Scaling Agile
Is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?
The article is part of the miniseries: “Agile Frame of Mind.”
In the previous article, we identified the pitfalls of messy agile. Let’s move up with the agile done right and scale it across all levels of the organization.
Agile teams are elegant disruptors walking on a thin line between organizational efficiency and innovative agility. Champions in flexibility, they quickly adapt to living with rigid hierarchies leading to an agile-harmonized bureaucracy. By getting leadership onboard, they gradually but surely infuse all cells of the organizational body with agile values and principles… until one day it becomes an agile enterprise.
Agile at scale focuses on improving performance of agile teams within the bureaucratic system. On a contrary, agile enterprise transforms business processes, systems, and operations.
Turning a dream into reality is never easy. To start, we will define how agile teams operate and why to scale. After all, is the whole greater than the sum of its parts?
A quick Agile profile would look like this:
- Topics of interest: Customer satisfaction, Business innovation
- Collaboration style: Harmonizer — builds trust and respect between team members.
- Working environment: Fast-paced, risk-tolerant & tenacious
- Favorite roles: Product Owner, Scrum Master, Functional Subject Expert
- Main values: Adaptability, Transparency, Continuous improvement
- Appreciates: Experimentation, Constant Feedback, Autonomy
Two things that might come as a surprise: 1. Core premise of agile is improving shareholder satisfaction i.e. better financial results. 2. Individually, agile teams perform better than traditional project teams. Collectively, they don’t improve company’s overall innovation velocity (low flow efficiency). To address those two surprises, organizations adopt agility across the enterprise.
The agile enterprise playbook starts with leadershp in capital letters. Due to the scope of transformation, they are on frontline to personally experience the fruits of agile labor. The first steps are compiling a backlog of corporate priorities and removing companywide impediments down the road. Chasing the grand goals might be delusional if not focused on right initiatives. Leadership that embraces agility sets the agile priorities: time-bound, high-risk, customer-centric solutions yielding to higher reward. Benefits of the strategy, assumptions, and sequence of activities are identified in the enterprise backlog.
Understanding the key customer priorities starts with mapping user experience (the Discovery phase). The second step is to establish alignment with business processes. Finally, identify the technology that enables agile processes and align right people to deploy. Steps to understand:
User Stories → Business Processes → IT Systems → Agile Teams → Journey Begins!
The road to an agile enterprise has lots of bumps but it is worth taking. Spotify is the leading example of scaling agile using its own model.
Besides the wide-spread terminology: Squads, Tribe, Chapter, Guild… Spotify created the ever-evolving scaling model (initially for the engineering department) with unique characteristics:
- Agile Teams (Squads) pursue a long-term mission using minimum viable product (MVP) principle. “Think it, Build it, Ship it, Tweak it”
- Learning environment “hack days” allows squads the divergent thinking. Each squad has access to an agile coach
- Tribes combine several squads in a total of 100 people or less
- Continuous feedback collection through squad surveys highlights the areas of improvement and existing roadblocks
- Squad dependencies are minimized. The Operations team supports the Development team by “building the road to production”
- Knowledge exchange happens through Chapters and Guilds
Note: The Spotify model can be adapted in the culture and architecture similar to Spotify’s.
The other popular framework of scaling agile is Scrum of Scrum. Awesome workspace, whiteboard, and sticky notes apply to all agile models.
An agile enterprise is indeed greater than the aggregation of individual teams. It flows in harmony between operational efficiency and unpredictable business opportunities. The holistic transformation is not an end itself but the continuous evolvement to build a sustainable enterprise adaptable to customer needs.
Bonus: HR can widely benefit from Agile processes. Employee centricity with quick wins instead of massive undertakings can help the function to innovate (discussed in a separate article).
References:
- Rigby, D., Elk, S., Berez, S. (2020). Doing Agile Right: Transformation Without Chaos. https://www.bain.com/insights/books/doing-agile-right/
- Kniberg, H., Ivarsson, A. (2012). Scaling Agile @ Spotify. https://blog.crisp.se/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/SpotifyScaling.pdf
