Stop Scaling Start Growing Agile

agile42 | the agile coaching company www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2017.
Stop scaling… Start growing
an agile organization

Dhaval Panchal
Agile Coach & Trainer
dhaval.panchal@agile42.com @dhavalpanchal

What to scale?

Delivery
Model?
Organizational
Structure? Teams and
Processes?

agile42 | The Agile Coaching Company www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2012.
Agile at Scale Frameworks

You didn’t try hard enough! cargo cult Agile

agile42 | We advise, train and coach companies building software www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2009.
Ordered
Unordered
Simple
ComplicatedComplex
Chaotic
Sense
Categorize
Respond
Best Practices
Good Practices
Sense
Analyze
Respond
Probe
Sense
Respond
Act
Sense
Respond
Emergent
Novel
Disorder
Cyneﬁn Framework

Fit for Purpose

New
Organization 
(up to 60 people)
Grown
Organization
(from 60 to 500 people)
Corporation
(from 500 to many thousands people)
“One size fits all?”… Not in practice… but in Principles!

agile42 | the agile coaching company www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2017.agile42 | the agile coaching company www.agile42.com | All rights reserved. Copyright © 2007 - 2017.
We need
to scale agile
because our
projects are
very large
So why don’t
you make your
projects
smaller?

The heart of an agile
organization…

Client &
Value focus
Self-Organization
&Autonomy
Iterative &
Incremental
change to
reduce the
risk
Continuous
Improvement

Three step guide to failed transition
• Pick favorite Agile scaling framework.
(when you know least about “ﬁt for
purpose”)
• Document new processes, roles and
responsibilities.
• Install Agile tools to enforce
standardization of practices.
People resist being coerced

Experiences
Beliefs
Actions
Results
Culture
Manage
Lead
The “Results Pyramid” is copyright of Partners in Leadership LLC
shift
the
balance
coaching is an ongoing
long term investment
Coaching for Results

Growing Agile is the agile way

Culture as ﬁrst class concern
Culture eats strategy for breakfast

“This is how we do things around here…”
Culture is the set of
behaviors that have been
established and accepted
within an organization

Make Culture Explicit
• Structured conversations
• Culture proﬁle
• Give voice to implicit

Schneider Culture Model

Cultural Shift: Growing Agile
Cultivation Competence
Control
People
Impersonal
Actuality
Possibility
Collaboration
William Schneider - The four Core Cultures
Agile Values
& Principles
Most of the organizations
today have a strong Hierarchy
oriented proﬁle
They struggle to introduce a
more agile and lean approach
to work, because the
hierarchical culture is not
supportive of agile values and
principles

“If you can make
culture explicit,
you can agree
where you stand,
and where you
want to go…”
There are two ways of encouraging behaviors within an organization:
1. Story telling and role-modeling (e.g: empathy and tradition, walk
the talk)
2. Ritualization (e.g: Scrum events, Ritual Dissent, Open Space)

Growing Agile Principle:
Make your culture explicit
Organizational culture exists, whether we acknowledge it or
not, and making explicit allows for better alignment and
context creation

Iterative & Incremental Change
Organizations change, when people in them change

The traditional approach to change management…
…focused on standardization, before stabilization…
t
Design
Documentation
Rollout
Fix Issues
> 3-4 months…

The agile approach to change management…
Design
Rollout
Doc
Rollout
Doc
Rollout
Doc
Coach
≤ 12 weeks t
…focused on stabilization with emergent standardization…
Design Coach
Rollout
Doc
Rollout
Doc

Agile Strategy Map™
Goal PSF
NC
Define the Goal we
want to achieve
Possible Success Factor (PSF)
represents a hypothesis about a
key factor that would enable us
to achieve the Goal
Necessary Condition (NC):
what is needed in order to fulfill
the Success Factor

Strategy Map from
March 2014
• The Goal for 2015
has been
established
• The Transition
Team identiﬁed at
least 7 PSFs that
would provide a
powerful leverage
to achieve the
ﬁnal Goal

Cross-department
Agile champions
team models Agile
behaviors and
nurtures
environment for
Agile transition to
succeed.

Focus on small incremental
changes
Whenever changing from one way of working to another, we
will go through a hybrid situation where the coexistence of
two different ways generates attrition, duplications and other
forms of waste. The awareness of this fact should push us
in delivering changes fast and in small increments…

Organize for value delivery
Focus on the work, not on the worker.

