DAC Enterprise Agile Transformation 3 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A DA Coach is advising on restructuring a 5,000-person IT organization. Which DA concept guides how to balance team autonomy with enterprise consistency?
- Guided continuous improvement
- Constrained autonomy (Correct answer)
- Inspect and adapt cycles
- Portfolio Kanban
Correct answer: Constrained autonomy
DA's 'constrained autonomy' principle allows teams freedom within enterprise guardrails, balancing local optimization with global coherence.
Question 2: When using DA's Inception phase at the enterprise level, what is the CRITICAL deliverable?
- A fully detailed project plan with fixed milestones
- A lightweight business case with initial stakeholder alignment (Correct answer)
- A signed contract with all external vendors
- A completed org chart for the transformed organization
Correct answer: A lightweight business case with initial stakeholder alignment
DA's Inception phase produces a lightweight business case and aligns key stakeholders, avoiding over-planning before learning begins.
Question 3: An enterprise agile transformation is failing because teams are agile but governance processes remain waterfall. What DA concept addresses this root cause?
- Disciplined DevOps
- Lean governance (Correct answer)
- Continuous delivery
- Value stream mapping
Correct answer: Lean governance
DA's lean governance concept modernizes governance processes to support iterative delivery rather than requiring phase-gate approvals.
Question 4: In the DA toolkit, which process blade is MOST focused on managing dependencies between agile teams at scale?
- Disciplined DevOps
- Continuous Improvement
- Coordinate Activities (Correct answer)
- Release Management
Correct answer: Coordinate Activities
The 'Coordinate Activities' process blade in DA specifically addresses how teams synchronize and manage cross-team dependencies.
Question 5: A DAC practitioner notices that the enterprise transformation has created 'agile islands' — isolated agile teams surrounded by traditional processes. What is the recommended approach?
- Protect the agile islands and let them grow organically over time
- Expand transformation systematically to adjacent value streams and support functions (Correct answer)
- Replace all remaining waterfall teams with Scrum teams immediately
- Hire external agile consultants to transform all remaining departments at once
Correct answer: Expand transformation systematically to adjacent value streams and support functions
DA recommends systematically expanding transformation to adjacent areas, connecting agile teams to supporting functions to eliminate the surrounding constraints.
Question 6: How does DA's Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) differ from team-level Scrum in an enterprise context?
- DAD replaces Scrum roles with traditional project management roles
- DAD provides a more complete lifecycle including enterprise concerns like architecture and governance (Correct answer)
- DAD eliminates retrospectives in favor of formal audits
- DAD requires teams to work in 4-week sprints exclusively
Correct answer: DAD provides a more complete lifecycle including enterprise concerns like architecture and governance
DAD extends beyond Scrum by addressing the full delivery lifecycle including enterprise architecture, data management, and governance concerns.
Question 7: Which DA principle recognizes that different parts of an enterprise may legitimately need different agile approaches simultaneously?
- One size fits one (Correct answer)
- Standardize on a single framework
- Normalize agile ceremonies across all teams
- Apply SAFe to all business units
Correct answer: One size fits one
DA's 'one size fits one' principle acknowledges that different teams and contexts within the same enterprise may need different ways of working.
DAC Enterprise Agile Transformation 3
A DA Coach is advising on restructuring a 5,000-person IT organization.
Which DA concept guides how to balance team autonomy with enterprise consistency?