Why 5D Agile? Do we really need another project methodology?

In 2020, I published Be The Five, which as you might have worked out was about the Be The Five methodology.  This took you through the five steps of Discuss, Discover, Decide, Design and Deliver as a way of designing and delivering your digital and transformational strategies and plans.

5D Agile is the framework that sits within the Deliver phase of the Be The Five methodology. And here's why it’s important. 

Digital and transformational projects are on the increase. Research shows that spend in these areas is likely to be in the trillions of dollars a year. And yet projects continue to fail to deliver the expected benefits with research showing that up to 95% did. Hence Be The Five, or more accurately Be In The Five Percent That Succeed. 

The book in essence takes you through five issues that arise in digital projects, which stem from: 

A lack of Clarity, Knowledge, Strategy, Plan and Success. Each section correlates with Discuss, Discover, Decide, Design and Deliver respectively. 

So that's the background, and from there we get into Delivery. But Delivery has come from an understanding of what's happening in your business or industry, what is happening externally and what tools are available, which come together to build the strategy, which leads to an annual plan and then we have to deliver the plan. 

In this instance the Strategy, (where are we now, where do we want to be and how are we going to bridge the gaps), leads into focusing on the Plan, (what can we deliver this financial year). Following the Plan will be the business case. In this model the business case is straightforward and in Local Government it might look something like:

Strategy - Housing wants to achieve X over the next five years. We can help them on this journey by undertaking three digital projects which are x1, x2 and x3.

Plan - We can only resource for one of these projects this financial year, the one that will give the most benefit is x2.

Business Case - By investing £X into project x2, we will help Housing to get from where they are today to what they want to achieve. There is an expected ROI on this project of £X. 

So we’re already starting to move into an agile environment, just be setting up our strategy and plan in the right way to be able to simplify the business case process, as in theory with a properly written strategy we’ve semi-approved the projects to be delivered already. Or as the Agile Manifesto might say we've achieved “Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount of work not done--is essential”.

So onto 5D Agile.

We’re now going to be delivering the project. As I’ve said before, Agile Project Management is project management done in an agile way. It is not Scrum or DSDM or any other product development methodology or framework. Project management is still project management. 

But we can still apply the Agile principles to how we deliver our projects. And similar to all frameworks, adapt them to work for you. 

5D Agile and our ditch software, are therefore our interpretation of how we think Agile Project Management can be simplified in organisations that traditionally have a lot of governance. Borne out of decades of working in a sector that thrives on governance. 

5D Agile is really a blend of Prince2, Scrum and Be The Five to help you consistently deliver excellent digital and transformational projects that really succeed. We’re not a generic productivity tool like so many so-called project management systems. 

Our framework is very simple. We break projects into timeboxes (of which you control the length), Each timebox of a project is called a Race, each week of a timebox is called a Lap. Timeboxes are then broken into Tasks and Actions. Each task and action is given a category. Unsurprisingly these are Discuss, Discover, Decide, Design and Deliver. 

We have done this to ensure that we have a complete audit of all the work undertaken on a project, but more so we want to make sure that IT / Digital are having the right conversations with colleagues at the right time (Discuss Tasks). We want to ensure that we are undertaking research, doing show and tells, understanding pressures (Discover Tasks). We want to ensure that any decisions made are captured and recorded helping to give the project team autonomy to make these (Decide Tasks). We want any design ideas to have been captured, why did we build it that way, or why did we choose that process, (Design Tasks). And finally what did we actually do in each race (Deliver Tasks). 

We are trying to capture a complete view of the project through our very quick and easy to use system which provides simple reporting at the end of each race or each project. It allows the project team to reflect on how well delivered the project was adn to improve their delivery (another agile manifesto principle). It provides a level of governance across the projects to see that conversations are happening, decisions are benign made, and a simple reports structure that can pull tasks by type. It also means that in a year's time we can look back on projects and understand why it was completed the way it was based on the information at the time. 

So Agile and 5D Agile aren't about not having governance or not recording information. As I said above agile project management is project management done in an agile way. You won’t be surprised then to know that the system has a risks and issues log too. But we’ve made this simple to use as well. 

Projects still need to be run properly, being agile is not an excuse to make shortcuts. So do we need another methodology? No we don’t, but in giving you a framework to adapt to your organisations needs, we’re helping you move forwards to being an agile project manager.

For a free demo or trial of ditch - please contact us at www.ditchpm.co.uk