I was recently asked by the Adelaide Agile community to give a talk at their Scaling Agility meetup. I had a lot on my plate the last few months with adapting all of my training to the virtual world and running some TKP and KMP sessions, but I thought this is a topic that I’d like to address. I think that many organisations have been doing “Agile at scale” in the wrong way so I hope that the folks from Adelaide – and others around the world, got something out of this recent talk.
I’ll start with what I think folks have been doing wrong. Firstly, the whole “we need to reorganise first” is completely wrong. There are a number of organisations doing this to implement things like SAFe and “the Spotify model”. I think this is completely unreasonable because it puts people offside in the organisation from the start and guarantees that for about the next 12 months your organisation is going to be massively internally focused and lose track of customers and purpose. If I were a competitor and you announced you were going to go down this path I’d be smiling away in the background knowing that I’d have a distinct competitive advantage for the immediate future that I should capitalise on.
Also, when it comes to things like the “Spotify Model” – not even the folks at Spotify think this is a thing. If you think the benefit is there, then go right ahead, but you’re missing the point that each of these organisations is unique and has particular needs. What was going on at Spotify was based upon their culture, their domain, their market – so a variety of factors that you likely don’t align with. I’ve always believe that organisations should find their own path to agility that is unique to their context – sure there may be patterns that you can apply, but don’t do so blindly.
Which is really my key point – understand the problems you’re trying to solve, understand your customers and understand your purpose. There’s no such thing as perfect and you’ll need to continually adapt. Models like SAFe are more internally focused and don’t put these things at the forefront – it feels more like a solution looking for a problem. I’ve mentioned this before in posts like “Focus on core problems“.
Scaling with Kanban is different because you focus on problems facing your customers and your teams. You look to understand purpose – customer and organisation, and evolve towards it in a humane way. There are different ways you can look at scaling such as height, width and depth. These are the kinds of things I cover off in my Kanban Management Professional courses. If you really want to go deeper as well, I’d suggest checking out the Kanban Maturity Model which has gone through many evolutions and is now packed full of useful, pragmatic advice.
Many thanks to Jason Cameron for reaching out to me and asking me to do this talk. It might be somewhat different than what your group is used to, but I hope that everyone got a lot out of it.
Here are the slides: