It might be because I'm not a native speaker, but there is something about "scaling agile" or "scaled agile" that really has been bothering me these last couple of years.
As I wrote before in my recollection of events agile was described as something that works well for small teams.
IMHO at least two of the principles, namely "face-to-face communication" and "architectures, requirements and designs from self-organizion" are extremely hard to do in larger groups – unless you add additional constraints like structures (aka hierarchy) or special roles outside each individual group of people or team (aka specialists).
So what are we talking about, when we talk about Agile at scale? At scale means (according to YourDictonary.com) to have something that is "at the required size to solve the problem." Scaling on the other hand means "a linear transformation that enlarges or diminishes objects."
What does that mean for scaling agile approaches?
Do we really want to scale e.g. the number of people involved in solving one specific problem? Because, actually the communication overhead does not scale linearly – it 'scales' according to Metcalfe's law and thus communication quickly becomes inefficient. (With 5 people there are only 10 unique ways of communication, with 12 people the number is already 66)
Therefore: Why do we keep talking about "scaling agile?"
I think we should talk about "appropriate solutions at scale" and strive for them. That might include approaches from the lean and agile communities, some implementation of the Kanban Method to facilitate the change and many other ideas that are appropriate for the actual challenges at hand. When we truly live in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous world, than maybe the solutions for big and complex organizations can also only evolve over time according to each specific organization.
till next time
Michael Mahlberg
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