Scaling Agile for Enterprise or Scaling Enterprise for Agile?

The success of the Agile with smaller teams have got the attention of enterprise teams. the question is whether it can be duplicated when scaled to enterprise size.

To bring scalability, we must first understand where does agile gets it agility!

Our experience of moving our small waterfall services team into agile product team over last two years, told us that agility comes from three sources:

Focus on story to get DONE (a smaller unit than application (waterfall) or even feature)!

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A dedicated, multi-functional team that works collaboratively, autonomously to get this story DONE, and

Early feedback of customer, ensuring early and guaranteed delivery of business value.

A focused, dedicated scrum team is thus the heart and soul that ensures agility of Agile. Look at the agile team of 6-8 like an $50 entree in a chic restaurant. Thus, scaling restaurant’s operation is not offering buffet, but creating and managing multiple teams that can simultaneously feed hand-crafted $50 entrée to 500 patrons a night! You get the idea.

And there lies the real challenge in scaling. Like in chic restaurant, there needs to be lot of preparation, well defined workflows, roles, and responsibilities. This is exactly what different enterprise scale frameworks are trying to do! They try to define terms, workflows, roles and responsibilities. SAFe®, for example, provides workflows that connect product definition module to program planning and software development modules through portfolio module. Also the roles and responsibilities in each of modules. These process frameworks need to complemented with transformational framework.

Here is what I mean by transformational framework: assume that a 5 people agile team get DONE 10 stories through a 2 weeks’ iteration. An enterprise team of 500, will need to have 1000 stories backlog ready at the start of iteration time box. Not only that, come next...