A Principles Based Approach to Scaling Agile

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If you’re looking at Scaling sessions, you’re probably in one of four categories: 1) You are using a scaling framework and want to make it work better, 2) You are evaluating various scaling frameworks and struggling to pick the one that will work best in your organization, 3) You want to “roll your own” scaling framework that is custom fit for your organization, and want to make sure that you create something that will lead to a truly Agile Organization, or 4) You want to “scale agile” outside of just the IT/development group in your organization.

While the idea of taking something that works really well at the team level and scaling it up seems logical, the core characteristics of successful teams are really hard to duplicate outside of a small number of people. In addition, this type of fractal approach is just one of several possible scenarios for scaling. This has resulted in scaling approaches that assume trust, accountability, and transparency of information without putting effective systems and structures in place to achieve those characteristics at the organizational level.

In this workshop, we’ll share a set of principles that we’ve discovered from our years of working with organizations of all types (including non-software) to help them become Agile Organizations at scale. These principles can be applied to any scaling framework, they are agnostic in nature in order to be useful in helping you: 1) Strengthen the effectiveness and agility of your chosen scaling framework, 2) Select a scaling framework that will best fit your organizational context, 3) Focus on the most important considerations if you are “rolling your own” scaling approach, and 4) Scale Agile thinking and approaches beyond development and IT.

Our principles based approach examines what Agile Organizations do to achieve those same benefits beyond just scaling to more agile teams working on projects, programs or portfolios. The principles can be used to achieve true Organizational Agility, which is necessary to remain competitive and make a difference in the 21st century.