Grow Agile Beyond the Team into the Enterprise
Know the common scaling hurdles and roadblocks and proactively address them.
- Agile benefits are easily seen in small, collocated teams: high quality products and improved transparency and culture. Success stories are resonating among your IT teams and at high levels of your organization.
- You now want to see these benefits on a larger scale, involving many teams and different types of projects that potentially do not use agile.
Our Advice
Critical Insight
- Scaling Agile up and out in your enterprise will introduce a different set of obstacles that you must consider: managing the coordination of multiple teams, incorporating Waterfall milestones, and incorporating Agile metrics in traditional reporting.
- A common understanding of Agile in your context becomes even more important in ensuring each team member is striving towards the same goal.
Impact and Result
- There can be many areas in your organization that can derail your Agile scaling initiatives, including management concerns, poor communication channels, or inadequate development practices.
- Gain a wide perspective of the state of your IT teams in order to determine which problems you would like to address first.
Workshop: Grow Agile Beyond the Team into the Enterprise
Workshops offer an easy way to accelerate your project. If you are unable to do the project yourself, and a Guided Implementation isn't enough, we offer low-cost delivery of our project workshops. We take you through every phase of your project and ensure that you have a roadmap in place to complete your project successfully.
Module 1: Identify Your Agile Scaling Impediments
The Purpose
- Discuss the common misinterpretations and benefits with scaling up agile.
- Learn about the various industry agile frameworks.
- Conduct a retrospective with agile coaches to identify current and potential scaling impediments.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Insights on your readiness to scale agile up in the enterprise.
- Grounded definition of business value.
- Shortlist of agile scaling impediments to be immediately addressed.
Activities
Outputs
Clarify common misunderstandings around agile.
- Organization and team readiness assessment to scale agile.
Be prepared to initially see a temporary drop in productivity.
- List of high priority communication, governance, and development technique issues to address in the scaling project.
Identify your level of readiness to begin scaling up agile.
- Definition of business value.
Determine your high priority agile scaling impediments.
Module 2: Address Your Issues
The Purpose
- Find the root causes for each of your communication, governance, and development technique issues.
- Develop and tailor scaling user stories for the solutions to address your issues.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Identification of the sources to your high priority scaling issues.
- Scaling user stories tailored to your context.
Activities
Outputs
Conduct a root cause analysis to identify the source of your challenges.
- Agile scaling user stories.
Identify and understand your communication, governance, and development technique issues.
Begin tailoring solutions to address your agile scaling issues.
Write your agile scaling user stories.
Module 3: Implement and Monitor Your Scaling Initiatives
The Purpose
- Create your prioritized scaling backlog for implementation.
- Continuously monitor the implementation of your solutions.
- Generate new solutions based on feedback from retrospectives and metrics.
Key Benefits Achieved
- Identification of agile scaling solutions to be addressed in upcoming sprints.
- List of metrics to measure the success of your scaling initiatives.
- Tips to consider during the implementation of your user stories.
Activities
Outputs
Review and size your scaling user stories with your team of agile coaches.
- Sized and prioritized agile scaling backlog.
Prioritize your scaling user stories.
- Monitoring plan for your agile scaling project.
Prepare a list of high-level costs for your upcoming sprints.
Communicate upcoming changes with a comprehensive communication plan.
Gather and analyze your metrics during your scaling sprints.
Conduct a retrospective to review your scaling initiatives and establish next steps.
About Info-Tech
Info-Tech Research Group is the world’s fastest-growing information technology research and advisory company, proudly serving over 30,000 IT professionals.
We produce unbiased and highly relevant research to help CIOs and IT leaders make strategic, timely, and well-informed decisions. We partner closely with IT teams to provide everything they need, from actionable tools to analyst guidance, ensuring they deliver measurable results for their organizations.
What Is a Blueprint?
A blueprint is designed to be a roadmap, containing a methodology and the tools and templates you need to solve your IT problems.
Each blueprint can be accompanied by a Guided Implementation that provides you access to our world-class analysts to help you get through the project.
Need Extra Help?
Speak With An Analyst
Get the help you need in this 3-phase advisory process. You'll receive 7 touchpoints with our researchers, all included in your membership.
Guided Implementation 1: Identify Agile scaling impediments
- Call 1: Discuss your drivers for scaling up Agile
- Call 2: Review your high priority scaling issues
- Call 3: Interpret your readiness to scale Agile
Guided Implementation 2: Address your issues
- Call 1: Evaluate the root causes of your high priority issues
- Call 2: Discuss your scaling solutions
Guided Implementation 3: Implement and monitor your scaling initiatives
- Call 1: Discuss the sizing and prioritization of your Agile scaling user stories
- Call 2: Discuss tips behind the implementation and monitoring of your solutions
Contributors
- Scott W. Ambler, Senior Consulting Partner, Scott Ambler + Associates
- Hassan Syed, Founder, Bir Ventures International
- Jesse Mussio, IT Manager, 3M
- Kristen Morton, Associate Implementation Architect, OneShield Inc
- Bryan Jonker, Developer, Health Alliance
- Rod Bray, Process Improvement Consultant, Scrum Masters Inc
- Zack Beadle, Enterprise Architect, Sterne Agee