In our latest webinar, Implementing Agility at Scale, hosted by Giuseppe de Simone and Lothar Fischmann, we explored the intricacies of scaling. The discussion offered valuable insights into the challenges involved in transitioning to Agile frameworks on a larger scale.
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We’ve been working with organizations for over 15 years and despite numerous existing frameworks and models, we’ve learned that there is no silver bullet when it comes to scaling Agile teams. Every context is different and complex. However, we believe that by applying Agile principles and some good practices, any organization can create a framework or model for scaling Agile teams: one that is best adapted to its respective environment and can grow organically. In this guide, we’ll describe a few best practices for scaling Agile teams.
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Today, Scrum has become one of the most widely adopted Agile frameworks. It enables teams and organizations to deliver value iteratively and incrementally, adapt to changing requirements and foster collaboration and self-organization. The influence of Scrum extends far beyond software development, shaping the way teams approach complex work across various industries. But how did everything begin and what were the main landmarks along the way? Here is a brief summary of the history of Scrum.
In software development, technical debt is a concept that reflects the extra development work that arises when we use quick or easy solutions. But the concept is useful beyond the world of software too. In the digital world, where new technologies and ideas are emerging just about every day, technical debt is almost unavoidable. So we need to know how to deal with it.
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There are two activities in my life that have filled the years with a roller coaster ride of celebration and depression – periods where I had to rely on grit and determination slogging through unending drudgery punctuated with moments of delight – developing software products and playing Dark Souls.
I realize that not everyone who reads this blog may be familiar with the Dark Souls games. Luckily, I can sum it up with one image – the screen that players see more than any other:
Dark Souls has a reputation as a brutally challenging game. As I start playing Elden Ring, the latest game in the series, I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned playing these games and how similar it is to Agile product development. Below are four of the things I’ve learned about Agile Product Development from Dark Souls.
While Dark Souls may be unforgiving, it’s not a particularly complex game. Even the most challenging enemies have big tells for their attacks and are fairly predictable in their behavior. Despite how frustrating it may feel after the tenth time dying to the same enemy, the game’s developers want you to succeed. If you’re paying attention, each level teaches you how to beat it. Easier enemies teach you the skills needed to beat the harder ones. Every time you see the “You Died” screen, you should be asking yourself, “what did I do that got me killed, and what should I do differently next time?”
This might be the most important lesson in Agile product development that so few people learn. Most of the products we build are not simply copies of another product. We’re solving new problems or old problems in new ways. Missteps will happen. Success comes when we learn from those missteps and find an innovative solution.
Related reading: How Dungeons and Dragons prepares you for being a Scrum Master
Nothing leads you into disaster like over-committing. In Dark Souls, a wise player will take the game one enemy at a time and always check their corners. This lets you re-evaluate your surroundings and take the best strategy for that moment, even if that strategy is to run back to safety to regroup and rethink.
Agile Product Development is no different. We take our development one small feature at a time. This doesn’t mean we don’t have a larger context in mind, but we also know that each completed feature could show us a fundamental flaw in our thinking. This gives us a chance to take a step back, regroup, and rethink.
Whether you’re playing Dark Souls or building a product, if you don’t want to end up in over your head, take it one small step at a time.
While it is true that each failure is an opportunity to learn, that doesn’t mean that failure won’t hurt. Whether you’re throwing yourself at the same enemy for the 28th time or you bomb a feature you were sure would be a slam dunk, you will get frustrated and it will kill your motivation. The best players and Agile teams know how to recognize that frustration and recover from it.
Find out what works for you to recover and re-energize. Do you need a break? A small win? Do you need the support of your team to rally and push through the problem? Too often, teams just resign themselves to the frustrating task, which rarely leads you to a successful outcome.
OK, I’m mixing game metaphors, I know, but the lesson holds. Sometimes hitting a wall in Dark Souls is an opportunity to double down and persevere. Other times, it’s a sign you need to go spend a little time tackling other challenges in another level. This can help you unwind the frustration, build new skills, and build up your character. You may find that when you come back to the challenge, it will be easier to overcome.
