Is scaling Agile the right focus?

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Written By Catherine Louis

During the registration of a recent Agile conference, browsing the program chock full of Scaled Agile presentations, a friend of mine looked at me and asked, “Is scaling Agile the most important problem for us to help solve in today’s business climate?”

By “scaling Agile”, I mean solving a problem involving lots of people, say 10 cross-functional, multi-disciplined teams, with a focus to be able to deliver incrementally, reliably, predictably, across these teams, living the values underlying the Agile Manifesto.

Being able to deliver in shorter iterations, adaptively, along with a set of values based on trust and respect, was a problem that the 17 Agile Manifesto signatories tried to tackle 13 years ago at a Utah ski resort. Being able to deliver in shorter iterations, adaptively, across 10 teams was not something they discussed.  (Dr. Alistair Cockburn is the exception to this, where his Crystal family of methodologies includes team size and business criticality concerns.)

Today, the marketed methods of scaling Agile are numerous now, SAFe, DAD, Less, ScrumPlop, with patterns of Scrum with Scrum of Scrums involving Chief Product Owners, and let’s not forget LAFABLE…(and I know as soon as this is posted there will be a method surely missed.) The debate on pros-cons of scaling methods, how scaling can fail, how to do it right and win, etc. is a trending topic at Agile conferences these days.

What do you think? Is scaling Agile our biggest problem to help solve? If not, what do you think is the most important problem for us to help solve in today’s business climate?

Catherine Louis

Catherine Louis is a Certified Scrum TrainerTM, independent Agile coach, and co-founder of the #PoDojo, who lives in North Carolina. With over 20 years of experience in complex product development in both software & hardware, Catherine has previously led Agile transition efforts in top telecommunications firms and worked with North Carolina State University to conduct research on Agile Test-Driven development. She has conducted years of research and training on “building security” into your product, verifying that security protection mechanisms are in place and working before it’s too late. Catherine regularly speaks at Agile20XX conferences, is a lead for the “Working With Customers” track, and runs the AgileRTP meetup group, one of the largest Agile meetup groups in the US.

https://twitter.com/catherinelouis
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