agiledeliverymodels

Agile Training and Coaching

A holistic and pragmatic way to scaling agile

Scrum@Scale (or Scrum at Scale) is one of the newer Agile frameworks, introduced in 2014 by Jeff Sutherland, creator of the Scrum methodology and one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto. It addresses complexities and impediments of multiple Scrum teams working with the Scrum guide to deliver value to their customers, and is designed to scale across the entire organization.

Key Purpose
& Core Principles

Scrum@Scale

A simple and lightweight framework

The purpose of Scrum@Scale is to offer a simple and lightweight framework to scale Scrum with as little bureaucracy as possible. It is one of the least prescriptive of the scaled Agile methodologies, emphasizing the typical challenges related to scaling, as well as suggestions for how to address these.

Scrum@Scale seeks to ‘radically simplify scaling by using Scrum to scale Scrum’. The core principle of Scrum@Scale is the known and clear responsibility split between the Product Owner and the Scrum Master. The Product Owner is responsible for the content (the ‘what’), while the Scrum Master is responsible for facilitating the process (the ‘how’). By highlighting this jurisdiction, Scrum@Scale seeks to eliminate conflict and waste.

An Introduction to Key Elements

Roles

Scrum@Scale places significant emphasis on the separate jurisdictions of the Product Owner and the Scrum Master. Therefore, the framework introduces to separate cycles for the roles, with two touchpoints: Product Release Feedback and Team Level Process.

Product Owner Cycle

The Product Owner Cycle revolves around what product or solution will be created and the activities needed to support and promote this. The further responsibilities of the role correspond to the standard Scrum definitions. Scrum@Scale groups Product Owners into Product Owner Teams that map to the Scrum of Scrum teams. These Product Owner Teams meet at a daily Meta Scrum ceremony, led by a Chief Product Owner, in order to coordinate as needed and discuss high-level strategy.

The Scrum Master Cycle

The Scrum Master Cycle revolves around building the products or solutions that have been identified by the Product Owner. Like with the Product Owner role, the individual Scrum teams have the same roles, activities, ceremonies and artefacts as in traditional scrum. Scrum@Scale groups scrum teams into Scrum of Scrums (SoS) which carry a joint responsibility for producing a common product increment. They participate in joint agile ceremonies such as backlog refinement, retrospectives, and a Scaled Daily Scrum with the objective of coordinating teams and removing impediments.

Scaling the cycles

If further scaling is needed, the overall responsible leader is the Executive Action Team (EAT). The Scrum of Scrum teams gather in a Scrum of Scrum of Scrums (SoSoS), and so on. Likewise, the Product Owners scale in a similar way depending on the context. The highest level of Product Owner scaling is the Executive Meta Scrum (EMT), prioritizing in a company-wide setting.

Get Started With Scrum@Scale

When implementing Scrum@Scale, the first activity is to install an Executive Action Team (EAT), a small set of teams using scrum at a small scale, in order to, at an early stage, start resolving any organizational bureaucracy or existing development practices that hinders agile. This model is then used as reference for scaling scrum to other teams and departments. The EAT must therefore have political and financial support throughout the organization, with capability of changing organizational policies and practices.

Source: https://www.scrumatscale.com/

In doubt which agile framework to choose?​

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Roles and responsibilities

Applying Scrum in a large-scale context

Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) focuses on how to apply principles and elements of Scrum in a large-scale context without overcomplicating processes or installing unnecessary bureaucracy. It is a ‘barely sufficient methodology’, revolving around many cross-functional, full-stack teams working together on their common goal and shared responsibility of delivering one shippable product – a complete end-to-end solution intended for real customers.

Key Purpose
& Core Principles

Large Scale Scrum
(LeSS)

Less is more

The key purpose of LeSS is to have many Scrum teams working together with as few processes and procedures as possible. As the name implies, the goal is to make the way of working and scaling as simple as possible.

