Are You Scaling Agile or Just Failing Agile?

One of the limitations of standard agile methodologies is that they are designed to operate primarily at the team level, with product owners, developers, testers, and other disciplines working together as a single team. So when you want to adopt agile practices on large programs or within large organizations, you will need to think about how do you scale your agile processes. However, many of the “off the shelf” agile processes are not really agile at all, resulting in organizations breaking one of the cardinal rules of the agile manifesto - individuals and interactions over processes and tools- taking SAFe, Nexus or any other prescribed methodology and force-fitting it will result in your team failing rather than scaling. In this session, Adam Sandman will discuss different ways you can incrementally scale up your use of agile approaches in an organization, use tools and processes intelligently (and sparingly) and makes sure it is driven by your needs and business value rather than some abstract framework. The key takeaways from this session include understanding the limits of agile in larger contexts, ways to allow complex organizations to embrace agile without micromanagement and bureaucracy, and case studies of successful & failed attempts to scale agile.