Agile@Scale - Some musings

Just last month the world celebrated 20th anniversary of agile manifesto that was written between 11-13 February 2001 by 17 thought leaders of software development. The agile world has come a long way with a lot of frameworks established based on those values and principles, concepts evolved, organizations and people benefitted and of course a lot of value created for businesses. It has been a rewarding journey for so many teams, and individuals like me of transforming the way of working.

Scaling agility across the organization has been a holy grail for years together. Much has been thought about and experimented on this subject. A small empowered team working in a self-organized manner is an essence of frameworks like scrum, however we may need several such teams working together to solve the complex problems faced by organizations, and that’s where the whole thinking about scaling agility starts.

Agile teams may think of vertical scaling when they think of scaling agility, taking their agility to the next level. For technical teams scaling agility may mean adopting advanced technical practices to be able to deliver changes in minutes and hours rather than months or days. For engineering leads, it may mean transforming to modern engineering practices of Cognitive DevSecOps with a focus on automation. For architects, it may mean following modern architecture patterns that are modular, scalable.

For scrum masters it may mean including teams outside of development team in scrum events to accelerate resolving impediments. For product owners, it may mean involving business stakeholders more in roadmap definition, reviews so business outcomes are maximized.

The real fun begins when we bring program managers, portfolio leads, enablement functions and leadership into the picture. They probably look at horizontal scaling. Replicating an agile team’s pattern elsewhere. Their thinking may be more broad based, focused on scaling agility across a program or an initiative or a portfolio. It may also mean scaling geographically or across departments or extending it to enablement functions. There may also be concerns around how we ensure security, compliance, or data privacy The business leadership may be looking at scaling agility to be more innovative and competitive in the market.

As per the 14th State of Agile Report, majority of the organizations use agile ways for software development. About a quarter use for IT, lesser % for operations and it’s a mere single digit percentage for enablement functions who have embraced agility. So this aspect of scaling is still a bit evolving.

Agile teams really benefit by embracing scrum, scrum is by far the most popular frameworks for teams. Of course teams add other practices or structures they believe would help such as XP practices, Kanban boards and so on. SAFe or Scaled Agile Framework is the largest framework used, used by almost 35% of organizations, followed by a curious 16% Scrum of scrums, which is not really a framework but a practice for collaboration. A lot of frameworks being used by < 5% and a large 28% says other or don’t know.

My interpretation of these numbers is that the Industry is still trying to figure out how to scale, a lot of organizations have found using a particular framework useful, about 60%, however remaining 40% are still using some practices or feel that they do not know.

Frameworks are great enablers. They give us set of rules, ideas, beliefs and describe the way certain things operate in business, or society. It’s of great help when one starts something new. Organizations love frameworks as those bring proven ready-to-use things and avoid re-inventing the wheel. A lot of our customers have benefited through SAFe, or scaling on the Spotify inspired structural constructs or using LeSS or Nexus or DAD.

However we must remember that frameworks may not be a silver bullet. I really loved Scott Ambler’s thought provoking presentations on #NoFrameworks where he raised valid questions. Sometimes the rules of the framework may not be applicable in the organization’s context. Sometimes the problem being solved by the frameworks may not exist in the organizations, or it may get solved using the framework, now what next? What if the best practices presented by a framework limit ideas or problem solving. One must consider these before adopting frameworks.

That’s where number of people who say they don’t know or simply use scrum of scrums is pretty large! There are also examples where organizations who mix practices from different frameworks to carve out a way of working and scaling most contextually suited for their organizations is pretty high. There are instances where customers invested heavily into frameworks, spent huge amount of money, later to realize that it does not work for them and moved to something else. While there is a war of frameworks in the agile scaling world, smart organizations pick and choose remembering that frameworks are only enablers, they should not box the organizations in!

The frameworks (whatever we pick and choose of those) provide us with methods and metrics, it is critical to also look at what mindsets and behaviors the organization needs to embrace to scale agility.

Another perspective that has fascinated me is based on work by Daniel North, Agility @ Scale requires both mindsets such as industrial as well as digital mindsets. Digital mindset is brought by empowered teams that build and run products tracking their own progress. The industrial mindset is brought by the leadership defining overall expectations, harvesting and amplifying component reuse, TechOps teams and so on. This leads to using the concept of autonomy with alignment.

Organizations need to continue build autonomous teams that are cross functional i.e. they have all the skills and capabilities within, those have the right resources and authority to deliver the business outcomes they have set out for. However to scale agility, organizations also need to create alignment of these teams by aligning their purpose, setting up constraints as rules or guard rails and ensuring that those are accountable for the work they do and the outcomes they produce.

Several other dimensions need to be considered as well such as developing a culture of collaboration that crosses departmental boundaries and builds thriving network communities while stable hierarchy provides efficiency and optimization.

 According to a Harvard Business Review research, some of the advanced agile organizations like Amazon, Netflix, Tesla, SpaceX, and so on broadly focus on four things to scale agility across the business which is 1) values and principles across different functions to create alignment and collaboration, 2) operating structures with focus on automation and modularization, 3) Talent acquisition and motivation strategy to encourage team behavior and 4) more agile Planning and budgeting cycles.

 The topic of agile @ scale is really enormous, I hope I could at least trigger some thoughts in your minds on things to watch out when organizations take the journey of scaling agility.