Scaling Agile Practices for the Enterprise
At Optimation, we’ve invested in developing our understanding and capabilities around Business Agility, because our customers are looking for ways to develop their overall responsiveness, through adopting lean governance, moving to management by coordination rather than control, combining a strategic focus with a tactical flexibility, innovating confidently while keeping it simple, maintaining the energy and connectedness of start-ups and avoiding the silos that destroy collaboration and slow everything down.
Unfortunately, implementing agile practices at the delivery level without changing how the rest of the organisation works is not an effective model. We’ve seen telecommunications and finance companies hit the wall and look around dazed wondering why they’re not getting the returns they expected. Sometimes this results in them going back to what they believe worked before, but more hopefully they take on the challenge of how to adapt to these new practices in their programme management and governance approaches.
This challenge was discussed at some length at our recent AgileTribe supper with Stephen Forte, particularly how some people have achieved success with emerging models, like the Scaled Agile Framework.
We asked Steve Forte, board member of the Scrum Alliance, what he thought about these developments. He said how he thought they offered real promise in enabling agile practices to scale up for the enterprise, and called out the old guard for becoming defensive and closed towards the new frameworks.
He was first introduced to the Scaled Agile Framework by Jacob Creech of Boost Agile, a New Zealander now based in Shanghai, and says “more please” to the emergence of frameworks like this that are scalable and based on the underlying values and principles of the Agile Manifesto. Steve has seen strong evidence of how even very large companies can do this effectively, and cited software giants like Google and Microsoft.
We’ve implemented lean governance and agile programme management in large organisations in New Zealand and seen it work too.
What’s been your experience? Have you seen agile practices succeed on small projects, only to falter when they take on large programmes? Or, have you seen agile practices work effectively in large organisations? What are your success stories? We’re keen to hear from you.
