The Art of Agile Development, 2nd Edition

CHAPTER SIX

Scaling Agility

In a perfect world, every Agile team would be perfectly isolated, completely owning its product or portfolio of products. Cross-team coordination is a common source of delays and errors. If every team were isolated, that wouldn’t be a problem.

It’s also not at all realistic. A typical Agile team has 4–10 people. That’s often not enough.

So, then, how do you scale? Although this book is focused on individual Agile teams, the question is important enough to deserve a chapter of its own.

Scaling Fluency

Far too often, organizations try to scale Agile without actually having the ability to be Agile in the first place. They invest a lot of time and money in the large-scale Agile flavor of the day, without investing in teams’ fluency or organizational capability. It never works.

To scale Agile, you’ll need to scale your organization’s ability to be Agile. This involves three parts: organizational capability, coaching capability, and team capability.

Organizational Capability

One of the biggest mistakes organizations make in trying to introduce Agile is to fail to make the investments described in Chapter 4. But even if your organization takes those investments seriously, there’s likely to be some hidden trouble spots.

Before you spend a lot of money on scaling Agile, work out the kinks in your organizational capability. If you’re working with an expert advisor, they’ll have specific suggestions. If you’re going it alone, start with a pilot team, or a small ...