7 Key Factors for Scaling Agile in Large Organizations

Agile software development has become a standard for the development of software products and services. From startups to large corporations, from IT companies to government agencies, agility is pervasive in almost every industry. Its adoption has grown from a small number of agile teams within an organization to multiple agile teams, larger teams, and entire organizations, bringing with it a whole new set of challenges and complexity.
According to VersionOne’s 12th Annual State of Agility Report, the top three challenges in adopting and scaling agile are organizational culture as opposed to shared agile values, resistance to the organization to change, and inadequate management support and funding. Despite these obstacles, 97% of respondents said their organization practices agile development. How can we meet the challenges?
The need to develop agility has spawned frameworks that provide guidance for organizations, including the Agile Framework at Scale (SAFe), Scrum of Scrums (SoS), Scrum at Scale (LeSS), and delivery disciplined fast (DAD). Regardless of the setting, there are several key factors that play a key role in the success of rapid mass adoption.
Here are seven things you should consider when trying to scale agility in a large organization.
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Executive leadership support:
Executive leadership support and funding is the most fundamental factor in a rapid transformation at scale. Successful transformation relies on leadership deeply engaged with organizational change agents, driving innovation, collaborating, and creating value as new ways of working are implemented.
Change presents challenges to all levels of the organization, so leaders must be prepared to face these challenges and provide strong support to ensure that the organization remains resilient. Agile scaling from the team level to the enterprise level also requires significant cost and effort and requires an investment of resources to be successful. Therefore, management must be absolutely clear about the intended outcome. Among other metrics, customer satisfaction, employee engagement, and regular delivery of useful features are success metrics management should be looking for. Progress achieved, actions taken, and results obtained must be measured, as they will determine the duration of support and funding.
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Knowledge acquisition:
A systematic training and education program on agile values and processes is needed for rapid adoption at scale. Inadequate knowledge or advice creates chaos and poor execution. In the absence of proper training and coaching, teams often adopt practices that are not agile at all! Without a clear understanding of what agility is (and isn’t), organizations trying to scale will face significant challenges.
To address this risk, provide regular scaled Agile training opportunities to teams, participate in external learning events, and raise awareness through internal meetings and conferences. Also, be sure to provide ongoing coaching support to teams undergoing rapid transition. Changing old habits is more difficult than starting over, which is why it is so important to support those who are anchored to the old way of doing things. Take advantage of experienced agility coaches who have a deep understanding of agility and how to apply the principles to your unique situation.
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Engineering excellence:
A strong technical culture is crucial when it comes to agile scaling. All in all, the lack of solid engineering practices slows down team productivity and leads to poor quality. Technical debt is growing under the pressure of constant deliveries, and the problem is getting worse as more teams need to coordinate their agile efforts. When pressed for time due to additional interactions between teams, teams can overlook important QA activities and suffer quality.
When scaling agile practices, organizations should ensure technical excellence by using end-to-end test automation. Creating a cross-functional DevOps culture, maintaining a clear definition of practice, developing membership of a versatile team, seamlessly collaborating across teams, and using visual heatsinks to monitor overall code quality.
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Tools and infrastructure:
Organizations need to invest in modern tools and infrastructure to support fast and frequent deliveries. Program complexity and distributed integration among teams increase with rapid adoption at scale, so existing tools and infrastructure may be outdated or inadequate to meet the needs of rapid product delivery methods and services.
Modern software practices such as continuous integration and deployment, behavior-driven development, and planning are often an integral part of the process. Fast delivery today. The need for tools and infrastructure to support these operations with the growing number of agile teams. Modern workspaces, video conferencing equipment, virtual meeting rooms, and collaboration tools are also critical to supporting distributed agile environments.
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Communities of practice:
CoP plays a key role in knowledge sharing and driving best practices across agile teams and organizations. These are often informal, self-organizing groups of individuals who share a common interest in promoting better ways of working in areas such as business, engineering practices, software tools, and processes.
CoPs for ScrumMasters, Agile Testing, UI/UX, DevOps, and Test Automation are very popular in large organizations. As the adoption of agility grows, it becomes more and more important for like-minded people to collaborate and share best practices and skills across the organization. Sometimes these CoPs create guidance on agile best practices to maintain consistency across teams.
The goal of communities of practice is to provide knowledge and support without being overly prescriptive, providing just enough guidance and framework for groups to refer to as needed.
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Integrating non-software teams:
One of the key factors behind the success of large-scale agile is gradually bringing more and more teams and functions into the transformation journey. Traditionally, business and support functions such as operations, version management auditing have operated in a waterfall model. switch to fast. They usually have a definite operating model and process that they believe will keep the system stable, and they don’t want to compromise with that. Putting them under the agile umbrella creates a state of uncertainty for them.
Adopting a new way of working not only has a positive effect on working relationships between teams, but also on the stability and quality of releases.
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Agile champions and change agents:
The team won’t move if organizations don’t have agile champions and change agents who are the main catalysts between management and teams. Any successful change requires someone who can turn the organization’s vision into reality. Agility champions and change agents make this possible.
They take ownership to drive change by working with management and teams. Letting go of traditional thinking is always a challenge, and because these people understand the organization’s culture better than a stranger, their involvement turns out to be more effective.
Agile scaling requires a good understanding of the reasons behind it, supported by informed decisions. Therefore, the consent and support of the organization’s leadership are very important. Agility and customer focus are essential in today’s highly competitive and rapidly changing marketplace. Making the entire organization more agile is the way to stay in the game.