Like SAFe, LeSS has defined a number of principles to guide the work within the framework:

  1. Large-Scale Scrum is Scrum
  2. Empirical process control
  3. Transparency
  4. More with less
  5. Whole-product focus
  6. Customer-centric
  7. Continuous improvement towards perfection
  8. Systems thinking
  9. Lean thinking
  10. Queuing theory

An Introduction to Key Elements

Roles

Keeping it simple, LeSS revolves around two main roles – Product Owner working with 2-8 teams and Scrum Masters working with 1-3 teams – with role descriptions stemming from standard scrum. The exception is that LeSS prefers to move the responsibility of refining the product backlog items from the Product Owner to the teams, which must be cross-functional and contain a combination of business domain knowledge and technical excellence. This means that a key prerequisite for success is that the teams are empowered to be able to directly interact with the customers.

All teams share a unified product backlog which they work on in synchronized sprints lasting 1-4 weeks. At the end of the sprint, the teams jointly deliver a product increment.

Ceremonies

In terms of ceremonies, LeSS places key emphasis on planning, product backlog refinement, and the sprint review and retrospective.

Planning is split into two parts; the first part where selected team representatives meet with the Product Owner and commit to selected product backlog items as well as discuss cross-team collaboration during the coming sprint. In the second part, the teams gather separately to plan the sprint and refine the sprint backlog.

Product Backlog Refinement is continuously done throughout the sprint in order to ensure that the product backlog items are ready for sprint planning, e.g. by splitting big items, detailing items, and estimating effort.

The end of sprint focuses on 3 activities: 1) The sprint review, where the team and customers review the sprint outcome together, 2) the retrospective, where improvement areas are identified and successes are celebrated in each team, and 3) the overall retrospective, where all teams, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters get together to inspect and adapt practices to gain improved efficiency. 

Source: https://less.works/

In doubt which agile framework to choose?​

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Top-down vs Buttom-up

Either way takes time. But at different times

As agile ways of work have made their way into many types of organisations, methods of implementing agile have been tested. There is no right way. There is always pros and cons and what to choose depends mostly on the culture of your organisation, the leadership style, the culture and many other factors.

Both approaches can work overall, both top-down and bottom-up agile transformations have equal chances of success as a starting point. The key is learning and adjusting to find the right balance that is appropriate to your organisation.

Two ways, or a hybrid?

Top Down

Risky business?

The top-down agile transformation tend to be planned for the entire organization at once. Such transformations take much longer to prepare  and to create traction. One year at a minimum would probably be required, often more.

During that period, a comprehensive org redesign is planned and performed. Then the organisation is prepared for the implementation of an Agile Operating Model – what ever the basis is (SAFE, DAD, Scrum of Scrums).

One major benefit of using this approach is, that it naturally requires top management to communication the “why” and the vision of such a transformation. And organisations tend to listen to and follow leaders. There are other cons to this approach, however there are risks as well. One of the major risks are, that if not orchestrated carefully you might “forget” to ask those who are closest to the work to be involved as influential stakeholders, making the adoption less likely to succeed. 

The three major pros 

  1. Creates more momentum as the wholeorganisation is involved in a big-bang style event, and if executed the right way delivers enterprise-wide results. 
  2. Less uncertainty about when and how the change will be implemented 

  3. Adequate funding for training, coaching is agreed upfront

And the equally major Cons 

  1. Longer preparation require adequate resourcing and a disciplined approach to be successful
  2. Could be led by those who are not closest to the work and therefore might not know the best route forward for transformation
  3. “Command and control” which is counterproductive to the nature of agile transformation could be an outcome

The buttom up

Single teams, units or projects can start the journey and become the example of success for the rest of the organisation to follow. When individual teams are empowered to make decisions based on experience and current data, there is a
high probability they are the right decisions.

Organisations that use this approach often state that this constant improvement approach allows them to decrease the risk of the transformation, however, at the expense of duration of the entire journey for the organisation – and with the risk of different teams using different cadence, agile model and culture, which makes it more difficult to align later.  

The three major pros 

  1. Those who are closest to the work have deciding influence
  2. Adoption is generally more likely to remain due to personal ownership
  3. Transformation is faster – at least at the team level
  4. Most effective for smaller organisations

And the eqally major cons

  1. Those who are closest to the work have deciding influence
  2. Adoption is generally more likely to remain due to personal ownership
  3. Transformation is faster – at least at the team level
  4. Most effective for smaller organisations

Want to know more about which approach to use?