In Agile development, you will encounter technical challenges and business challenges. You may need to buckle down and work through them, but other times, turning your attention to other feature areas will help you make progress and get your team unstuck. Often, that shakes loose new ideas and new solutions. When you return to the earlier work, you’ll be armed with new ideas and a fresh perspective.
It may seem strange to compare two things that seem so different as playing video games and building products, but in the end, a challenge is a challenge. The ways we work through them carry over across our personal and professional activities. I hope some of these lessons resonate with you.
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While the Agile journey is exciting, it can be overwhelming. In this webinar, our senior coaches Daniel Lynn and Giuseppe De Simone help to give you direction on this journey. They explore the many options and agile certifications available to you. They outline the Path to CSP as well as the many other qualifications and experiences that can help you along the way. When mapping out your path, our coaches explain that you should be guided by what you want to learn and how you want to grow.
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Daniel Lynn started his career as a software engineer and found himself passionate about developing products inside of Scrum. He is an experienced Agile Coach with a demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry. Daniel is passionate about what he does and helping others.
Giuseppe De Simone is a Certified Scrum Trainer, Certified Enterprise and Team Coach who is passionate about helping individuals, teams and organizations become more productive by embracing Agile values, principles and practices. Being an Approved Certified Agile Leadership and Path to CSP Educator, he is one of the very few in the world holding all the guide level certifications from Scrum Alliance. Giuseppe holds a Master degree in Electronic Engineering and started his career as a Software Developer. He became interested in how people can effectively work together and how teams can transform into an organism capable of delivering products and services which customers love.
agile42 offers Scrum courses, as well as:
2021 was another unpredictable year. Although we seemed more prepared for remote working and different ways of doing business, there were, as always, some unexpected curve balls. COVID-19 variants, hybrid working arrangements, and cancelled Christmas parties, among many other challenges, made for an interesting year of work. If there is anything we can learn from the past few years, it is to expect the unexpected. There is always room to inspect and adapt.
We asked you, our community, what your greatest agile challenges were from 2021 and what you learned from them. Here are eight of your biggest challenges, and biggest lessons, from the last year.
Having a plan and procedures in place allows you the opportunity to inspect and adapt. This is a vital step towards improvement. As Agile practitioner Jesper Ørting reminds us, “In sport, people train 99% of the time and perform 1%, but in business, we train 1% of the time and have to perform 99%, and we still expect it to work.” This begs the question: are we spending enough time planning, developing skills, and adapting?
Scrum Master Riaan Johannes R reflects on how important having a plan was for his Program Increment (PI) Planning. “Face to face communication is already difficult with PI Planning, but doing this remotely is a nightmare,” he explained, “You need to not only have an agenda and a plan, but also facilitate via the tool you use and also know this off by heart.”
Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash
When there is massive uncertainty, it can result in a lack of purpose, motivation, and cohesion among your teams. Scrum Master Floris Dafel experienced this. “I’ve learnt that a lack of purpose is like kryptonite to teams”, he said, “and it can be overcome by trust and openness. […] We did some trust-building team exercises that helped and also created our own vision where there was a lack of it instead of waiting for it. The challenges actually built a strong team in the end.”
Photo by fauxels from Pexels
For Agile Coach Matteo Betti, coping with change in a remote working environment was a massive challenge. They had the additional challenge of facing a massive reteaming. “I learned that you have to be patient and wait for the right opportunity to show things from different perspectives,” he explained, “Change should not be imposed. Scrum Master Daniel Palmisano shared a similar experience.“I learned that sometimes we have to be patient and let the people think about change and be willing to accept new ways of working,” he told agile42.
During times of change, teams need time to embrace the process. The best thing a leader can do is communicate what is expected across the team, be open to new ways of working, and be patient.
Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash
While retrospectives can be a great opportunity to look back on a sprint and make plans to improve in the future, it’s important to make sure they’re geared towards real, actionable change. “Retrospectives can be great and insightful but the pitfall is that if nothing changes teams tend to say, ‘this is all useless!’,” shared Facilitator Valentina Sandi. “So Inspect – Adapt – ACTION”. A successful retrospective ensures action instead of running into the same issues every time.
