Anthony Mersino October 6, 2020 I’ve been writing about Disciplined Agile (DA) since PMI bought them in 2019, including my recent post about the confusion around PMI Agile Certifications. It turns out that my earlier predictions about the marriage of PMI and DA were mostly correct!
On September 1, PMI announced their new approach for agile certifications. They have refined the 6 certifications they bought with disciplined agile, the existing PMI-ACP and a new one from Flex to create 5 certifications:
Given DA’s prior sniping about Scrum and their disdain for what they call prescriptive approaches, it is ironic to see two of the five certifications are for “Scrum Masters”. You can get all the details on the PMI site here: PMI Journey to Business Agility
PMI and Disciplined Agile Seem to be a non-Event
The thing is, while I have been banging on about PMI and the acquisition for the better part of the last year, most of you are yawning. So what, who cares? you seem to be saying.
Which makes me really curious. Is there really no appetite for Disciplined Agile adoption?
Are you disinterested because it is PMI? Or because it is Disciplined Agile? Are you comfortable with your SAFe or Scrum approaches and not interested in learning more? Is PMI not a credible source of training and certification leading to business agility?
And what happened to those people who were using Disciplined Agile before PMI bought them? These are questions I am very curious about. I would like to understand whether Disciplined Agile is going to flourish under PMI or quietly die.
So I looked to the publicly available information. Each year the VersionOne / Collabnet / digital.ai Annual State of Agile Report asks the question about the agile methodology used by respondents. Scrum is always the big winner with 70-80% of the respondents claiming it, depending on how you interpret the 9% who say they use other/hybrid/multiple methodologies (see below).
Later in the report, it shows the responses to the question of scaling method. Disciplined Agile Delivery gets 4% of the vote, on par with Large Scale Scrum (LeSS), Enterprise Scrum, and Lean Management. These are all dwarfed by SAFe and Scrum of Scrums.
I don’t know about you but 4% sounds high for DAD. I hear more about LeSS and in fact, I’ve yet to encounter a client who was using DAD, had used DAD, or wanted to use DAD.
Perhaps that is why no one is interested in the Disciplined Agile Certifications from PMI. If no one is interested, I can drop it like a hot potato.
This article originally appeared on Vitality Chicago’s Blog and has been republished with permission.
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