Do You Mean Scaling Agile or Business Agility?
True “business agility” is quite difficult for most larger organizations. It means having the whole company embrace agile concepts. The effect is amazing as it creates a truly agile company, one that can move in lockstep with the market and adjust internal marketing, finance, business strategy and execution more seamlessly. Whether you call this Teal like Frederic Laloux, having an Agile Company, embracing Enterprise Agility, or you actually understand Business Agility, it’s probably even more rare than I suspect most people think.
Where all companies start on the road to Business Agility is by slowly expanding on their initial success one step at a time. Frequently, agile starts with one early adopter team that uses new ways of thinking and new agile processes to achieve some kind of success that wasn’t quite possible before. Often this evolves organically as more teams try to mimic the success of the first early adopter. Soon after, perhaps an executive legitimizes the approach and helps amplify its success, giving credence to the movement and sponsorship to the new ways of working. Gradually, this turns into a movement as it takes over the culture and more employees work on agile teams and embrace the agile mindset.
At this point, it becomes critical that the company embrace some sort of approach to “scaling agile” because the complexities of larger solutions, the dependencies between solutions, and the political capital needed to include all of the stakeholders, subject matter experts and middle management on a growing number of agile teams becomes insurmountable otherwise. In fact, this is likely the point where a lot of agile transformations fail. If the culture doesn’t pervade the layers of middle management and everywhere else agile teams have dependencies, there will be too much resistance to progress and work will revert back to doing things the old way. Finance and HR can also be critical blockers in terms of annual budgets, project approval processes, staffing and hiring constraints, and even just including agile roles in official job descriptions, etc.
A colleague of mine and I spent some time trying to write what it means to scale agile. Given the context above, my hope is that by sharing these words you find something here that can help you and your organization as well:
The word scaling refers to the ability to extend beyond the original scope; applying concepts, strategies, and resources to a greater or expanded purpose. Scaling agile means that we are adopting agile principles and mindsets beyond the individual team level, to other layers of the organization.
Scaling agile requires commitment from both the leaders and teams to align on strategic intent, and a willingness to work together in a transparent manner to lead from a common customer-centric, product vision.
Scaling requires a new way of thinking as well as a new way of working. The scaling structure and scaling ceremonies should not be thought of in a hierarchical or organizational context. The scaling agile processes are exclusively centered around applying new ways of thinking and working to enable the delivery of business and customer outcomes by allowing teams-of-teams to truly own their work in a structure that brings together the necessary teams and individuals regardless of organizational constraints. By doing so, we focus on the right opportunities, optimize the flow of value to end users, highlight delays and challenges and ultimately work together toward achieving business agility.
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About the Author: Brian Link is the author of AgileMisconceptions.com (also available on Amazon) and the owner of Practical Agilist, LLC. Brian provides leadership and coaching services as an Agile Coach at LeanDog. Follow Brian on Twitter @blinkdaddy or LinkedIn, and subscribe to his newsletter.
