Scaling Agile seems to be a hot topic at the moment. A number of people are suggesting that “Agile doesn’t Scale”. They are right and they are wrong.
First, lets clarify what I mean by Scaling Agile. Scaling Agile does not mean a large organisation where all the teams use Scrum or Kanban. It means that the entire organisation is using Agile… The usual suspects of Development, Testing, Product Management, but also Finance, Marketing, Operations and Management. Scaling means that as an organisation grows in its use of Agile, it can do so fairly smoothly.
The “Agile doesn’t Scale” crowd are right!
Dave Snowden says that you cannot scale Agile using Recipes, you need Chefs. You need people who have done their apprenticeship for several years and studied the material. I agree with Dave. You need Chefs to Scale Agile. People with years of experience in Agile who understand the theory and principles. However, that is not enough. You also need people who understand organisations rather than development teams. People who have years of experience which involves understanding management, finance, operations and marketing.
The Chefs exist but there not that many of them about. A number of them are helping organisations to Scale. It will not be possible to determine whether they have successfully scaled Agile in a way that is sustainable for a few years. ( I remember a few years ago an Investment Bank in London had an entire department that was Agile but it did not survive for more than a couple of years as the developers had not incorporated the business analysts )
In order for the claim “Agile Scales” to be valid, we need a set of patterns or recipes that people can use without the need for a Chef.
Those recipes do not exist yet. So the “Agile does not scale” crowd are correct.
The “Agile doesn’t Scale” are wrong!
After the Chefs have scaled agile a number of times, it will be possible to examine their stories of success and failure to extract patterns for scaling Agile. It will not happen for a few years as it is necessary to establish whether the patterns are stable in the organisation, or whether they need the support of a powerful manager to ensure their success.
Even though the recipes do not exist yet, they will start to emerge over the coming years. So the “Agile does scale” crowd are correct as well.
You never know, some of the patterns in the Safe framework may turn out to be valid. (So far, listening to stories of people scaling Agile, you need to scale using the product management function who work on a single enterprise level backlog, with a development/testing group that has staff liquidity).
The IT Risk Manager 
September 29th, 2013 at 2:38 pm
I agree. A single pipeline is essential, aka Unified Demand Management.
September 29th, 2013 at 3:59 pm
Thanks for posting Chris. I keep checking the comments to see things along the lines of “oh, but those recipes do exist! It’s in a cookbook called ‘SAFe’ ” (the comment in your last paragraph being ignored in this case).
It would be interesting to hear more about the experiences people have found helpful with respect to the bits you teased us with at the close of the post:
* product management function working off a single enterprise backlog (depending how you perceive this, seems to suggest something other than organizing work via projects)
* Development/testing group that has staff liquidity (also seems to tiptoe away from projects being the central organizing concept of work to introduce change)
October 2nd, 2013 at 10:26 pm
If I understand you correctly, that’s a particularly strong definition of what it means to scale Agile. I would also call it an unreasonably strong definition. But maybe I misunderstand…
Are you saying that for Agile to be scaled all departments in an organisation need to be using it for all their work, regardless of whether that work is about developing technology?
If you are saying that, then a lot of questions follow. For example: “Why on earth should they be interested in using Agile?” And “Why stop at the organisation, why not continue up to the whole country?” And “So what do you mean by Agile, anyway, if you’re talking about PR or Facilities or Catering?”
If you’re not saying that, then I shall remain at ease.
October 15th, 2013 at 7:23 pm
[…] the latter “that’s not scaled until you’ve got at least 1,000 developers”. Some would say of either “that’s not scaling agile until everyone in the organisation is doing […]
February 17th, 2014 at 2:50 pm
You can find an Agile Scaling implementation with success by Spotify:
Click to access SpotifyScaling.pdf
Thanks and regards
February 21st, 2017 at 7:59 am
[…] liegt das aber? Agile gilt vielen Autoren als schlecht skalierbare Entwicklungsmethode. So sei es leicht, wenige, einzelne Teams auf agile Methoden umzustellen, jedoch ungleich schwerer, […]
February 21st, 2017 at 8:20 am
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February 24th, 2017 at 9:20 am
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