Most organizations use a primarily hierarchical organization structure to organize their scaled populations. These organizations cannot be agile without adding additional connections between interdependent nodes. Hubs and scale-free networks offer a solution, and we find them in traditional structures usually associated with peripheral or vestigial concerns.
2. • “Many software engineers are thus drawn like
moths to the flame of scale.”
• Excerpt From: Clive Thompson. “Coders.” Apple
Books.
https://books.apple.com/us/book/coders/id13903
60381
2
8. What Is a Scale-Free
System?
• They tend to have a high number of hubs
• Long tails in the distribution of node degree, with some
nodes an order of magnitude larger than the smaller nodes
• The hubs tie together communities of leaves (and maybe a
few other hubs)
• They tend to be flat — so they have low graph diamater
(the largest number of hops from any node to any other
node) — and the diameter remains constant as the graph
grows (scale-free)
8
9. Hubs reduce graph diameter
astillo: "Effective Web Crawling", PhD Thesis, University of Ch
Diameter = 7Diameter = 18
9
13. Why are Scale-Free Systems
Good For?
• They are robust — they tend to survive random
link breakages
• They tend to reduce internode traversal distance
• They have redundancy
13
14. Alternatives To Scale-
Freeness
• A fully-connected network
• Works for one development team but does not
scale to large developments nor beyond
development
• Hierarchy
• Works, but a lot of overhead and delay that
violates TPS principles
14
15. Just a footnote…
• “Agility” is at best awkward when trying to
remember the names of the 650 people you work
with, or if it takes a long time (more than five
minutes) to walk to their desk.
15
16. Data from the Pasteur Project
• Empirical
sociometric data on
> 100
organizations
16
17. A journey into history
0
2
4
6
8
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
A Telecommunications R&D Lab
17
22. The results from walking
down memory lane…
• Most organizations followed the “natural” normal
distribution of node degree
• Agile organizations followed the exponential
distribution of node degree
22
23. Many Scaling Approaches
Use Multiple Hierarchies
C
P
O
The PO Team
The communication metaphor is hierarchical, because a
flat structure will not accommodate that scale
The MetaScrum
Leadershi
p
Stakeholde
rs
Customer
s
Distance from any Dev
to a Customer is at
least 4, more likely >= 6
(the same as any two
people on Earth…)23
24. Achieving Scale-Freeness in
your Organization
• In a large organization, add overlay hubs
• Hubs support helping relationships in large organizations (Powers et al.)
• Network-structured Scrum of Scrums (not the old-style variety)
• Birds of a Feather
• Beyond a certain point, the hub complexity is overwhelming
• I.e., beyond a certain point, agile is impossible: e.g., open source
• Split the large organization in smaller ones: Value Stream Fork
• Autonomy, mastery, purpose
• To the degree possible, let each team deliver autonomously
24
25. But what is the goal?
• Scale-freeness supports information interchange
in large organizations; that may increase output
• Small organizations need “critical mass” to do
something significant, up to five people
• So, innovation is effective in groups of about five
• Innovation is also effective in connected (urban)
populations — which have hub connections
(Johnson)
25
26. Development is largely self-
contained — to optimize productivity
• Maybe you need few hubs
connecting sales with R&D
— only for essential
coupling
• Therefore, maybe fewer
“individuals & interactions”
at the enterprise level
• Raises the question of
whether “enterprise agile”
make sense
26
27. High-Density Liquid Networks: What if I
wanted to optimize innovation instead?
Scale-free!
“The innovation power of the marketplace derives, in part,
from this most elemental math: no matter how smart the
‘authorities’ may be, if they are outnumbered a thousand to
one by the marketplace, there will be more good ideas lurking
in the market than in the feudal castle. Cities and markets
recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the
adjacent possible. As long as there is spillover between those
minds, useful innovations will be more likely to appear and to
spread through the population at large.” — Johnson, “Where
Good Ideas Come From”
27
28. Extending the Network
Beyond Development
• The real sense of
“enterprise”
• If you have multiple
customers, a scale-
free graph is
unreasonable
Development
Hu
b
SupportHu
b
End Users
Hu
b
Hu
b
Hu
b
Management
Hu
b
“Cartel”
Scrum of Scrums
Scrum of Scrums
BOF
Distance from some Devs to an
end user is as small as 228
29. Examples of Organizations
that Work this Way
• Research
laboratories
(Bell Labs:
one patent
a day over
100 years)
X
X X
XX29
30. Longitudinal Possibilities!
• Combine gestalt theory and scale
freeness to create organizations
where the output is not linear
with adding people, but a weak
power series!
• We already know this boosts
product output for small values
• We know this boosts innovation
for large values
• Law of diminishing returns on
output, but maybe a win in
innovation
Output
Nodes in Organizstion
30
31. Working Groups —
Brainstorming
• How to add hubs to an existing Scrum organization (like yours!)
• Agile Lean Leadershiop framework
• Others? Buddy systems? Staff sharing? No constraints!
• Scrum of Scrums / Feature Owner
• Meta Scrums
• Birds of a Feather
• The architecture structure — code “stewardship” teams !!!
31
32. Conclusion
• Most scaling frameworks are not scale-free
• At best, they are hierarchical organizations that just
run interrupt-driven
• Small Scrum works because everyone is connected
• Scale-freeness supports enterprise agility
• Scrum has some facilities now, but more formalized
“hubs” could make it even better
32
33. Possible Corollaries
• Don’t try to scale your organization unless it is
scale-free AND you do it in a scale-free way
• You cannot be purely agile (individuals and
interactions) in a market where hubs can’t reduce
the connection path length to all users (democracy
/ republic)
• All scaled agile frameworks are traditional
hierarchies with scaled graph diameters: are those
agile?
33
34. 35
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Scrum@Scale uses the term “scale-free architecture” to mean “… linear scalability of teams. Productivity per person does not go down no matter how many teams you add.” Mail from Jeff Suthlerland, 12 February 2019 at 16:26.
There is a desire for people creating scaled Scrum system to create a scale-free system, and S@S is one of them.
But, yet, they already do. https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20160204094159/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/dcp171766_429935.pdf
Peaks are 7.5 km and 15 km away
These are from the two graphs of the preceding slide
Hale, et al, “Mapping the UK Webspace: Fifteen Years of British Universities on the Web.”
May 2014. DOI: 10.1145/2615569.2615691. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262264957_Mapping_the_UK_Webspace_Fifteen_Years_of_British_Universities_on_the_Web
… but it’s small (12 people)
Small World Theory
Hubs support helping relationships in large organizations: Powers et al. “When is bigger better? The effects of group size on the evolution of helping behaviours.” https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/When-is-bigger-better-The-effects-of-group-size-on-Powers-Lehmann/a2812148114baf401cb8d4a51f8c61450d694629
Agile makes sense within development where tight coupling and interactions are the norm. But at the enterprise level, there may be enough natural decoupling (shearing layers) that agile response times are unnecessary. This is exacerbated by the myth that requirements change — no, they don’t: our understanding changes.
Johnson, “Where Good Ideas Come From.”
Picture credit: Manu Cornet / www.bonkersworld.net