This document discusses principles and practices for scaling agile approaches in organizations. It begins by introducing Josef Scherer as an agile management consultant with experience helping large companies adopt scaled agile frameworks. It then poses questions to consider when scaling agile, such as goals, the type of scaling needed, and potential practices. The document outlines vertical and horizontal scaling and describes scaled roles, artifacts, and events in the Scaled Agile Framework. It also discusses scaling practices at Spotify, including feature teams and microservice architecture. Finally, it emphasizes that principles are more important than practices when scaling and should drive autonomy through purpose and motivation.

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Agile@Scale
For your Organisation –
What‘s the Right Mix of Principles and Practices?
Leatherman Day, Telefónica Germany
München, 25.06.2014
Josef.Scherer@KEGON.de

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 Agile Management Consultant
 Solution Focused Coach
 30 years of experience in software development
 7 years of experience with Large Scale Scrum
 3 Enterprise Agile Transitions (bwin, ADAG, Telekom P&I)
 Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) Program Consultant and Trainer
Josef Scherer

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 Training and Consulting for Agile@Enterprise
 Leading SAFe consulting company in Germany (5 SPCs, 5 SAs)
 Scaled Agile Inc. Partner
 Customers using SAFe
KEGON AG

4. Scaling Agile Practices & Self-Similarity
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5. Questions about Scaling Practices
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 What is your primary business goal for improvement?
(decrease T2M or TCO, increase customer satisfaction, …)
 Do you need to scale at all to reach that goal?
 What kind of scaling is more important to reach that goal?
(vertical or horizontal or both)
 What scaling practices could help you to reach that goal?
 Are there any quick wins by using low effort, high impact
practices?

6. Vertical & Horizontal Scaling
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http://www.it-agile.de/wissen/agile-skalierung-ueber-die-prinzipien/
Number of
Teams
Coverage of Value Stream

7. Vertical Scaling, Ready & Done
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 Number of Teams? (vertical)
 Coverage of Value Stream? (horizontal)
 Marketing, Product Management, SW Development, Operations
 Number of Organisational Levels? (both)
 Classic Functional: Team, Department, Division, Enterprise
 SAFe: Team, Program, Portfolio, Business Unit, Enterprise
 Large Scale Scrum: Feature Team, Requirement Area, Product
 Levels of Inspect&Adapt Cycles? (both)
 Iteration, Release, Road Map, Product Vision, Business Model
What is Scaled?

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Organisational properties that apply at all levels
Roles
 Team, Product Owner, Scrum Master, Architect
Artefacts
 Backlog, Increment
Timeboxes/Events
 Planning, Scrum, Review, Retrospective
Other agile practices
 DoD, DoR, Test First
Fractal, Self-Similarity of Scrum

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 Scaled Roles
 Agile Release Train (ART) -> Value Streams, Business Units?
 Product Management -> Program Portfolio Management
 System Architect -> Enterprise Architect
 Release Train Engineer (RTE) -> Agile Portfolio Master?
 Scaled Artefacts
 Program Backlog (Features) -> Portfolio Backlog (Epics)
 Scaled Inspect and Adapt Events
 Release Planning -> Strategic Planning?
 System Demo -> Review Investment Themes?
 Problem Solving Workshop -> Improvement Portfolio Mgt.?
Self-Similarity & SAFe Protfolio Level?

12.  One Product Manager as overall
Product Owner
 One Product Backlog per
Product
 One Area Product Owner per
Requirement Area
 Feature Teams with domain
knowledge
 Joint Sprint Meetings
 Planning 1
 Review
 Retrospective
 PBL Refinement
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Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)

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Vertical Scaling @Spotify

14. Scaling Teams & CoPs @Spotify
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 Engineering Practices
 Pair Work
 Shared Code Ownership (internal open source)
 Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery
 Test First (ATDD & TDD)
 Communities of Practice (CoPs)
 Scrum Master, Agile Coaches
 Product Owner
 Agile Testing
 Agile Architecture
Other important Scaling Practices

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Feature Teams -> Micro Service
Architecture
http://www.it-agile.de/wissen/skalierbare-software-architekturen/

17. Scaling Lean & Agile Principles
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Dee Hock (CEO VISA) The Birth of the Chaordic Age
Simple, clear purpose and principles
give rise to complex, intelligent behavior.

18. Questions about Scaling Principles
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 Again:
What is your primary business goal for improvement?
 What principles are relevant to reach that goal?
 What weighting of purpose and autonomy is right for your
culture?
 What ballance of principles & practices is appropriate for you
teams?

19. Principles > Practices
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20. Lean House
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21. ©2008-2014 Scaled Agile, Inc. and Leffingwell, LLC. All rights reserved.
Product Development Flow
Don Reinertsen
Principles of Product
Development Flow
1. Take an economic view
2. Actively manage queues
3. Understand and exploit
variability
4. Reduce batch sizes
5. Apply WIP constraints
6. Control flow under uncertainty:
cadence and synchronization
7. Get feedback as fast as possible
8. Decentralize control
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22. ©2008-2014 Scaled Agile, Inc. and Leffingwell, LLC. All rights reserved.
Lean Foundation: Leadership
 Management is trained in
lean thinking
 Bases decisions on this
long term philosophy
1. Take a Systems View
2. Embrace the Agile
Manifesto
3. Implement Product
Development Flow
4. Unlock the Intrinsic
Motivation of Knowledge
Workers
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Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer
through early and continuous delivery
of valuable software. …
Business people and developers must work
together daily throughout the project.
Build projects around motivated individuals.
Give them the environment and support they need,
and trust them to get the job done. …
Simplicity--the art of maximizing the amount
of work not done--is essential.
The best architectures, requirements, and designs
emerge from self-organizing teams.
At regular intervals, the team reflects on how
to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts
its behavior accordingly.
Principles behind the Agile Manifesto

24. Drive: Autonomy, Mastery, Purpose
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25. Purpose enables Autonomy
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26. 4 Levels of Team Autonomy
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27. Alignment & Autonomy @Spotify
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28. Alignment in SAFe
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29. LeSS Principles & Themes
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For scaling, Large Scale Scrum (LeSS) hits a sweet-spot balance between
defined Scrum practices and the principles of empirical process control.
Larman, Vodde 2014,
Large Scale Scrum.