Scalable Agile Frameworks for Strategic Solution Delivery

There are many methods and frameworks available for business to adopt to help with solution delivery and management.

Businesses want to be efficient and nimble and expect the solutions delivery to be quick so they can take the end products to markets in time. They want to try out new ideas quickly and retract those that do not get much traction without causing damage to their brand and reputation. As they say, businesses would like to ‘fail fast and fail forward’.

There is a cut-throat competition in the market and each day counts. Smaller and newer entrants have the advantage of taking the ‘first principles’ approach and adopt the tools and agile methodologies that suit them better to give them the needed competitive advantage over the bigger incumbents. Larger and mature businesses who have been following traditional methods are increasingly finding it necessary to adopt new ways of operating and they must make gradual changes to keep up with their nimbler, aggressive, and younger competition.

There are many flavours of agile methodologies in circulation since the early 2000s. However, the adoption rate of agile is relatively slow in the big businesses mainly because true adoption of agile requires transformational changes to the business’s operating models at all levels and so true adoption of agile is difficult to achieve. Also, the existing agile methodologies do not scale very well for large organizations and large organizations tend to get bogged down with all sorts of internal barriers, power struggles, and bureaucratic resistances to the changes.

The motivation behind agile methodologies is well understood and appreciated by business leaders, however the change is gradual. Large businesses find it hard to make the required shift and so they continue to use, albeit bespoke, traditional waterfall process to deliver change. Businesses have found ways to break down delivery of large programs into sufficiently smaller chunks or projects to deliver the most viable products effectively within their expected timelines. Given that these businesses are satisfied and are managing their need for quick deliver sufficiently well, they are not too eager to shift to a fully agile based operating model just yet.

Well established businesses leading in their industry with little competition, who run their business operations like a well-oiled machine, do not wish to introduce disruptions by making substantial changes to their operating models. They are not in a hurry and are perfectly fine continuing with their existing stable and established traditional processes. Unless business’s top brass believes agile transformation is the only recourse left for their survival, there is very little hope for change. That said, agile adoption is taking root in large organizations due to efforts of enthusiastic middle level managers, usually in pockets within the IT organizations, however it does not spill over any further outside of the IT organizations.

Agile delivery management is not a new concept; it has been gaining acceptance since the 2000s. Lately, adoption of agile methodology is certainly gaining momentum in all industries and plenty of research is available on the subject and many books have been written on this topic.

There are essentially two leading flavours of basic agile processes – Scrum process and Kanban. And then there is a hybrid approach mixing some aspects from both Scrum and Kanban together. Scrum is the older of the two approaches.

Under Scrum, teams commit to shipping working solution deliverable through set intervals called sprints. The idea is to iteratively develop the solution in small installments while learning from the experience and quickly gathering and integrating customer feedback. Scrum teams adopt specific roles, create short ‘just enough’ artifacts, and hold regular ‘ceremonies’ to keep things moving forward as quickly as the teams can handle. More details on Scum can be found online (e.g., Scrum Guides - scrumguides.org).

Kanban is all about visualizing the work as a flow of activities, limiting work in progress to match the cognitive capacity of the team, and maximizing efficiency. Kanban teams focus on reducing the time it takes to complete an activity (or a user story) from start to finish and do so by using the famous ‘Kanban board’ continuously improving their flow of work.

These agile processes work very well with newer start-ups and smaller IT organizations with fewer delivery teams (counting on fingers of hands); however, they have difficulty in scaling out within larger and more established businesses and therefore there is a need for scalable agile frameworks. As mentioned before the full benefits of agile can only be realized when all levels of organization adopt the agile operating models that include adoption of the right roles and agile DevSecOps processes with the right CI/CD tool chains.

See the article - Essential Capabilities for Strategic Planning

Under complete agile environment in a business all essential capabilities must adopt agile approach. In other words, the operating models for all the essential practices must be designed to work seamlessly in harmony with each other. This also means the operating model of architecture organizations must be redesigned to be agile. All essential agile teams collectively and collaboratively must perform the activities following the agile processes and produce the necessary ‘just enough’ deliverables required to complete the delivery of the outcomes against the stated business goals.

