Scaling Agility

In a perfect world, every Agile team would be perfectly isolated, completely owning its product or portfolio of products. Cross-team coordination is a common source of delays and errors. If every team were isolated, that wouldn’t be a problem.

It’s also not at all realistic. A typical Agile team has 4–10 people. That’s often not enough.

So, then, how do you scale? Although this book is focused on individual Agile teams, the question is important enough to deserve a chapter of its own.

Scaling Fluency

Far too often, organizations invest in scaling Agile without investing in teams’ fluency or organizational capability.

Far too often, organizations try to scale Agile without actually having the ability to be Agile in the first place. They invest a lot of time and money in the large-scale Agile flavor of the day, without investing in teams’ fluency or organizational capability. It never works.

To scale Agile, you’ll need to scale your organization’s ability to be Agile. This involves three parts: organizational capability, coaching capability, and team capability.

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In this Section

1. Scaling Agility
   1. Scaling Fluency
      1. Organizational Capability
      2. Coaching Capability
      3. Team Capability
         1. Sidebar: Second Adopter Syndrome
   2. Scaling Products and Portfolios
      1. Scaling Vertically
         1. LeSS
         2. Adopting LeSS
         3. FAST
         4. Adopting FAST
         5. Challenges and benefits of vertical scaling
      2. Scaling Horizontally
      3. Scaling Vertically and Horizontally
      4. My Recommendation
         1. Sidebar: What About SAFe?