What Does Scaling Agile to the Enterprise Mean, part 2?
You’ve heard people say, “That’s great, but does it scale?” , we think we all agree on what that means. But, as with many words we use in this space, the word scale is potentially overloaded – everyone has a different idea of what the term means. This led to some interesting comments on my post Monday, What Does Scaling Agile to the Enterprise Mean?. Even though I explained the five orders of scaling, and that the practices were different at each order of scale, there is confusion about what I mean by scaling and what we are scaling.
I have gone to dictionary.com to gain clarity on what it means to scale. I pulled eight definitions to determine which one we intend.
Scale (skeyl)
- one of the thin, flat, horny plates forming the covering of certain animals, as snakes, lizards, and pangolins
- a balance or any of various other instruments or devices for weighing
- a succession or progression of steps or degrees; graduated series:
- a succession of tones ascending or descending according to fixed intervals
- the proportion that a representation of an object bears to the object itself
- Australian Informal. to ride on (public transportation) without paying the fare
- Dentristy scal•ing. The removal of calculus and other deposits on the teeth by means of instruments
- a certain relative or proportionate size or extent
We don’t mean what comes off fish, what we weigh things with, a way of measuring temperature, a musical construct, making a model of something, riding without paying the fare, or cleaning teeth.
So we must mean taking Agile to a proportionate size. That’s to point of the different orders of scaling. That Agile will be expressed differently at each order. But what are we actually taking to a proportionate size? Do we want to have an Enterprise wide stand-up with thousands of people? Do we want to have every job done by two people? What are we scaling?
Small team agile, as guided by the Agile Manifesto for Software Development, is a set of values and principles. Agile, as practiced in many development teams, is a set of management, leadership, and engineering practices resulting in an energized workforce frequently delivering software that meets the emerging needs of the customer. For other definitions of Agile, I went back to dictionary.com.
Agile (aj-ahyl)
- quick and well-coordinated in movement
- marked by an ability to think quickly
Well, we aren’t hoping that every person in the Enterprise learns to write code. It isn’t the specific practices that we want to see scale. It is quick and well coordinated movement we see in small team agile. It is the ability to think quickly and respond to emerging customer needs.
What do we mean by scaling agile to the enterprise? We are scaling the benefits of agile – the benefits of an energized workforce frequently delivering value that meets the emerging needs of the customer. We want to take this up from small development teams so that the entire organization can be more adaptive and responsive.
It turns out that the capabilities (not the specific practices) that make the benefits of small team agile possible can be expressed at each order of scaling. And when layered together, the benefits of agile can be scaled to the enterprise level. Over the next few weeks, I am going to go through the management, leadership, and engineering capabilities of small team agile and discuss how the capabilities scale to deliver benefits at the different orders of scaling.
Tags: Agile, Big Agile, Business Analysis, Business Capability, Capability Analysis