When undergoing change and transformation, especially along your Agile journey, it is crucial that everyone shares the same understanding of both the process and the goal. “Our biggest fail this year was assuming that everybody on the team and organisation has the same understanding of what Agile and Scrum means,” reflects Scrum Master Claus Trohl. “We are now rectifying this by more widespread communication throughout the organisation.”
There are a multitude of tools that can help you communicate better, especially as more and more teams work remotely. For Lean and Agile coach Ilija Popjanev, changing their approach to communication has been instrumental. She says, “Our biggest failure was weak communication through emails. We learnt the lesson and switched to Slack and Whatsapp, now it is totally different.”
Photo by Pavan Trikutam on Unsplash
Mentor and Facilitator Nissaf Sleimi has incorporated games and tools to build resilience while facilitating. Using games to practise agile methods not only deepens our understanding of concepts but helps us to build confidence, communication skills, and trust. You can practise communication and other Agile concepts through these games, such as the Kanban Pizza Game.
At agile42, one of our biggest lessons for the year was that the learning never ends. As we approach the new year, we want to make sure we’re not repeating old mistakes, and learn how to improve on the issues we’ve identified. Want to learn with us? Check out our online courses, enquire about our training and workshops, and sign up for our free webinars.
In a modern world, you need to be able to connect very quickly. You need people to be able to do things that are routine without difficulty, without problems. We need to have information in near real-time in many cases. So, digitisation is a key hygiene factor aspect of that process and essential within any modern organisation.
They are many and various. Part of the danger here is that people are seeing digitisation, like people saw business process reengineering back at the turn of the century - an excuse to reduce staff numbers rather than to increase the quality of services. So, the organisational expectations are that many of the routine tasks would go and instead become automated.
However, those are in the center of a normal distribution. You also need to account for the fact that the exceptions will be many and varied, particularly in the early days. You need to create an organisation that can handle both the automation and nonautomation, the digitisation, and personal interactions. So, it’s not just simply a process of saying:
You actually have to rethink the culture and the aspects of the organisation around digitisation - what it will mean for you, what it will mean for your staff and what it will mean for your customers. That is an exploratory process and not necessarily something that can be planned in advance.
Agile at its heart, is about fast cycles, high levels of customer interaction, high levels of experimentation, a willingness to be wrong, and a willingness to do things again and again until you get them right. Those sort of short-cycle, high interaction processes are key to digitalisation. Agile, properly applied, has a key role to play in making this transformation successful.
This is the area which everybody is neglecting. So, if I’m a customer, digitalisation can provide me with a very powerful way of doing routine tasks very quickly. However, when I start to move into exceptional states, everything sort of just goes wrong.
To give a personal example; I got a package from Amazon the other day containing an expensive item that I never ordered. I contacted Amazon and they said, “do you not want it?” and I said, “well I never ordered it so something is messed up in your system”. Their digitised system couldn’t cope with me returning it, so I got a pair of size 8 shoes, which I can never use, for free.
You need to be able to interact with somebody in real-time and you need to have somebody who actually understands the concepts of your inquiry. At that point, digitalisation is supporting a human actor and not replacing a human actor. We also need to consider the degree to which society-level access is an issue. For example, if you live in a middle-class household, you are likely to have high-capacity broadband and digitised services that are easily accessible and make perfect sense. However, some people may not have the same digital access and are excluded from these new services and products. We need to think about making technology pervasive and open access widely enough to handle some of these societal implications. The danger is in the creation of a digitised class and an undigitised, disenfranchised class.
What is the impact on customers?
For customers, if it works well, it becomes a very different, and often better, way of interacting. It was like when ATM’s took off -; you didn’t have totalk to the bank manager if you actually didn’t have enough money, the machine would tell you, not a person. The level of personalisation and automation was actually very powerful. The same is true with digitalisation – the customer now has more autonomy and agency in their interactions
As a customer, that impact is quite a powerful one. It makes my life easier and gives me more freedom. Except in cases where a high level of human interaction is required. When something happens that couldn’t have been planned for, the system needs to have the ability to adapt and change. One of the problems in a digitisation market is that, if you lose customer intimacy, you become a commodity supplier and customers might as well go to somebody else. So, even if you can automate things, even if you can digitize the whole experience, it’s really important companies also focus on maintaining intimacy and human contact in that relationship as a part of their overall approach to loyalty.
