A survey of key Lean-Agile scaling considerations By now most large enterprises are past the experimenting stage with Agile. Many are beginning to realize that simply training teams in Agile techniques like Scrum and Kanban, while useful, isn’t sufficient to achieve real business transformation. And they are struggling with coordinating teams involved in work on large solutions and the tensions between Agile approaches and other organizational patterns and practices, things like budgeting and staffing, that were ignored or fudged until now. In this talk Jon Terry will share his experience working with executives on these challenges at large enterprise in Europe and North America. He will outline his view of the typical state of play. He will explain what he’s seeing in terms of adoption of techniques from agile scaling methods like SAFe, DAD, LeSS, and Spotify. And he will discuss the big questions being raised by executives in their struggle to take Lean-Agile across the enterprise. The goal is to help those trying to get started to better understand key concepts and considerations.

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Is it SAFe to Scale?
A survey of the Lean-Agile scaling landscape
Jon Terry, Chief Evangelist Lean-Agile Strategy

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Transforming with Planview WRM
THE CHANGING
WORLD
OF WORK REALIZING
AGILE-AT-SCALE
CREATING AN
INNOVATION CULTURE
STRATEGY
Innovation
Management
MAKING THE
PRODUCT SHIFT

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Increasing Agile Adoption
Title, Forrester Research, Inc. , Date of Publication

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Expanding Agile Success
Results
• More innovation relative to routine operations
• React to change faster
• Increased responsiveness to customer needs
• Greater efficiency and productivity
What if a company were to
launch dozens, hundreds,
or even thousands of agile
teams throughout the
organization?
Would scaling up agile
improve corporate
performance as much as
agile methods improve
team performance?
Harvard Business Review Agile at Scale, Darrell K. Rigby, Jeff Sutherland, Andy Noble, Accessed June 2018

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Context
• Selling software, not SAFe
• Being asked “Can you support?” or “How does this work?”
• ~50 global 500 firms in the past year
• Automotive, aerospace, financial, government, pharma, more
• Conversations with execs 1-2 levels below board
• Agile CoEs and PMOs

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Agile pilot

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Two years later

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What do we mean ‘scaling’?
Less About This

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What do we mean ‘scaling’?
Even If It’s This

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What do we mean ‘scaling’?
Or Even This

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True Scaling is Dependencies
STRATEGIES
PROGRAMS
TEAMS OF TEAMS
Dev Ops Mktg Sales CS
Value Streams
Alignment

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Frequent
Small
Good
Decoupled
FSGD
( Fizz Good )
We should try to design them away

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But we can’t always

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The Rise of the Frameworks …

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People Are Buying This
Now
even biggerer with 50%
more all teh thingz!!!!
The Big Picture

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But Mostly Implementing This
Essential SAFe

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Allocate work to teams,
not people to projects

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Allocations and Resource Pools
CIO
Business
Analysis
Resource
Resource
Resource
Resource
Development
Resource
Resource
Resource
Resource
Testing
Resource
Resource
Resource
Resource
Operations
Resource
Resource
Resource
Resource
Etc
PMO
Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
Project 100
The
Business

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Long-lived, cross functional teams
Squads, Pods,
Crews etc
Has design, develop, test, and
deploy skills for 80% of work
SAFe assumes about 10 people
Work assigned to the squad not
squad members
May be Scrum or Kanban
Member can belong to only 1
squad
Front End Devs
QA &
DevOps
Back End Devs
PM & Design

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In long-lived Teams-of-Teams
ART, Flight, Tribe
Team of Teams
5-12 teams
50-120 people
Below that, too much overhead
Above that, Dunbar’s number and
practical challenges with
meetings
Go Kanban!
Go Scrum!

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With a Shared Mission
Value Stream or
“Persistent Demand”

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Pursued via Incremental Goals
Epic or Feature

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● In-person if possible
● Leaders set out the overall situation and
set key goals
● Team make initial plans based on goals
and their backlog of stories and defects
● Focus on speed and value, ie WSJF
● Preliminary plans are merged to identify
cross team dependencies
● Teams re-plan to optimize sequencing
and share workload to minimize
dependencies
Roughly quarterly planning meetings

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Roughly quarterly planning meetings
● In-person if possible
● Leaders set out the overall situation and
set key goals
● Team make initial plans based on goals
and their backlog of stories and defects
● Focus on speed and value, ie WSJF
● Preliminary plans are merged to identify
cross team dependencies
● Teams re-plan to optimize sequencing
and share workload to minimize
dependencies

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Roughly quarterly planning meetings
● In-person if possible
● Business leaders set out the overall
situation and set key goals
● Teams make initial plans based on goals
and their backlog of stories and defects
● Focus on speed and value, ie WSJF
● Preliminary plans are merged to identify
cross team dependencies
● Teams re-plan to optimize sequencing
and share workload to minimize
dependencies

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With two week waves in between
Demo!
Demo!
Demo!
Demo!
Demo!

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Demos provide left-right awareness
Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo!

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Other cadences as needed by teams
Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo!

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Continuous Integration
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!

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Deployment ASAP
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!

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Not Scrummer-fail
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!
Demo! Demo! Demo! Demo!
Demo!

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The Good
• Exposing lots more people to Agile Manifesto
• Thoroughly infused with Lean principles
• Started as mostly Scrum but now embraces Kanban
• Celebrates material from Reinertsen, Pink, Marquet, and Kim
• Forcing orgs to consider long-lived cross-functional teams
• Provides a tangible organizational change

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The Bad
• Too much material for too short training sessions
• Risk of inexpert instructors providing only surface intro
– Especially about Kanban!
• Some silly Agile fossils: normalized story points!
• No guidance on functional career development

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Career Management: Functions still matter
Career Management
Hiring
Training
Standards
Mentoring
Squad Guild
Work Delivery
Has design, develop, test, and
deploy skills for 80% of work
SAFe assumes about 10 people
Work assigned to the squad not
squad members
Member can belong to only 1
squad

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The Fuzzy
• Operational vs development value streams
• How and when to reapportion teams across strategies?
• At what level are strategies and programs governed and funded
vs delegated, decomposed and self-governed
• How to measure value delivered?
• How to embed architecture, audit, security?

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More Learning
The Big Picture is clickable
scaledagileframework.com
Converted into a book

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Thank You!
Connect: Jon Terry, Chief Evangelist Lean-Agile Strategy, Planview
Follow: @leankitjon
Read: Agile PMO: 5 Steps to Driving Agility at Scale
Explore: planview.com/lean-agile-delivery

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Too big to be Agile

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Just following the leader

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Sadly, not following the leader

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Autonomy with purpose