Scaling up your Agile Organization in 6 Steps

Imagine your organization is 1 big supermarket wine rack. It’s up to you to organize the rack in the only right way. How would you go about that? Do you divide the rack by color? White on one side, rosé in the middle and red on the other? Could work just fine. Or by price? Highest price at the top, in the middle the wines that are affordable to the bulk and the headache wines at the bottom? Could also work fine. Or by country? Or by type of grape? Or by winery? There’s something to be said for everything.

Choosing one often comes at the expense of the other. So it’s about seeing through all the variables at play between teams and making a decision that best fits the context at the time. This is heartbreakingly difficult. Because when the context (customer demand, legislation, competition, technology) changes, the variables change with it. That causes you to have to make new choices in how you organize yourself. So you’re never done with this. It is a continuous process and that requires continuous attention.

Designing and developing the right organizational structure is primarily about communication. So it is not about management positions, corporate politics, hobbyhorses or successful practices of the past. It is about arranging communication in your Agile organization as clearly and simply as possible, so that different agile teams can properly and quickly align dependencies with each other and/or work scaled together on 1 product.

There are 6 steps that will help you decide the best way to communicate. Don’t go through these steps once, but evaluate them systematically, looking for the best way. The way that delivers the most customer value and the least hassle internally.

Step 1 Determine the minimum viable bureaucracy (MVB)

Want to scale up? Don’t. Where possible. First, see what you can do to avoid scaling. For example, by making teams autonomous, and thus less dependent on each other. With that, start looking for your minimal viable bureaucracy: a system with as few fixed communication moments (such as regular meetings) as possible.
Analyze what communication is needed between variables (team, department, management, etc…). This is a logical step that is often skipped. We are used to organizing ourselves in an organizational chart from tig years ago. “This is the way things are done around here.” Ask yourself what communication is critical to delivering the best customer value? Between which teams and which layers in the organization?

Step 2 Determine the decision tree

Analyze which decisions need to be made in which place to bring speed to the organization. For this, the same applies as step 1. Decision making is also often organized based on the past, but that does not mean it is the most effective way NOW. Take time to make a conscious decision to use a decision tree…. See how far you can go to put decision-making authority in the teams as much as possible.

Step 3 Choose regularity and experiment with it

Regularity reduces complexity. However, many regular meetings limit effectiveness. Therefore, prioritize the most important tools for communication and decision-making. This is where it comes down to making choices. Which communication do you choose? What constitutes the most logical clustering? Note: the decisions you make now, you make based on information you have now. If you have new information that causes you to revise the decision, you reorganize. This is where it comes down to guts and an experiment. From an experiment, you learn again what the best option is.

Step 4 Determine the division of roles

Determine role assignment based on flow for communication and decision-making. Google has studied in their Google’s Project Aristotle that clarity in role assignment helps teams get into flow. Most important is the division of roles for people who provide direct value to the product or service. Management facilitates.

Step 5 Make blocks and choices visible

Identify the bottlenecks / impediments in communication and decision making. And seek advice from preferably the entire organization on this issue. Think of the red cord hanging above the production lines of Toyota factories. Any employee can pull this cord as soon as a product defect is detected, and all employees will then gather around the defect, and make a plan to resolve it This may feel awkward and delaying during implementation, but helps tremendously in creating excellence in your organization.
Further: You prioritized in Step 3. With that you also choose not to optimize some things. Be very clear and transparent about this. This prevents major irritations and also gives you the insight if the irritations become too big that you may have to go back to step 3 and start a new experiment.

Step 6 Repeat

What is important is that you learn to look at the organization impactfully. This requires guts. Guts to keep experimenting without being 100% sure that the initiative you are doing works flawlessly. Because wherever you try something, sometimes it goes wrong and then it is very easy to blame Agile, Scrum, the customer, your colleague, the management. But much more important is to look at what you learn from the actions so you can take the next step to sub-optimization. Therefore, a learning organization always goes through steps 1 through 5 several times.

CO Author Agile Coach and Trainer Steije de Lat