Agile in the Large Enterprise

As more large enterprises are adopting agile practices organization-wide, they face unique challenges when compared to smaller organizations or individual projects. While most agile approaches work well at the team level, many of those same preferred practices just don’t work well when scaled beyond a single team. For example, distributed teams are a reality in global enterprises, but most agile approaches prefer co-location on requirements and solutions. Business stakeholders aren’t usually part of the decision to adopt agile, and as such, are resistant to participate, or are not trained on how to work with teams operating in an agile environment.

Executives sometimes mandate the organization-wide move to agile, leaving managers to implement a methodology they might not believe in or aren’t trained to support. PMOs love gated approval processes for things like requirements, design, and solutions and are hesitant to give them up, but they are still needed as key stakeholders on projects. Also, in most global organizations, funding isn’t allocated to projects in an agile manner, which means executives are asking for guarantees on the dollar that agile just doesn’t support.

In this paper, we’ll start by understanding the primary motivations for large global organizations to adopt agile practices along with an overview of different scaled approaches, a comparison of their requirements approaches, and their limitations when scaling. Finally, this paper discusses some of the most common challenges our customers’ teams facing when scaling agile and provides suggestions to overcome those challenges.

AgiLE: Summary of Approaches to Scaling Agile in the Large Enterprise

Over 80% of organizations are implementing agile approaches now and that number is increasing every year [6]. Many of those organizations have hundreds or even thousands of members on their IT teams. The challenge these enterprises are facing is that many agile approaches aren’t designed to scale, or at the very least don’t give many guidelines for scaling. Even the agile manifesto principles that work well at the team and delivery levels do not really address what to do on a large scale.

The trend of moving to agile approaches in large organizations has created a demand for approaches that scale. There are numerous approaches available, leaving many agile transition teams confused as to which approach is best for their organization. This summary of frameworks focuses on the most commonly encountered approaches, according to a Gartner study on scaled agile approaches [3] and our own experiences working with F1000 organizations trying to scale agile.

What Is AgiLE?

AgiLE is not a typo! It’s our shorthand name for agile in the Large Enterprise. We are working with customers who are scaling agile approaches from the team level to the enterprise level. Some common issues that we see when teams try to scale are related to dependencies across teams, finding common ways to share information and collaborate across teams, dealing with distributed teams, ensuring user stories are written and prioritized to provide business value, business stakeholders that are not aligned to or are untrained in agile practices, formalized or regulated processes, and non-iterative funding models.

Summary Comparison of Scaled Approaches

There are many ways to scale “base agile”, all of which claim to cover the typical pitfalls associated with scaling agile like distributed teams and just in time requirements gathering. While that is true, there are still strengths and limitations for each approach. Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is by far the most commonly deployed approach in industry. However, SAFe is also the most rigorous approach and may not be a good fit for many organizations. Disciplined Agile Delivery (DaD) is another large player in the scaled agile stage; however, our evaluation didn’t find a consistent answer as to which industries commonly use DaD. Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) seems to have higher adoption in the financial industries. And Nexus is still too new to determine which industries will adopt it.

Exhibit 1 describes each of these scaled agile approaches using a common set of “levers” or determining factors for when to use each methodology. This table is not meant to be a thorough decision table; rather, it helps narrow the choices for a final assessment of the scaled approaches specific to your organization.