#ElevateAgile2021

2021 Talks

Agile Transformation and Delivery Systems at Scale

Anita Lessard

1 of 10

About The Talk

Small teams dominated the early days of Agile, often collocated and working side-by-side with onsite customers. With autonomy over their technology stack and the ability to do push button changes into production at a moment’s notice. The core organizing principle was that we had dedicated teams, working off a clearly articulated backlog of requirements, producing an increment of working-tested software at regular intervals.

As Agile got more popular, it got codified into methodologies like Scrum and SAFe. While these approaches are aware of the necessary pre-conditions to make themselves work, they didn’t meet teams where they were and provide guidance to help practitioners untangle their organizational designs and technology architectures. The net effect was often poorly formed teams, insufficiently clear backlogs, and the utter inability to produce a working tested increment of product at the end of the sprint.

Solving these problems requires that we look at the System of Delivery holistically and articulate a strategy for forming teams, feeding those teams strategically aligned backlogs, and integrating and measuring the output of multiple teams working in tandem to deliver more complex and larger scale deliverables. Cross-team coordination and dependency management become essential factors in making Agile work, especially in an early-stage transformation.

Topic Areas:

Creating Systems and Processes around Customers and Markets
How to Build a Trustworthy System You Can Delegate Into
Our Theory of Transformation
Why Organizational Alignment is the Root Problem

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Agile Transformation and Delivery Systems at Scale

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Establishing a Reliable System You Can Delegate Into

For years, the Agile community has taken the approach that an Agile Transformation was about teaching people the principles, practices, and mindset of an Agile organization. While principles, practices, and mindset are incredibly important, they are insufficient for successfully orchestrating a transformation at scale. Everything about agile assumes that you have complete cross-functional teams, clearly articulated and strategically aligned backlogs, and the ability to produce a working, tested increment of software at the end of every sprint. This begs the question; what do you do if you don’t?

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Engaging the Enterprise at Scale: How to Get Everyone Else to Change

One of the challenges of introducing Agile into an organizational ecosystem is that the principles, practices, mindsets, organizational structure, governance, and metrics are orthogonal to how most corporations do business. Agile gets installed in the small and is instantly at odds with the current operating model. It is incongruent with how work is funded and approved and how it handles compliance and corporate governance. To even have a chance, agile is granted exceptions to these control frameworks. Still, in the end, these frameworks will limit our ability to make progress and achieve true business agility.

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