Being Agile is the default approach in smaller organisations

Squads, Chapters, Tribes, Guilds, Sprints, Retrospectives, minimise handoffs, reduce waste and be co-located.  Some form of these words and phrases became an integral part in my work life as I became part of a larger organisation that acquired us in 2012.  While going through my agile training, I had a lingering thought in my mind:  Why was I learning obvious things as widely accepted and effective concepts? This is exactly what we did as a smaller company.

I started working for a very large company with thousands of employees working on government contracts and having rigid processes.  A year later, I moved to a 20 people organisation and it was a culture shock for me. I had to go and talk to people to get work done, not fill a form or drop an email.  I figured this out quickly and observed that work got done at a rapid pace because everyone was reachable, that meant fewer contact points and minimal handoffs.   This collaborative approach allowed me to move from client services to collaborating development projects within 18 months.  Soon I became part of the product team and worked with sales to convert leads to actual clients.  I would joke that we were a grand total of three people who handled all product implementations.  Three years, I had rotated in all areas of the product lifecycle.  

The learnings in these initial years have laid the foundation for my approach to my entire professional career.  Starting with me, every person in my team had to have the required acumen to collaborate with anyone in the organisation:  This approach allowed us to build an extremely successful organisation over the years.  

Finally, effective Agile requires the team to comprise of good allrounders with individual areas of expertise, smaller organisations have this thought process as their default mode and allows them to transition to an effective Agile Unit as they get larger or are acquired.