top 5 concerns in scaling agile - refinem · their time to achieving fully functional...
TRANSCRIPT
Contents
Introduction 3
Organizational Culture 4
Executive Support 6
Team Coordination 8
Choosing a Framework 10
Integrating Code 12
Conclusion 13
TOP 5 CONCERNS
IN SCALING AGILE
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Introduction
Organizations practicing agile at a mature level are likely to have realized many benefits throughout their agile journey. These benefits include greater customer participation and satisfaction, more consistent value delivery, and enhanced team empowerment and learning. Such benefits will be localized at first to the teams that have adopted agile. Once executives and change agents in the organization have seen the value of agile, they are likely to push for enterprise-wide agile adoption. To achieve this goal, the next step is to scale agile, which comes with its own set of challenges.
The journey to enterprise-wide agile has several critical steps. To scale agile, organizations need to add more teams and team coordination, build additional support infrastructure, and re-examine traditional delivery approaches to sustain a focus on frequent value delivery
with empowered teams across the enterprise. Successfully achieving enterprise-wide agile can result in greater value delivery capacity, agile awareness, and ability to handle large and complex projects in an agile way.
In this ebook, we describe five top concerns for successfully scaling agile. We also share tips for overcoming each concern.
TOP 5 CONCERNS
IN SCALING AGILE
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Organizational Culture
Can the organization’s culture support agile at an enterprise level?
Two key cultural factors determine whether an organization can transition successfully to enterprise-wide agile:
1. Does the organization embrace frequent value delivery at every level? Scaling agile will intensify any pushback against frequent value delivery since many scaling frameworks reinforce mechanisms for frequent, or even continuous, delivery. For example, Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) incorporates the Agile Release Train to support value delivery on a predictable basis.
2. Does the organization support empowered teams? Team empowerment is at the center of agile, and is also fundamentally different from the traditional command-and-control approach to managing teams. If managers still want to hold most of the power over their teams, achieving enterprise-wide agility will be difficult.
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This concern can be overcome by creating awareness of the value of frequent delivery and team empowerment. Training, coaching, and mentoring for teams, managers, and executives will help create this awareness. The objective is to help personnel at all levels understand and embrace frequent value delivery and empowered teams in order to realize the full benefits of enterprise-wide agile.
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IN SCALING AGILE
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Executive Support
Will executives support an enterprise-wide transition?
Executive support is vitally important to an enterprise-wide agile transition. Executives can leverage their resources to remove barriers in scaling agile. If executive support is missing, the barriers may remain, making the journey to enterprise-wide agile that much more difficult. If there is entrenched resistance from executives, the scaling effort will stall and may fail entirely. Executives may cite many reasons for their resistance, including attachment to traditional methods, lack of awareness or understanding of the benefits of agile, or concerns about the cost of scaling.
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This concern can be overcome by demonstrating the value of agile at the enterprise level and differentiating agile from waterfall. When executives realize how enterprise-wide agile can help them prioritize business goals and achieve strategic outcomes, they may be more likely to support scaling. If there is a champion for scaling agile at the executive level, this person can help convince others to scale.
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IN SCALING AGILE
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Agile scales by adding more teams and more coordination, not by adding more people to existing teams. Conflicts commonly arise over how teams will share information and collaborate. This concern increases when teams are distributed across different locations. Because teams in an enterprise-wide agile setup are more likely to be integrating their work, communication and collaboration become drastically more important in order to achieve successful integration and avoid rework.
This concern can be overcome by establishing a well-defined process for planning and tracking work. Before the organization decides what framework to use, they need to examine how teams will be collaborating and how they need to communicate.
“Communication
and collaboration
become drastically
more important in
order to achieve
successful
integration and avoid rework”
RefineM
Team Coordination
How will teams share information and collaborate?
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Assessing communication needs both within the team and across teams is important. Assessing and solving both sets of needs keeps communication smooth as teams work to achieve enterprise-wide scaling.
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Many organizations start with this question and become overwhelmed by the available choices. Because scaling agile carries significant time, monetary, and resource costs, the framework needs to fit well. The commitment to a scaling framework also needs to be organization-wide, since confusion and conflict can result from some teams following agile and some following waterfall.
This concern can be overcome by evaluating needs and desired outcomes early on. Asking the questions on the next page before researching frameworks can aid in determining whether enterprise-wide agile is worth the cost. Agile coaches can also help organizations evaluate and choose a framework.
Choosing a Framework
What is the right framework for scaling agile?
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Questions to ask
1. What is our business strategy?
• How has agile helped achieve it?
2. How many projects are planned?
• What is their average size and complexity?
3. How many agile teams do we have?
• How many do we need enterprise-wide?
4. What key benefits are possible with enterprise-wide agile?
• Will scaling agile make us efficient in delivering on our strategy?
5. What are the critical success factors of transition?
• Will scaling agile truly work in our organizational culture?
• Can the current agile teams maintain/enhance their performance at scale or will it become a worse nightmare?
• What are the other risks of scaling?
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When teams work together in enterprise-level agile, they need to have a strong process for integrating code. A framework may help guide teams on their integrations, but even with the framework, teams may struggle initially to develop the process for integrating code.
This concern can be overcome by defining the process and frequency of code integration based on what time and resources are needed to integrate code. Assessing based on needs capacity will result in a more realistic integration process. In organizations using SAFe, the Agile Release Train will govern code integrations. For organizations using Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) Large-scale Scrum (LeSS) or other frameworks, there may be less guidance on integrations.
Automating as much of the integration process as possible can also help make it more effective. If integration and testing can be automated, teams will be freed up to watch for other issues.
Integrating Code
How will teams integrate their code?
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Conclusion
By addressing these five leading concerns, organizations can accelerate their time to achieving fully functional enterprise-wide agile, realizing the benefits of scaling agile sooner. They will be better able to deliver frequent value, their teams will be further empowered and oriented toward collaborative and frequent value delivery, and they will be prepared to take on larger, more complex projects in an agile way.
If you’re thinking of guiding your organization toward enterprise-wide agile and don’t know where to start, a good beginning point is evaluating business goals and what outcomes you hope to achieve through enterprise-wide agile. You can then look at these challenges and
develop plans to overcome them before starting the process of choosing a framework.
If you’re still struggling with scaling agile, or other project management or agile challenges, please feel free to reach out to us at [email protected].
We’re happy to help.
TOP 5 CONCERNS
IN SCALING AGILE