Scaling Agile: Are We Ready to Scale? | Xebia

Written by Tom Siebeneicher En Rik De Groot | Feb 17, 2022 2:49:26 PM

After the initial successes in implementing Agile, many companies fail to scale it to the entire organization. One reason this failure occurs is because they try to scale up to all of their teams without properly organizing the rest of their ecosystem. In this article, Agile experts Rik de Groot and Tom Siebeneicher cover some of the challenges of scaling and preview what they will tackle in depth during their Scaling Agile Webinar.

First, a bit of history
The original Agile Manifesto was published in 2001 and introduced the concept of Scrum. It soon spread around the world as a simple and elegant framework for dealing with the rapidly changing requirements of a dynamic, global marketplace. Agile and in a more detailed sense Scrum helped organizations become more flexible and adaptive to keep up and compete, so in this way, it met a real need. However, organizations soon realized that a Scrum teams alone was not enough. They needed to find ways to scale Scrum and Agile more broadly across their entire organizations.

The 3 most common scaling challenges:

1. How Mature is Your Scrum Team?
One of the first obstacles an organization encounters when attempting to scale Agile is the level of maturity, or lack of it, within their Scrum team or teams. The newest version of the Scrum guide is fourteen pages long, but it doesn’t solve every challenge a team might face day to day. If a Scrum team is mature enough, it can evolve and adapt by itself. In other words, a mature Scrum team has a real Agile mindset and doesn’t just follow the relevant rituals. How well your team can react to changing situations, as a group, is an indication of its maturity level.

2. How to Approach Scaling Scrum
Often, as soon as the first positive effects of one or more Scrum teams reaches them, management decides to scale Scrum further into the organization. To provide guidance, several scaling Agile frameworks have developed over time. Today, there are around six different constructs most commonly used. But what is the right framework for your organization, and where should you begin? What are the real reasons to scale? And how do these frameworks solve the challenges? These questions often come to mind and whole groups will try to answer them as quickly as possible. Frankly, these questions should not be ignored and instead properly answered by taking our webinar.

3. Perceiving the Entire Ecosystem
Based on the concept of Scrum, every person who adds value to the product vision should be included in the Scrum team. But in a typical organization, there are many departments and areas that don’t directly add value to the product, for example, HR and legal. And so, they are excluded from the Scrum team. However, these areas are essential to ensuring the Scrum team can work. For this reason, they should be considered part of the entire ecosystem to establish a complete Agile organization. Otherwise, ignoring them creates a major disruption in the transformation of scaling Agile.

Learn more

Webinar Scaling Agile
Watch the free Scaling Agile Webinar, where we dive into these three challenges in detail and discuss different approaches to each one. By the end, you will have a much better understanding of what it takes for a successful scale-up of Scrum in your organization.

Workshop Scaling Agile
Setting Up Your Organization’s Transformation for Agile Scaling Success.

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