Agile Know-How Magazine • Fall 2017
Have you noticed, as I did, that the
SAFe training material focuses mainly
on the basics of Agility? Well, that’s normal!
E
ven if big organizations have found Agile scaling
frameworks to their measure (SAFe 1 , DaD 2 , Nexus, and
LeSS 3 ), it does not exclude the fact that to implement them,
the foundations remain the same: the Agile Manifesto, Scrum,
Lean, Extreme Pr ogramming, Emergent Design, planning by
business value, etc.
This made me want to design a small Agile scaling playbook,
without a framework, for all people who have some Agile
experience and who want to address scaling directly.
Basic play — the Big Team
One of Scrum’s strengths is to have
put forward an important condition
for success: the multidisciplinary
and self-organized team. That is to
say, a single team with all the
skills to autonomously build
a new product increment. To this,
add the recommendation that it be
collocated and you have a winning
recipe to reduce complexity caused
by exchanges, dependencies, infre-
quent feedback, individuals’ lack of availability, poor motiva-
tion, and lack of engagement. Unfortunately, the complexity
caused by synchronization increases again as soon as a new
team is added.
That is why, if there is no tension within your team, I would re-
commend to keep it as is, regardless of the limits recommended
by the Scrum Guide (3 to 9 individuals) or Mike Cohn (7 ± 2
individuals). I have myself been part of Agile teams of more
than ten people for which there was no advantage of being
divided. On the other hand, having exceeded the recommen-
dations of the literature, we were ready to revise our configura-
tion if certain situations arose:
Playbook
Basic Play • The Big Team
Plays for the
development line • Feature Team
• Component Team
Plays for the
business units • 1 product – N backlogs
• 1 backlog – N products
Plays for the
special teams • The designers
• The operators
• The support team
• Clearly insufficient velocity requiring the addition of an
important number of new members.
• Inability to maintain a direct relationship between all
members (e.g. one-on-one), leading to the creation of
unofficial subgroups within the team.
• Team meetings that are too long and exhausting, where the
shared understanding and involvement of all are difficult to
maintain.
Play #1 — Multidisciplinary teams (Feature Teams)
When the Big Team reaches its limit, there can be benefits to
dividing it. With Agile approaches, the most natural way to
do it is to create multidisciplinary teams. Much like the basic
team, multidisciplinary teams have all the skills to autono-
mously build a new product increment.
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