The matrix organization…
SubSystem1
SubSystem2
SubSystem3
Infrastructure
Operations
PMO
Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
… optimized for utilization, not value delivery…
Handovers and coordination
Value
Client
Push in the lines

Stream 1
Stream 2
Stream 3
The agile organization…
SubSystem1
SubSystem2
SubSystem3
Infrastructure
Operations
… optimized for value delivery and time to market
Value
Client
Pull on the streams

Opportunity Canvases to create context and focus on Customer Value…
Lean Portfolio Canvas™ have been created by agile42 and are licensed using Creative Common 3.0 with attribution (BY), non commercial usage (NC) and
share alike (SA) options. You can reuse and modify the template, but you will always have to leave the logo on it.
OpportunityName (title)
1. Opportunity 2. Customer Segments
What is the problem to be solved? What type of customers & users will
benefit from this solution?
How is the customer solving the
problem right now?
3. Possible Solution
What are the key points of a possible
solution to the presented problem?
4. Benefits
What are the benefits for the
customers?
6. Measuring Success
What metrics will be best measure the
success of the feature?
5. Business Readiness
What steps are required from the
business side to be able to use this
capability?
7. Cost of Delay
Which profile better represent the cost
of delay (CoD)?
8. Costs Structure
How does the cost structure look like for such a feature? One time, ongoing
costs, contractors expenses, development costs?
9. Value to Customer and Business
What are the expected incremental revenue for selling this feature, and what are
the strategic and tactical benefit? What are the intangible values (usability,
performance, customer knowledge obtained...)
Opportunity Owner (name)

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Uniﬁed Portfolio and Program System
to increase transparency, to visualize
Customer Value and dependencies

Focus on value and organize
accordingly
Focusing on value means to make sure that there are as
few obstacles as possible in the direction of the value
streams…

Decentralize control
Sandbox of creativity, accountability, and team work.

Control !
Worker 1
Sub 1
Worker 2
Sub 2 Sub 3
The hierarchical organization… Centralized Control,
ends up overloaded,
introducing delays
Requests
Authorization
the design is based on mistrust…
Information&power

Scale this?
In hierarchies, getting anything done involves workers in a complex web of requestors,
approvers, and reports. Overhead of managing work is often larger than cost of doing
work.

Team as container for empowerment
Worker 3Worker 2
The agile organization…
Decentralized
Control reduces
overhead, and
encourage
collaboration
the design is based on trust…
Worker 1
Collaboration
Information&power

No two teams have same task board design, no two
teams have copy-cat practices.

Clear explicit policies
describe range of
autonomy teams have.
AND program metrics
Product Owner(s)
container for discovery
and breakdown of
Epics.
Team containers
for managing
stories
Done stories
and epics.
Transparency builds trust between Portfolio
Management and Delivery teams

Decentralize control whenever
possible
Decentralization of control and decision making, reduces
the feedback loops, and enables faster reaction times. It
requires deﬁning containers for empowerment, to allow for
autonomous decision making.

De-synchronized ﬂow
Are the trains running on time?

t
Project 2
Project 3
Project 1
The plan driven organization… Synchronization of all Projects
for a release, decreases
efficiency and increases
coordination costs
Release
Pm 3
Pm 1
Pm 2
…fixed scope and fixed date…

t
The agile organization… De-synchronization of
development teams to
reduce cost of release
…variable scope and variable date…
Feature A
Release
Team 1
Team 2
Team 3
Team 4
Feature B
Release Release
Feature C
Release
Feature D
Release
Feature E

Automated testing and focus on Epics
allowed to go to market on time, and
build capability to incremental enter new
states.
Switch from big product
releases to incremental
change, every feature is
released on all platforms
“Focusing on one Feature at a time allowed for
faster feedback also involving stakeholders was
easier… deliver fast to learn fast”

Avoid synchronization of ﬂows
unless necessary
De-synchronization is unintuitive, but allows for parallel
distributed work, without having to carry the excessive
burden of coordination and handovers…

Overall lessons learned
Changes in behavior happens thanks to focus on principles
and values, the resulting emergent systems showed
recurring and reusable patterns that may reproduce similar
behaviors…

Assessment
Strategy
Pilot Projects
Rollout
Enterprise Transition Framework (ETF)

so what?

1. There is no blueprint for an
Agile Organization, as from
the moment you’ll try to
deﬁne one, it won’t be Agile
anymore!

2. Scaling the delivery model
won’t make your organization
agile, you need to change the
culture too!

3. Becoming an Agile
organization should never be
your goal, it is a means at
best!

4. Becoming an agile
organization is a team sport,
and still everyone needs to
start the change from within!

5. Experience shows that
there are recurring patterns
emerging by embracing
speciﬁc principles… so use
them!
At your ownrisk! ;-)

Thank You!

More food for thought...

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The brands and logos of agile42, Enterprise Transition Framework ETF (http://agile42.com/etf/), Team Coaching
Framework TCF (http://tcf.agile42.com/) and Agile Strategy Map (http://www.agile42.com/en/agile-transition/agile-
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Stop Scaling Start Growing Agile

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