process
At the core of DA Next is our Value Acceleration Process—a structured yet adaptable approach built on collaboration and visual discovery tools. It provides a simple but powerful way to uncover pain points, bottlenecks, and improvement opportunities, which are then captured in an actionable backlog. By prioritizing high-impact practices aligned with desired outcomes, organizations can implement improvements across the end-to-end flow that meaningfully enhance value delivery.
3. Practical Tools for Real-World Application
We’ve heard your feedback: you want more actionable guidance. The DA Knowledge Base offers a rich collection of curated practices across Agile, Lean, and Value Stream Management. But with so many options, it can be difficult to know where to begin. Teams and leadership groups—such as PMOs—often feel overwhelmed or stuck by the sheer volume of choices.
Disciplined Agile Quick Starts address this challenge by answering the critical question: “What should we do next?” These are thoughtfully recommended starting points that highlight high-impact options along the DA Ways of Working spectrum.
Quick Starts are especially helpful for those new to Agile or transitioning to a hybrid approach. With an experienced coach, teams can navigate these choices more effectively—but even without one, Quick Starts offer a practical on-ramp to Disciplined Agile. They jumpstart discovery and improvement by providing a focused, actionable place to begin.
4. Simplified, Universal Values
We’ve streamlined our principles around four core universal values:
- Respect People & Planet: Create sustainable, ethical environments where individuals thrive while acknowledging our broader environmental responsibilities.
- Optimize Value Delivery: Focus on delivering meaningful value efficiently by streamlining processes, eliminating waste, and prioritizing high-impact work.
- Relentless Improvement: Continuously enhance processes, skills, and outcomes through experimentation, feedback, and reflection.
- Be Pragmatic: Make realistic, context-sensitive choices based on specific situations rather than rigidly following predefined approaches.
These four universal values provide a foundational guide for applying the DA toolkit effectively, ensuring that process choices and improvement efforts remain grounded in principles that consistently lead to better performance and sustainable success.
5. Scalable Concepts for Better Alignment
Value Increments and Innovation Increments serve as powerful alignment mechanisms bridging strategic vision and execution. They provide a common vehicle that connects leadership priorities to team-level workflow, ensuring everyone from the C-suite to delivery teams shares understanding and purpose.
New Offerings That Deliver Real Value
We launched our first two DA Next offerings on April 29th:
- DA Essentials: A 1-hour introduction to DA, its decision framework and knowledge base.
- DA Foundations: An 8-hour class equipping project managers and team leaders with practical skills to optimize team workflows
Coming later in 2025, our flagship offering:
- DA Leadership: A transformative 8-hour program preparing leaders to understand value stream management, optimize end-to-end value delivery, and drive organizational agility
What makes these offerings different is our signature approach: teaching practical skills on how to use the DA knowledge base to start where you are and improve incrementally. We recognize that every organization has a unique context, culture, and set of goals—there is no one-size-fits-all solution for agility.
We’re Just Getting Started
DA Next represents an ongoing evolution. As the co-creators of the next generation of Disciplined Agile, we’re continuing to enhance our knowledge base, develop more actionable tools, and refine our approach based on your feedback and real-world implementation experiences.
What challenges do you face in achieving organizational agility? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.
Curtis Hibbs & Joshua Barnes – The Co-Creators of DA Next