Chris Spagnuolo’s EdgeHopper

I recently had someone pose a question to me that got me thinking about the scalability of agile success.  Here was the question: “I’m part of large organization of over 1,000 people.  Our small team of 40 has been using agile with a great deal of success.  Now our company wants to me to extrapolate the successes we’ve enjoyed from agile (efficiency, value, profitability) to the rest of the company.  Do you think the agile success of 40 people can be extrapolated to over 1,000 people?”

It’s a great question and I don’t think there is an easy answer to it.  Speaking from my own personal experience, it’s been difficult extrapolating the success our small team of five developers had in the past to our larger organization of about 35 people.  There are many challenges as you scale agile up.  Agile practices depend heavily on collocated teams that are cross-functional in nature.  When you start scaling agile up, you need to consider geographic dispersion of much larger project teams that may not be as cross-functional as you’d like them to be.  This is just the nature of large organizations.  This can have an impact on communications and coordination of work across dispersed teams.  Another success factor that’s related to this in larger organizations is the use of matrix management.  Teams in large organizations are usually composed of a mélange of team members who, because of matrix management, report to and are managed by different parts of the organization.  This can lead to the fire drill mentality and “resource ownership” issues.  This can quickly degrade the level of commitment and the quality/value of functionality that the teams deliver.

Other obvious factors that can be relevant when scaling up are the development and testing environments.  Teams need to be able to continuously integrate their work and have a common infrastructure that supports this across a large organization.  Teams need to know quickly whether or not the work they’ve done is negatively impacting the rest of the codebase.  This is no small matter and can really improve or decrease the effectiveness and efficiency of agile development teams.

There are probably many more factors that are related to scaling agile up, but to me, the ones mentioned above seem critical.  Personally I don’t think you can simply extrapolate the success of smaller agile adoptions to larger organization-wide adoptions.  I think that each has its own distinct set of challenges that make it difficult to draw a line and say we had X amount of success here, so that means we’ll have 10X success when we scale this up.  However, that is not to say that large organizations cannot enjoy the benefits and successes agile practices offer.  They just have to approach it with a different mindset than smaller teams or organizations.  In fact, many large organizations have really recognized tremendous gains using agile practices.  If you’re interested, there is a great case study available about BMC Software adopting and scaling agile practices throughout a very large organization.  It’s available here.  It’s well worth the read and gives some great insights into how large companies adapt to make agile work for them.

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