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Chapter 9 | Evolve the Enterprise
all conspire to pull the new initiative back to earth, and, when the consultants leave and the next big problem arises, the enterprise goes back to the “do whatever it takes” mentality, workarounds and shortcuts are applied, things drift back to the old ways, and skepticism grows while morale deflates. I have a stack of books on agility a yard high, and each one has unique insights. They teach us how to follow an agile process, use visible charts, and help teams coalesce and perform. They offer guidance to coaches, developers, managers, and executives on the meaning and practice of agile. Scaling agile software development across the enterprise is a topic frequently raised, with varying degrees of formality, ranging from Dean Leffingwell’s highly structured Scaled Agile Framework for the Enterprise (SAFe)1 to Scott Ambler’s Discipline Agile Delivery (DAD)2 method, and from Larman and Vodde’s Large Scale Scrum (LeSS)3 to the common “Scrum of Scrums” approach found in Cohn’s4 and Schwaber’s5 works. We’ll take a quick walk through some of these frameworks, and look at some of the adherents and critics of each.Whether, as an agile consultant, you agree or disagree with these methods, you must be aware of them. Each, either in part or in whole, has elements that you can adapt and apply to the enterprise situation you find on the ground.Your clients, if they’ve researched agility at all, will be familiar with these ideas, and therefore so must you, for credibility if nothing else. Different techniques fit different circumstances, and the broader your knowledge the more value you can add. The debate over the scalability of agile software development is settled. Agile development has been scaled successfully in hundreds of enterprises worldwide, and the techniques offered by these agile pioneers are prudent and proven. And, of course, these innovators and hundreds of their “certified” followers roam the globe, coaching teams and enterprises in the use of these techniques. Why, then, do so many agile transitions fail to evolve, or to stick? First of all, existing frameworks are almost primarily focused on software development. Ambler’s DAD framework and Leffingwell’s SAFe are explicitly information technology (IT)-centric. They present processes and practices that prescribe techniques for scaling agile IT, but they don’t address adequately, to my eyes, the deep and ingrained cultural and management barriers to their visions, let alone offer realistic goals and techniques for agile advisors to help leaders evolve.
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http://www.scaledagileframework.com/. http://www.disciplinedagiledelivery.com/introduction-to-dad/. 3 http://less.works/. 4 Mike Cohn, Succeeding with Agile: Software Development Using Scrum (Boston: AddisonWesley, 2010). 5 Ken Schwaber, Agile Project Management with Scrum (Redmond,WA: Microsoft Press, 2004). 2
