A Practical Approach to Large-Scale Agile Development: How HP Transformed LaserJet FutureSmart Firmware

Chapter 10. Organizational Approach: Managing to Disadvantages

The pure academic approach to agile practice has some very specific approaches to organization. We’ve leveraged some of these but have chosen not to follow others as we’ve scaled agile to our large organization. This is important to point out because, like architecture, organization provides a lot of leverage for driving changes in behavior and results. However, there are advantages and disadvantages to different organizational approaches. The classical example of the impact of organizational approaches is provided by studying the history of about 80 years of R&D at DuPont.¹ In their history, they ended up switching from centralized corporate R&D labs to distributed divisional R&D ...