Two Talks on Scaling Agile

I've been doing a lot of work with multi-team development projects recently, and this has resulted in two good talks on large-scale Agile.

Scaling Beyond the Enterprise

My first talk was a keynote for Agile India in March 2016. It provides a good overview of the issues that come up, some of the solutions, and discusses my approach is different from existing approaches to scaling.

Scaling Beyond the Enterprise

The brilliance of early Agile methods was their non-conformity. They rejected conventional wisdom about how software should be created and substituted a new reality: one where collaboration, adaptation, and continuous improvement were more important than rigid processes and plans. At first, many people rejected these innovations, but Agile stood the test of time. Now it's won the day.

When people talk about scaling Agile, they forget those insurrectionary roots. They focus on what's palatable to the "enterprise:" how to make Agile safe, non-threatening, and acceptable--how to make it more conventional and conformist. In doing so, they risk losing the innovations that make Agile work so well.

What if we stopped worrying about what's safe and acceptable? What if we went back to those innovative roots? What would Agile look like if we scaled beyond the enterprise?

Come find out.

Rethinking Scaling

At the I T.A.K.E. conference in Romania, in May 2016, I keynoted on this topic again. This was an audience of developers, so I took a deeper look at the architectural and team structure considerations. There's a bit of overlap, but it goes into more detail with more examples. I'm particularly pleased with how this talk came out: it's covers a very solid list of things to think about as your company grows.

Rethinking Scaling

That feeling of a successful startup. A handful of people in a room, getting shi...ny things done. Everybody working together, all cylinders firing. It's intoxicating.

That feeling of a great XP team. A cross-functional team, all in a room, getting shi...pping done. Everybody working together, sharing responsibility, creating great code. It's impossible to forget.

But what do you do when the startup IPOs, and the 12-person company is now a 1000-person behemoth? What do you do when the XP team grows, and you have 100 people working on a product, not ten? How do you keep those great small-team dynamics in a big organization?

When people talk about scaling Agile, they focus on what's palatable to the "enterprise:" how to make Agile safe, non-threatening, and acceptable. But what if we aren't in that kind of company? What if we know what it's like to be great, but we're too big to do it the way we used to?

Let's set aside the brand names, consulting companies, and enterprise certifications. Let's look at the possibilities of large-scale Agile at its best.

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