Are You Ready to Scale Agile?
You are an Agile evangelist. You have championed the shift to Agile at your organization and have coached several teams successfully. Your organization is delivering quality product faster to your internal and external customers. But there's still a struggle to coordinate across different parts of the organization. And you get pulled into meeting after meeting to coordinate across teams. As a result, your most successful teams are expressing frustration with each other and, and now, quality has slipped. Something has to change.
You've heard about scaling Agile. You may even have an idea of some of the well-known frameworks, such as SAFe®, LeSS, Scrum@Scale, etc. But are you ready? Is your organization ready to scale Agile?
Related: SAFe® Cheat Sheet: A Guide to Scaled Agile Framework
Organizational Readiness
While this is not an exhaustive list, ask yourself and your organization these questions to assess your readiness to scale Agile.
- Which framework is best for your organization?
- Do you have management and executive buy-in?
- Do you have funding for external training and certification?
- Can you group teams together to support strategic initiatives?
- Can you identify your change agents and champions?
- Can you identify a set of teams to pilot the change?
- How much time are you willing to commit to the change?
- How much time do you have to commit to the change?
- How much time are you willing to commit to continuous learning?
Iterate Your Framework Implementation
Just like the Scaled Agile frameworks themselves, you approach implementation iteratively. We recently guided a leading satellite TV provider through an agile transformation that took several phases, from the divestiture from their parent company to the implementation of value streams within their teams.
This organization achieved data governance, standardized language, and SAFe adaptations, in addition to true real-time enterprise visibility, with a customized, single-pane-of-glass dashboard built by integrating Jira Align, the organization's financial systems, and PowerBI.
While it had a specific start date, the implementation of SAFe® within this client's organization was iterative and over time. It also required the backing of management and executives and a devoted set of change agents willing to take the steps for scale.
Let us know how we can help your organization take the first step in agile transformation.
