Agile Scale-Up to differentiate your business from the competition

It's time for your business to scale toward agile transformation with the right framework, focus, and technology to deliver more value, faster. Scaling with Agile enables teams across an organization to use agile frameworks and techniques to transform the way work is done and improve products or services delivered to end-users.

Thus, your company will be able to achieve significant changes at all levels: you will have more committed staff, more productive teams , and a real impact on income and final results. But most importantly: Agile Scale Up isn't about creating more efficient teams, it's about differentiating the business.

What does it mean to "scale" Agile methodologies?

You may be thinking of a mountain, a video game, or your birthday, and that's okay. In all of them, you need to overcome adversity, and as you get older, you need more coordination. The same thing happens with agile teams: by the time you realize it, you will be coordinating new goals that exceed the ones you already climbed.

Agile Scale-Up refers to the process of translating established agile methods, such as Scrum and Kanban, to larger groups of people. It's an impactful approach for organizations that already use Agile practices and want to transition in a way that is both streamlined and robust.

It advocates simplicity versus strictly defined processes, and as companies see success in these small groups, they want to replicate it across a larger team, department, or organization. That's where agile scaling makes a difference.

Why should you use it in your company?

This method maintains the focus on creating value while allowing for flexibility and change, allowing leadership to be exercised with minimal disruption to organizational flow.

To achieve this, Agile Scale-Up requires extending Agile principles beyond software development to the rest of the business, both horizontally and vertically. However, putting the Agile set of beliefs into practice can be difficult in large companies, especially in areas such as Human Resources, Finance, and Legal, where there is a world of consecutive responsibilities and tasks to fulfill.

With a scaled agile approach , companies can integrate Agile values into their own organization and development culture, making reasonable modifications when necessary to achieve a balance between availability and workload that is aligned with teams and periodically reassessed. , often every trimester.

Agile Scale Up can generate enormous benefits at all levels of the organization, let's look at some of the most important:

? Align strategy and work

Scaling with Agile connects the company's higher-level goals with the people responsible for achieving them. This alignment fosters transparency, drives team coordination, enables faster response times, and increases agility if focus or market changes.

? Improves capacity management

Management benefits from persistent and stable teams with historical metrics around delivery, so they can make informed decisions about who can take on how much and what kind of work.

? Facilitates ART planning

Agile Scale-Up emphasizes creating Agile Release Trains (ART) or teams of teams, which involves bringing people from multiple functions and departments together under the same command. This can occur across the enterprise in an end-to-end value chain or within departments (such as DevOps), to better align and coordinate.

? Enables visibility across the Enterprise

Scaling with Agile enables transparency across the company by connecting and visualizing the work of each team. As a result, leaders and managers gain an overview of potential risks and can make informed decisions to assign work appropriately.

? Involve employees more

Agile Scale-Up generates such confidence and autonomy that it translates directly into happier and more engaged employees, which in turn benefit the business with lower turnover rates, higher productivity, and greater satisfaction.

How many agile frameworks exist?

Scaling Agile Frameworks are a cultural transformation where people, practices, and business tools are integrated to improve collaboration and ability to execute against your strategy.

Each of the following 6 frameworks approaches Agile scaling differently, and there are still more frameworks to explore, where everyone recognizes that it is a challenging process with obstacles that every organization must overcome.?

If you ask me what is the best framework to choose, it will depend on the needs, background, and personality of the teams in your business:

1. Scaled Agile Framework? (SAFe?): It is a knowledge base of proven and integrated principles, practices, and competencies to achieve business agility through Lean, Agile, and DevOps. Includes planning at the team, program, and portfolio levels.

2. Disciplined Agile (DA): It is a set of tools aimed at emphasizing team roles through a goal-driven approach that makes it more flexible than other agile scaling frameworks.

3. Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS): LeSS addresses the challenge of scaling Agile through the specific lens of Scrum, helping organizations discover how to apply the principles, purpose, and elements of Scrum in a large-scale context. , in the simplest way possible.

4. Scrum?Scale: Created by Dr. Jeff Sutherland, co-creator of Scrum and the Scrum Guide. It is a lightweight and adaptable scaling framework known for 'minimal viable bureaucracy' through scale-free architecture and for empowering every member of the Scrum team. "Scrum at Scale combines two cycles, the Scrum Master Cycle, and the Product Owner Cycle, to coordinate the efforts of multiple teams throughout the organization.

5. Nexus: It was created by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum, to scale Scrum using the principles of inspection and adaptation, showing the journey these teams take when they come together, how they share the work between teams, and how they manage and minimize dependencies. Use a single product backlog (or Product Backlog) to serve multiple teams; This work is then integrated and sent to a separate team.

6. Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD): It was created by Scott Ambler and Mark Lines. This framework recommends three phases: initiation, construction, and transition. It builds on existing agile techniques and uses startup, builds, and transition phases. It helps in the areas of architecture and design in the initial phase and is ideal for implementation with DevOps (transition phase).

Attributes to evaluate for a transforming Agile Scale Up

The Institute of Software Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University identified eight attributes to consider when scaling Agile as organizations create programs that implement processes:

1. Team size

2. Role specialization

3. Length of iteration

4. Synchronized cadence

5. Definition of release

6. Lot size

7. Role of the product owner

8. User role

Each of these components plays a role in successful agile scaling, but getting it "right" is a complex task. Just applying traditional Agile principles to a larger group of people is not enough. For that reason, I recommend using an agile scaling framework to guide all of these efforts.

Extra: Did you already know the Spotify model ?

Because here we love to continue learning, I share the case of the Spotify model, an autonomous framework that relies on people to scale the agile methodology. It's a great example of dealing with multiple teams in a product development organization, and it represents Spotify's point of view on scaling from both a technical and a cultural perspective.

It came out in 2012 when Henrik Kniberg and Anders Ivarsson published the white paper “Scaling Agile @ Spotify,” where they presented a summary of their engineering teams on how they were approaching agility in the company.

Naturally, the model was the boom among Agile organizations, who tried to apply what Spotify did. And although at first glance the model is simple, if the company does not change its behavior (open to change) or culture (they stick only to what they know), the environment will become complex.

Read more about the case to create an organization that works fast with autonomy and a purpose, and if you are thinking of implementing it as well, first solve the culture and structure of your organization. Where are you right now and where do you want to go?

Conclusion

Agile companies are growing better than companies that still follow traditional business strategies by decentralizing decision-making, creating greater transparency and a better fit around work, and increasing speed to market.

It is imperative to innovate and scale with the agile participation of leaders , a well-defined customer base, knowing the business value, maintaining integrated teams, implementing continuous improvements, and adopting an iterative approach to transcend the company culture, allowing these new values to prevail in the company over time.

Caro Salazar/ Founder Design Thinking Sweden AB.

Download in Spanish.