• Agile Leadership

To scale or no to scale. That is the question! About Scaling Agile…

Why did you choose this training?

Dorien: “Because we started in 2018 with a number of Agile teams within EDSN working together on the same IT landscape and on the same products/services, we as an organization quickly started paying attention to cross-team coordination (scaling). However, I myself have little knowledge of Scaling Agile and was often curious about the reason and set-up of certain meetings. I felt that some meetings were insufficiently structured or unnecessary.

My goal was to gain more insight and understanding of the different ways of scaling and thus dare to enter the discussion on the design of scaling within my organization. This master class seemed like the perfect opportunity for me to gain more knowledge.

What is Scaling Agile to you?

Dorien: “EDSN comes from a waterfall (ed.: project-driven) world, but would like to become more agile. That’s why we started our Agile transition about a year ago. This is a huge challenge and our old way of working and some choices mean that we cannot avoid scaling. In this, we took a lot of inspiration from SAFe. Now we see that certain things work well, but other things do not work as well. Since we have gained some experience, now is a good time to work with colleagues to see how we can start improving ourselves continuously. The term we take away most from the training is ‘Minimal Viable Bureaucracy’: only using elements/events/artefacts from different scaling models when they actually bring something to the teams. For us, that’s really something we want to work on.”

What was the biggest eye-opener?

Dorien: “We learned a lot of things about different scaling frameworks but also especially why we should actually avoid Scaling Agile. After all, scaling requires coordination and leads to ‘waste’ (inefficiency), something we actually want to minimize from a Lean perspective. That was really an eye-opener for us.”

And that Agile mindset, what is that for you guys?

Dorien: “What we would like to develop in is the mindset in which we deliver value for the customer or end user and where making mistakes is allowed: continuous learning through hypothesizing, trying out, evaluating and learning plan from it. Nice concrete examples we are considering as a result of the training are a Failure Friday Festival and a physical ‘Graveyard’ where we keep track of learning points from the experiments we have done.”

What is something that you guys will be working on tomorrow?

Dorien: “Currently, it is mainly the PO and/or the SM who are involved in the scaling events, but in my opinion you should especially involve the team members. Fortunately, I already notice that the team members are getting more and more involved in such events and that the team members themselves are being listened to. We could also try doing the form of the events differently, such as a customer arena or a demo roulette.”

“In addition, I think we can gain a lot by minimizing dependencies between teams. This can be done in several ways: for example, by making more conscious choices between feature-based or component-based design of teams or by experimenting with one PO and/or one backlog for multiple teams (which have strong dependencies to each other).”