What are the challenges of scaling agile practices across large organizations?

Coordination Across Multiple Teams or Solutions: As organizations scale, they must coordinate efforts across numerous teams and solutions. Ensuring consistent communication, alignment, and collaboration becomes complex, especially when teams work on distinct aspects of a solution. Integrating Legacy Systems and Processes: Enterprises often have existing and long-standing legacy systems and processes. Integrating these with agile practices can be herculean, as it requires balancing the need for modernization and innovation with maintaining systemic stability and operational readiness.

Hey Jeff nice to hear from you buddy. I have adopted this shift and welcomed the resistance. That is the perfect opportunity to collaborate on the shift. The resistance is the point of them learning more about how this works, their questions drive the conversation. As you know we don't shy away from resistance. As a coach, we are always prepared to share the efficiency and effectiveness of the process. Thanks sir

As organizations grow, managing coordination across multiple teams and solutions becomes increasingly complex. Effective communication and alignment are crucial to maintaining collaboration when teams handle different solution aspects. Additionally, integrating legacy systems and processes with agile methodologies poses a significant challenge. It requires a delicate balance between embracing innovation and ensuring the stability and readiness of long-established systems.

One of the most important pointer for scaling in Agile across a bigger organization is the cultural shift. Most of the employees have a tendency to try to follow the existing processes and are very susceptible to changes. Agile is more of a philosophy which helps us deliver faster product into the market by leveraging tools and skillsets. So education and trainings also play a vital part in this shift. As we all know change is the only constant and adapting to it may take some time but its worth every penny and it starts with teams gathering together and adhering to its practices in smaller teams and then gradually implementing it to the broader company.

A transi??o cultural é um aspecto importante para a ado??o de práticas ágeis em escala, pois n?o se trata somente de desenvolvimento de software mas, também, de mudan?a de postura, de atitude. E essa mudan?a depende da maturidade das pessoas. A colabora??o deve prevalecer entre diferentes departamentos, e neste ponto o alinhamento de objetivos devem ser comuns a todos na companhia para minimizar o comportamento de 'nós versus eles'. Essa é uma mudan?a de todos da organiza??o, independente da hierarquia de cargos e posi??es.

Coordination within the team and across is one of the challenge when introducing agility within an organization. Setting up right expectations and dependencies can help in team coordination and smooth deliveries. Team Ambassadors can help in knowledge sharing cross team communication effectively.

One would assume that the concept of an ART practiced in SAFe would remove coordination hurdles. While it helps, there are still significant knowledge gaps that further lead to these hurdles in coordination. One good recommendation is to have baseline knowledge for everything so that as these coordination challenges arise, everyone has a minimum level of expertise to tackle them.

é preciso ter clareza dos acordos que todos devem respeitar para se trabalhar em conjunto. Transparência nos processos e responsabilidade individual podem promover uma 'autonomia consciente' do grupo de trabalho, onde cada indivíduo sabe o que é esperado dele e até onde pode ir. Estabelecer um ambiente seguro é um dos pontos importantes para considerar ao escalar a agilidade.

Be agile with your team definition. Define teams based on the scope they work on, not the expertise they have. Scope definition should aim to breakdown workloads to as small as possible, but in a large organization, multiple sets of expertise may be needed to achieve this workload. Collect the right team members based on the scope and keep them as one team till the workload is done. Plan ahead to make sure each expert has scope to work on moving forward, even if as part of different teams, based on the needs of each scope he'll be part of. Track the progress to make sure the experts are released on time from their current team to join the next, and keep backup plans in case of delays.

Na integra??o de processos é sempre interessante ter em mente a transparência, a inspe??o e a adapta??o (embora seja fortemente ligado ao scrum este s?o pilares inerentes a qualquer processo ágil). Mapeie o processo, estruture os pontos de conex?o, experimente, me?a, aprenda e melhore. A quest?o n?o é a prática de negócio tradicional que foi estabelecida, e sim o quanto há de abertura haja melhoria contínua.

user stories must be clearly defined and have tags to refer to dependency, where leads need broad knowledge/scope. this helps teams to move in the right direction.

Na minha vis?o, ao escolher pela implementa??o de um framework de escala é preciso entender quais s?o as premissas consideradas por cada um. Que tipo de ambiente, cultura, estrutura, perfis e outros. E o qu?o disposta está a empresa em atender as essas premissas. Caso contrário, a 'culpa' cairá sobre o framework adotado que n?o atende as necessidades da empresa. Claro que sempre é possível fazer adapta??es, mas é preciso ter clareza do que ganhará e o que perderá no caminho.

Investir em trilhas de aprendizado para melhor desempenhar sua fun??o e adquirir conhecimento s?o fundamentais, assim como, experiências práticas através de workshops utilizando casos reais e palpáveis do dia a dia do profissional. Reter conhecimento é uma capacidade cada dia mais valorizada nas empresas.

The major issue is lack of dedication and team fatigue. Agile demands constant focus, productivity is measured mostly on the short term and past success is soon forgotten since each milestone is very small and there are so many of them. This makes it hard to celebrate large achievements and quickly team members become jaded with the need to deliver value, as they have done so many times, but there's also so many to go. Fatigue is also accelerated by the constant wish of younger resources to get promoted or advance to other roles. As small success happens fast with Agile, quickly team members become tiered of the role they are in and are looking to move on, which disrupts the agile pipeline. Managers must keep backup plans to cope.

People are at the core of any transformation and Nurturing their development and growth is non-negotiable. When transformations happen particularly agile transformations, it changes how decisions are being made, how teams are structured, how success is measured in and many more things that have a direct and indirect impact on people. So for a transformation to succeed, making people understand what is in it for them will accelerate their onboarding and bring in their proactive participation. Agile mindset and principles should go hand in hand to internalize within teams in every act and decision. Valuing people and their inputs will go a long way in overcoming collaboration hurdles in the transformation journey.

Enterprises often overemphasize the process and tooling automation aspects of the ‘how’ to scale and underestimate the importance of accommodating and designing for employee needs and culture change. In my experience: (1) A scaling framework that continually builds on an inventory of agile use cases helps make the ‘how’ simple for practitioners to integrate into their delivery practices (2) Cross-functional forums that encourage & enable practitioners to collaborate and unite around standards/practices to tailor delivery approach/methodology, is typically the secret sauce (3) Learning maps that mature employee capabilities towards enterprise agility goals along with individual/team rewards & incentives aligned to them are critical nudges