Agile adoption at the enterprise level can be very challenging, however there are a few options available for scalable agile frameworks that can be adopted by businesses to make it easier to scale out the agile methodology, not just within the IT organizations, but at all levels of within the business.?

Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

SAFe is a leading scaled agile framework in the industry. It is also a complex framework. It embeds the agile processes in all levels of business operations and caters the framework according to the size and complexity of the business. To adopt SAFe, the business must consider redesigning the operating models of at least strategic delivery parts of the business. This change must be mandated by the senior leaders to be successful.

The good news is SAFe provides very detailed documentation, training, and guidance at all levels of business for strategy execution, strategic assessments, and overall solution delivery in terms of – standing up appropriate operating models at all levels of business, governance structures and agile processes for managing lean portfolio, program, and product delivery for solutions of all sizes. This is one of the reasons for its popularity and good adoption rate.

There are plenty of great articles and documentation on SAFe framework available online, however for the most authoritative source on the subject refer to - https://scaledagile.com/

Scrum of Scrums (SoS)

Scrum of Scrum (SoS) focuses on mid-sized organizations with the main goal of providing an effective way to coordinate the work of several scrum teams. It still follows the agile process; however, it coordinates work of several scrum team by adding another higher layer scrum team to oversee the work of all the secondary scrum teams that are running the sprints.

To make sure all the operations are coordinated a scrum of scrum is held routinely. During the daily stand-up, each team delegates an ambassador to attend the scrum of scrum. Each ambassador reports the accomplishments and plans of their respective team in the scrum of scrum. Scrum of scrum has a separate backlog to track all the changes of all scrum teams and is aimed at solving coordination challenges between teams.

It works well for a relatively smaller businesses which have just outgrown their scrum teams that need better coordination among the teams. Within large businesses with federated organization structures, SoS is more likely to be used at the business unit level.

For more information on SoS you may want to refer to - https://www.atlassian.com/agile/scrum/scrum-of-scrums

Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)

Scrum is an efficient method to organize Agile teams. However, agile teams alone cannot plan, design, build, and release the solution on their own for a large scalable solution. The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework works around the limitations of the Scrum. In DAD the scrum teams are larger and consist of primary and secondary roles. The primary roles include the business stakeholders and roles responsible for leading and owning the product definitions and architecture. The secondary roles in the team make up the people doing the development, testing, and delivery.

This special team makeup addresses the issue of scale such that the team discusses what works, what does not, and why. Such teams over a period can increase the possibility of adopting approaches that eventually work better to deal with their unique situations.

DAD uses a hybrid approach that extends the concepts from various Agile frameworks- Kanban, Lean development, Extreme Programming, Agile Modeling, etc. Unlike Scrum, which is a prescriptive, DAD is a goal-driven approach.

For more information on DAD the reader may refer to - https://www.pmi.org/disciplined-agile/process/introduction-to-dad

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) is a scaled-up version of a one-team Scrum, there are multiple scrums however, all teams collectively focus on the same product delivery. LeSS maintains the basic practices of Scrum but has some differences. There is a product backlog, but it is for the entire product to be shared by all teams and not just by one team. There is only one definition of ‘Done’ for all the teams and all teams are in a common sprint delivering a shippable product.

In LeSS, coordination amongst the teams is the responsibility of the teams itself and there are no assigned outside coordinators. These teams coordinate through scrum meetings which include product owners, scrum masters, and rotating representatives from each team.

For more information on LeSS readers may want to refer to - https://less.works/

In Conclusion,

Businesses must find ways to move toward agile delivery models. They must consider performing current state maturity assessment in light of holistic agile adoption. They must identify gaps in their existing operating models for the essential capabilities delivering strategic changes and develop the right target operating models that leverage one of the above scalable agile frameworks to be able to holistically deliver the intended strategic changes effectively and efficiently.

Author: Sunil Rananavare, IT Strategy Planning and Architecture (CIO Advisory)

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The views in the article are author’s own and not necessarily of his employer.?