Agile at Scale?

[Jeff V]

Hello all,

Question: Who here is participating in larger-scale agile? The scale I'm looking for is 2 to 3+ agile teams working together (5 to 9, total 10 to 27+), or larger teams (20+ with some hybrid matrix/agile approach) practicing agility towards a common corporate or customer goal. Especially with difficult constraints, distribution, matrixing, or other typical corporate and Federal concerns.

I'm trying to draw a distinction between small biz, consultancies, and contractors who may be practicing a lot of agile, but in small batches. As in, there are one to many small teams all working out of their own backlogs on different projects or for different customers. They do not have to work together and scale effort towards a common goal to solve large, highly constrained and complex problem spaces and with social and political difficulties.

I'll go first: I've recently been working with a program supporting a federal customer with about 150 staff. They're attempting to practice Agile in a very difficult technical and customer environment. In the past I've worked on teams numbering in the 20 team member range trying to practice Scrum to solve Federal problems -- and consulted for other teams doing the same.

Jeff

[Arin Sime]

Jeff,

Great question, and those are difficult challenges in the federal space in my experience.

I've been working with a large insurance company that has scaled up from 3 agile teams when we started with them to 8 now.  Each team has 12-15 people on it.  Some of the teams work on completely different products and so don't need to coordinate, others are working on the same product and so have to coordinate with each other.

They use very open team spaces and lots of white boards and visible information radiators.  They do a good job of working with agile generally, though sometimes they run into problems with either their traditional customers not getting it, or with technologies like mainframes that don't lend themselves well to agile.  They've got the process down pretty well.  The web teams have the engineering practices down very well too, but then the mainframe/cobol teams have more trouble with the engineering practices.

Thanks,
Arin

Jeff

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Arin Sime
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