I’m opening the Lifecycle box
According to an ancient story (or rather an epic poem by Hesiod), Pandora had a box (or rather a jar of the 7th century BC) which was full of gifts from the Gods and Pandora was not allowed to open it. Pandora was curious and she couldn’t resist. So there she goes opening the box:
Out from the jar flew every trouble known to humanity. Pandora managed to keep one spirit in the jar as she shut the lid, a timid sprite named Elpis, usually translated as “hope.”
I have heard stories by old and wise CORBA application programming practitioners, of how the Box still exists today in the hand of the Gods and if you open it you will find lifecycles and hope 🕊️.
I thought of this story today during a conversation on Lean start-up principles. Principles may not mean much to people. What is usually expected is a more of an efficient and effective mechanism that streamlines work. And this is called a lifecycle.
Agile teams and UX designers accept the reality that the ‘right answer’ is unknowable up-front. Teams apply a process to avoid the Big Design Up-front (BDUF is one of my favourite acronyms), that involves empathising with users, defining the problem, and ideating, prototyping and validating the solution, to test their hypotheses/strategies incrementally. That’s a great story. For some, this might be trouble being let out of a box 📦.
Ok. Now let’s forget troubles. Let’s focus on what else is there.
Lean UX is not panacea (in Greek mythology, Panacea was a goddess of universal remedy). It is just one of the tools that are used to support the agile delivery lifecycle. DAD on the other hand explicitly focuses on the entire delivery lifecycle and all aspects of solution delivery.
Did I say DAD of God? (Greeks typically pronounce God as “GAD” so… 😀)
Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) is a people-first, learning-oriented hybrid agile approach to IT solution delivery. It has a risk-value delivery lifecycle, is goal-driven, is enterprise aware, and is scalable. Discipline Agile (DA) is a hybrid toolkit that builds upon the solid foundation of other methods and software process frameworks.
In particular, DAD has been identified as a means of moving beyond scrum because it focuses on the full delivery lifecycle.
DAD’s Lean lifecycle applies the lean principles that we’ve talked about to a series of comprehensive steps. That’s much better.
The Disciplined Agile (DA) tool kit supplies straightforward guidance:
https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/lifecycle/lean-lifecycle
What a great lifecycle box set you have there! Lovely. Have a look at more frameworks and open more boxes:
