The Need to Scale Agile

While agile frameworks such as Scrum or Kanban work excellently at the team level, new challenges arise when agility needs to be applied to larger projects, programs or even the entire organization.

Coordinating the work of multiple teams collaborating on a complex product or solution requires approaches that go beyond basic single-team practices.

Simply replicating Scrum across multiple teams without a coordination structure often leads to alignment issues, unmanaged dependencies, and integration difficulties.

Thus, the need arises to scale agile: applying agile principles and values consistently and effectively at a higher level, involving multiple teams working toward common goals.

Challenges in Large Projects and Multiple Teams

When working with multiple agile teams on large-scale initiatives (programs, portfolios, complex products), specific challenges emerge that are not usually present in a single team:

• Coordination: how to ensure that the different teams work in a synchronized and aligned way towards the same strategic goals?
• Dependencies: How to manage interdependencies between the work of different teams to avoid blockages and delays?
• Integration: How to integrate the work of multiple teams into a coherent and functional product or solution on a regular basis?
• Strategic Alignment: How to ensure that the tactical work of teams effectively contributes to business objectives at the program or portfolio level?
• Communication: How to maintain fluid and transparent communication between teams, escalated roles (such as Project Manager) and stakeholders?
• Consistency: How to maintain consistency in agile practices and tools across different teams?

Addressing these challenges requires specific structures and practices beyond those of a single team.

Introduction to Scaling Frameworks

To address the challenges of large-scale agility, various scaling frameworks have been developed.

These frameworks provide structures, roles, events and artifacts specifically designed to coordinate the work of multiple agile teams.

They seek to apply agile principles (such as incremental delivery, adaptation to change, and focus on value) at the program, portfolio, or enterprise level.

Examples of these frameworks include Scrum of Scrums, Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Nexus and Disciplined Agile (DA), each with their own approaches and levels of prescriptiveness for organizing and managing agility beyond the individual team.

The choice of the appropriate framework depends on the specific context of the organization.

Summary

While frameworks like Scrum work well for a team, scaling them creates challenges. Coordinating multiple teams on complex products requires approaches that go beyond.

Replicating Scrum without a coordination structure creates alignment and dependency issues. The need to scale is to apply agile principles at a higher level.

Challenges include coordination, integration and strategic alignment. To address these, various agile scaling frameworks have been developed.