Scaling Agile is the buzzword taking the software industry by storm and gaining popularity in other sectors like manufacturing, eCommerce, and retail. Agile software development has been around for the past 20 years. The approach to software development has evolved since its inception to help businesses keep up with the market pace. Agile basically comes down to the notion that software should be delivered at regular intervals, giving the customer the option to accept the software rather than wait for them to accept it.
What does “Scaling Agile” mean?
Scaling agile is the process of taking proven agile methods, like scrum and kanban, and using them with a more extensive diverse set of people in larger groups. Traditionally, agile works best in groups that are no bigger than 11 people.
Companies succeed by allowing small groups of employees to define their own goals and design products. They eventually want to apply the same freedoms and successes to a more extensive department. Unfortunately, this is where most companies run into trouble: their people lack consistent motivation and rely too heavily on their managers for instruction. This is where scaling Agile comes in.
Benefits of Scaling Agile
As scaling agile involves management, culture, and technology shifts, the benefits are far superior to the challenges. Alignment, built-in quality, transparency, and program execution represent the core values of the scaled agile framework.
In an organization, transforming workflow to a scaled agile framework brings countless tangible and intangible benefits. Businesses that scale Agile tend to go to market quicker while increasing customer satisfaction and ROI. Moreover, successful Agile companies report that they’re better able to attract top talent than their less agile valued agile counterparts. Let us discuss some of these benefits in detail below:
1. Align strategy and work
Scaling Agile enables connecting the organization’s top-level objectives with the people responsible for achieving them. This alignment helps to create numerous effects like boosting cross-team coordination, fostering transparency, enabling faster response times, and many more.
Scaling agile also emphasizes creating ARTs(Agile Release Trains) to ensure that the team objectives are aligned, and everyone in the organization is centered on producing value for customers.
2. Improve capacity management
The capacity management is aligned to the ARTs and regularly evaluated with a scaled agile approach. These methods focus on flexibility and change, empowering leadership to reflect and rebalance regularly and minimizing the disturbance to organizational flow. Management helps from stabling the teams with specific metrics to persistent making informed decisions about who can take on how much work.
3. Assist teams of teams planning
Scaling agile across the organization requires different people from multiple teams and departments together under the same umbrella. It may occur throughout the organization within every department like Dev and Ops, but it always requires greater coordination.
Scaled agile frameworks solve this matter by quarterly planning events which bring cross-functional teams together and build plans that highlight potential dependencies, deliver against corporate goals, and identify the risks. These “teams of teams” play prominent roles in scaling agile by giving everyone in the organization clear visibility into quarterly deliverables.
4. Enable enterprise-wide visibility
Visibility doesn’t only come from planning. Scaling agile enables transparency across the organization by connecting and visualizing the work by every team member.
Leaders and managers gain a big picture of potential barriers and make clear choices to allocate the work appropriately. Scaling agile allows them to visualize how ARTs or teams of teams measure their progress and performance, deliver their products, and gauge the financial impact of their work.
5. Engage employees
Scaling agile is deeply rooted in trust at the team and individual levels. People are empowered to make choices about how their work is delivered, impacting the high-level business goals. This trust translates to happier and more engaged employees who can eventually benefit the business with a lower turnover rate, high productivity, and great user experience.
Should You Use the Scaled Agile Framework?
To conclude, SAFe, a regularly evaluated agile methodology is the most popular framework for scaling agile among the organization because many of its features focus on eliminating the challenges faced by the team members.
In other words, if your business is beginning to transition to agility, SAFe is the best choice to bridge the gap of transformation. A SAFe framework is a prescriptive approach compared to Disciplined Agile, which provides more flexibility but at the same time requires an organization to understand the agile philosophy fully.
Originally published here.
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