Are You Ready to Scale Agile?
You are an Agile evangelist. You have championed the shift to Agile at your organization and have coached several teams successfully. Your organization is delivering quality product faster to your internal and external customers. But there's still a struggle to coordinate across different parts of the organization. And you get pulled into meeting after meeting to coordinate across teams. As a result, your most successful teams are expressing frustration with each other and, and now, quality has slipped. Something has to change.
You've heard about scaling Agile. You may even have an idea of some of the well-known frameworks, such as SAFe, LeSS, Scrum@Scale, etc. But are you ready? Is your organization ready to scale Agile?
Organizational Readiness
While this is not an exhaustive list, ask yourself and your organization these questions to assess your readiness to scale Agile.
- Which framework is best for your organization?
- Do you have management and executive buy-in?
- Do you have funding for external training and certification?
- Can you group teams together to support strategic initiatives?
- Can you identify your change agents and champions?
- Can you identify a set of teams to pilot the change?
- How much time are you willing to commit to the change?
- How much time do you have to commit to the change?
- How much time are you willing to commit to continuous learning?
Iterate Your Framework Implementation
Just like the scaled Agile frameworks themselves, you approach their implementation iteratively. One of our clients chose and implemented SAFe for a single program and scaled iteratively. They started with one Agile Release Train and in three years scaled to four Agile Release Trains with the intention to launch an additional train before the end of the year. They also reorganized the Trains once they realized they were no longer organized around value and instead were structured in a traditional resource-management way.
The implementation of SAFe within this client's organization, while it had a specific start date, was implemented iteratively and over time. It also took the backing of management and executives and a devoted set of change agents willing to take the steps for scale.
We here at Praecipio Consulting have assisted our clients in their journeys to scale Agile. Let us know how we can help you take your first step.
