Understanding how to scale up is not enough to understand what to do when you get there.

After having scaled up your agile organization its important to know how to keep it from reverting back.

It is a long journey to prepare an organization to take on agile operations at scale. Despite an organization perhaps having the capabilities to ramp up and/or understand how to get from A to B, it is most important to truly understand what happens when at scale. With this understanding only stemming from answer both key questions. 1. Why scale up from just having agile teams? and 2. How do agile operations work when at scale?

Why agile at scale?

Compared to the deployment of a couple agile teams in isolation, agile at scale encompasses the entirety of an organization. It does not segmentalize into traditional or agile ways of working which would separate systems and tools. Rather the full organization embraces a unilateral test into pivot approach to solving issues and coming up with new solutions.

Benefits

Continually Improving

Always testing new things and ways of working gives a never-ending sense and realization for upgrades and upgradability. (People believe in change because they see it all the time)

Iterative

Delivery risk declines as agile ways of working happen in fast sprints, this means that things are always changing, and progress given its multi directional will always happen.

Empirical

Lessor team dependency on plans, estimates and assumptions (things happen in the now), by tracking and measuring things as they happen based on sprints that provide feedback instantly teams can quickly change directions and produce self-correcting results.

Cross Functional

Teams have a pool of differing skills and experience allowing for them to best understand the end goal (meeting the wants/needs of the customer and executives), these teams include people skilled, in business, marketing, risk management, industry specialists etc.

Focused

Accountability is fostered within teams as they are only working on that project and tend to see it through till the end resting the pressure for success on them.

How to measure

Importantly, when contemplating the benefits organizations will need to know how to test and measure progress to ensure its right for them. The ultimate goal of agile development is to increase business performance. Thus, simply, the starting point can be defined as before agile development was implemented and then end is the current performance after adoption.

Measuring is important as it provides a perspective for improving quality and sets in place the tools for measuring success allowing for better future design making.

Keep Going

Yet, it is important to be patient with results and keep going. The core attuite of agile thinking is to try new ideas, to succeed and to fail in the aim of learning new things that can later be used to generate exciting results. It’s about continuous improvement suggesting that setback and mistakes are a part of the process, and this must be held in mind when assess how the agile approach is doing. Additionally, stopping and reverting only leaves talent feeling less powerful and demotivated.

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Agile operations once at scale

Once an organization has ramped up into having agile operations at scale it is important to remember this is not the end goal and its still a fight to maintain it. The final objective is to increase business performance and it will be a task to keep the organization on track with all the changes it has gone through to scale up. The things to keep in mind are how to manage agile teams and the role of leadership.

Manging Agile teams

When an organization has embraced agile at scale it becomes pivotal to consider both the challenges and needs now encountered by agile teams.

The system needs to become 100% agile, otherwise it promotes hostility between traditional and agile teams. Steaming from the jealousy that agile teams have the speed, freedoms, funding, and the ability to inject induvial value into their projects. Whereas traditional teams are held down by long review processes, pre-set tasks, a rigid top-down leadership, and no ability to explore outside the brief. Workflow differences are the result of not creating a fully agile system, this is problematic as it creates an unbalanced dynamic that is harder to manage and can lead to cultural tensions. The solution to this making sure all the talent on both team types is on the same page, either through a true 100% agile transformation or by operating agile teams in isolation.

However, what agile teams need to succeed is a reshaping of the systems around them and their way of working. They need clear funding channels, the ability to work in proximity with their teams, new operating models that reflect the changes, less interference from governance and cultural changes. But most importantly agile teams need to be empowered to feel they have the trust and freedom of the organization to embrace new ideas, ways of working and explore projects from a place of passion.

To maintain successful agile workflows at scale overtime organizations, need to ensure a stable culture and make sure the talent feel valued. An aligned culture provides clarity and a shared vision that will allow for better working chemistry and ensure that projects stay on track towards a common goal. Talent, however, needs to feel important as that is when people truly feel able to express their ideas, share their passions and become open to the insights of others. Collaboration is the core, collaboration between the organization and the teams, collaboration between team members, and collaboration between people.

The role of leaders

The biggest shift in agile at scale operations is that leaderships roles change. From having a top-down commanding presence to becoming the overseers and care takers of the business future direction. Leaderships new core focus is to align purpose, strategy, set priorities, guide cultural shifts, and understand the firm plus its talent. Good leaders give agile teams, trust, openness, collaboration, and autonomy. Yet, through communicating what and why correctly they allow teams to fix things for them in alignment with the firm’s vision. By keeping an organization collectively cantered on what truly matters through gearing the culture towards future ambitions greater amounts of alignment can be achieved, leading to teams being able to act more independently with more autonomy.

Change must happen top down, as to empower the workers the leaders need to change how they work and give up control, redefining how they fit into the agile workplace. As follows leaders can’t be risk adverse and personal career oriented. Agile working styles need risk to create the energy the culture feeds from to motivate innovation, leadership that can’t embrace this will only find ways to slow down change and become counterproductive. Most leaders will be or have been at one point career oriented to have risen the ranks but in an agile system they must embrace their new roles and accept they don’t have responsibility over managing agile teams’ ways of working regardless of the results. Leadership must embrace the cultural shift themselves will promote and show the talent they are all working towards a shared goal in different ways.

Are you ready?

It is hard to embrace an agile model across a whole organization, not every firm can manage the change as it requires full organizational support and transformation. But for the firms that are truly ready to become future leaders of the digital landscape it is the way forward.

Agile ways of working can make workers more empowered leading to faster delivery times, more motivation, more engagement, higher product quality and better financial results. The ability to learn, grow and change paths are profoundly human, allowing a technological blending with this human approach is the ultimate translator for personality in the digital space.