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scrum at scale

Agile Levers

Time to transform is now ?

We are bombarded with sentences about how important, relevant and urgent it is, that we change our behavior; how we run our organizations, how fast we need to deliver and how adaptive we should be. We truly need to change the “How We Change” in organizations.

Transformation projects are long term events that implement valuable, strategically important features for and with your organization. And as we do that, the way we work, innovate, create value and operate change as well. Strategies are great and visions important. But without the ability to execute and continuously rethink and change you will loose out.

Scaling Agile from IT to your entire organization

The greatest challenge lies not in the new practices put in place, but in the interface and coherence between these practices and the existing organizational processes.  With the goal to address the scalability challenge, a number of frameworks has emerged that claim to offer the much needed guidance for scaling Lean-Agile to the large-scale development efforts, where there are several development teams with digital architects, business analysts, and developers working in multi-year projects or programs. 

A quick guide on "how to"

How can you apply agile methods in business, and not only when implementing new IT? What are the success factors in agile business transformation projects and which mistakes should you avoid? 

Some creating the great master plan, some make progress using your own projects or initiatives to implement agile – but scale fast and monitor progress! We can show you how it is easily done.

Cultural changes requires focused attention, and embracing Agile and Lean methodologies requires a significant mindset shift. It goes in business projects as well as IT, and running projects on agile principles is the easiest way to introduce agile. Using metrics, automation and stronger executive agile leadership is mandatory and we know how to make that change in both small and large organisations (i.e. TeamHealth Radar).

Small, self-directed teams are central in agile projects and the “way of working”. The effect of team-work quality on team performance, learning and work satisfaction should be monitored and steadily improved.  The objective is to optimize and balance team-work-quality and velocity. This can be achieved by designing working space and leverage learning from direct experience with the help of our frameworks.

Your organization need to change. But where to start? You cannot do everything at the same time. How do you know which initiatives are the most important to start with? We create transformation maps that  communicate the vision and breakdown into Epics and Features that can be used as guidance for your organization. We provide sawy Lean Business Case templates that fit into your transformation map.  And we always focus on data-driven decision making, and guide you on how to keep that focus crisp and relevant.

It may sound daunting, but the thing is  – it is mostly liberating, exiting and utterly rewarding. Both on business but also on a personal level. Start the journey on focusing on five areas: Personal, principles, process, practice and pace. The first is the most important. You need to be or know a transformation leader within your organization, who will go all the way in leading the journey. Then the principles, or some might name it vision and purpose of what you want to strive for. We guide you through the process of that and of process, practice and pace too. 

Most are probably already in our organization, and just need the framework and some coaching to make transformation into agility happen. Sometimes different competencies are also needed and discussions about how, where and how often to meet in teams and across teams rises to the surface. Maybe you need agile coaches, scrum masters or interim product owners? Let’s discuss how you create the right set-up in your organisation.

Workspace surroundings are critical for realizing the lean-agile potential. Projects are often linked to a very specific type of office work, especially those managed by means of Agile methods. Special features of Agile Project Management, especially with respect to communication and information exchange forms, frequency and actors may make Agile Project Management office arrangements a task you need to take seriously. 

Presentation of information destined for the entire team or teams is important. While e.g. Confluence or any other shared service based solution is fine, the actual visualization on boards motivates discussions and helps clarify impediments in an informal manner. This feature can successfully be implemented by providing additional whiteboards for each team – and across teams. Each team can use two whiteboards and a large conference card, directly attached to the walls. One of the tables is used as the Sprint Backlog/Kanban Board. The second board can be used for the communication of additional information, the necessary design work and work planning – and of course during Retrospectives.

The criticality of individual and team well-being in lean-agile delivery models underpin the need for hygiene values e.g. image, culture, adaptability, health and safety, innovation and creativity, sustainability, and corporate social responsibility. 

You most certainly will be looking for identifying the most important interventions, measuring tools and KPIs. Remember less is more.