Think “Organizational Agility” when using Scrum@Scale

Most organizations I work with already feel the stress and strain of operating in today’s high-speed, complex, and uncertain world. Many authors have written for organizations to survive in this turbulent economy, they need to learn to live with complexity, not just try to reduce it. This requires an institution-wide mindset and an organizational architecture that allows for adaptability and flexibility, enabling quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions and demands. 

One of the Agile frameworks, Scrum, is well suited for working with complexity and uncertainty. Scrum teams obtain frequent feedback on short, fixed time periods to adjust when needed, thus reducing risk while ensuring they are delivering value. But to think that the benefits could stop at the team level might be a bit premature.

What about the organization? How can we make an organization better prepared to deal with rapidly changing demands? This is where Scrum@Scale comes into play.

There’s a common misconception about scaling Scrum. I often hear “scaling Scrum means just more Scrum teams.” It’s not unusual for this statement to be made with a cynical tone full of sarcasm. While scaling Scrum does tend to add more Scrum teams, there’s more to scaling Scrum than adding Scrum teams. A whole lot more.

The more successful companies who have scaled Scrum already realized that scaling Scrum involves the evolution of the whole organization, not simply adding Scrum teams in one area of the company. Because, in reality, to get a product or service out the door, it rarely is up to just one person or team – it can and does take a village. If teams can quickly get a product ready for launch, but the rest of the organization or your customers aren’t ready, you’ve lost.

Over time, there will be a point in your Agile transformation journey where the “newer” approaches of Scrum impacts how your organization has traditionally operated. I find that when 20-30% of the teams use Scrum to produce products but the rest of the organization continues to do what it has done before, this causes significant churn that ripples across the organization. Management and executives tend to want to control the change or standardize Scrum processes across all teams (for consistency), which can hamper the benefits of trying to scale Scrum.

Scrum@Scale is about business agility, putting in the “minimum viable bureaucracy” to enable the organization to hum. This means involving managers and executives in the overall process of delivering solutions to your clients and/or creating new market opportunities. Everyone becomes involved in the product, from marketing, sales, contracts/procurement, finance, customer support, and so forth.

Does this mean that your entire organization needs to flip to Scrum and running sprints on Day 1? No. But, it does require the organization to take a different perspective – it’s a switch from “how do I (or how does my department) keep itself as efficient as possible” to “how do we as a company reach our goals and service our customers with value as effectively as possible?”

Scrum@Scale is a framework that builds off of Scrum, describing a set of patterns to help increase organizational effectiveness. For your organization to operate better, there will be a change from the status quo, which is hard work. Based upon your pain points and opportunities, Scrum@Scale states that you address those situations first to a reasonable level of resolution, then move to the next pain point or opportunity. Over time, the organization organically addresses issues most important to itself, while also learning how to work together as a cohesive unit, not just optimizing one area over another. With organizational agility, companies are better suited to compete in today’s turbulent (and exciting!) world.

Steven Martin is a certified Scrum@Scale (S@S) Trainer who has helped many companies, from startups to Fortune 500, become more effective organizations using Agile approaches. The next S@S workshop will be in DC, August 23 & 24th, 2018. For more info, see https://bit.ly/2zJPHvd