Watch the recording of Dave's webinar on "Digital Transformation".
*Click here to read Part 1 blog post*
One of the first questions we ask Product Owner’s when it comes to any kind of coaching conversation is: “what is your product basically about”? And hopefully, the Product Owner is able to give us a short insight into the main characteristics of his product and be able to tell us where the journey should go. If he is able to tell it to us, he should also be able to tell it to stakeholders, users, or clients. The basic idea behind the Product Vision is that the Product Owner should be able to make an elevator pitch for instance to his company’s CEO/CIO of the idea behind this new product.
There are a couple of good examples of Product Visions that are very well known. For example, JFK’s “Man on the Moon” speech or Martin Luther King who stated, “I Have a Dream” and, of course, Steve Jobs’
vision of the iPod. So what we are seeing is that a Product Vision can also be used for organisational or social development as Martin Luther King did. A vision and a clear understanding of the product is helpful and guides people on the journey.
We use the idea of a Product Vision also when we talk about an agile transition. For example, where there is a sponsor at the top who has an idea of how the agile organisation could look like, what the benefit of agility is and why it is important to start working in an agile way. Other good examples of Product Visions can be found within shows such as “Shark Tank”. The principle behind “Shark Tank” is quite simple. There are people who have an innovative product idea and they would like to get some capital from venture capitalists. So they pitch their product and try to convince the “Sharks” to invest in their product.
The people on “Shark Tank” are extremely motivated in selling their product to the “Sharks”. In their presentation, they will focus on the most important aspects of their product and why people would buy it. Some of them also hand the product to the “Sharks” so they can touch, smell or possibly taste it, which can be quite important for some products.
It’s not only the presenter's work we can learn from. You could also learn something from the “Sharks”. For example, what kind of questions are these people asking? Typical questions include:
You will find Product Owners who have given a thought to all these questions, who prepared themselves in front of a mirror or with friends, who thought how to present their product in a succinct way that will be well perceived by stakeholders, users, or the “Sharks”. This helps people to understand the product and to develop it. Therefore, working on a Product Vision is always a good first step on your journey.
Watch the recording of Lothar's webinar on "What makes a great Product Owner?".
*Click here to read Part 1 blog post*
Our Certified Agile Skills – Scaling 1 (CAS-S1) training class is a brand new Scrum Alliance certification. There’s an unprecedented demand for companies to deliver more in the contemporary business landscape. CAS-Scaling 1 provides a solid foundation to ramp up the results of your agile efforts and take production to the next level. Scaling agile requires focused collaboration, coherent objectives, and appropriate change management practices to ensure that the flexibility and responsiveness that make agile effective on a team level can be sustained on a much larger scale.
In CAS-S1 you will learn different approaches that need to be taken when working agile with multiple teams. Unlike prescriptive scaling frameworks, the course will equip you with the skills and knowledge to identify principle-informed patterns that apply to your organization’s unique and evolving context.
The class is presented in a highly interactive and collaborative format with elements of lecture, classroom discussion, exercises, games and simulations, smoothly blended throughout the class. We will approach the class at a sustainable pace and endeavor to take breaks often, to allow our brain to stay focused and our body to recharge when necessary.
Upon completion of the class, students will receive a CAS-S1 Scaling certification.
This course is ideal for change agents—managers, executives, coaches, and anyone participating in scaling within an organization who needs adaptable guidance and a tailored approach to the core aspects of scaling.
The CAS-S1 course is right for:
You can supercharge your skills even if you’re in the middle of an evolving scaling transformation or have never attempted scaling. This course is designed to meet you and your organization wherever you are in your journey to expand the benefits of agile teams.
Eleven months later, what has stuck with me the most is that agile42’s training provided an expansive tool belt of techniques and concepts. I feel I can draw on the tool belt any time I need.
Mitchell F., Program Management Consultant
In order to ensure a collaborative, engaging and fun environment even virtually, we are going to use a number of digital platforms.
You will receive further information and specific instructions before the training.
agile42’s training reinforced for me the paradigm shift from the waterfall approach in a monolithic organization to Agile’s concept of servant leadership. Yes, I’m leading the team, but I’m here to enable your success.
Michael M., Senior Project Manager
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