Authors’ Comments:
It’s essential to identify the real motivation to scale agile before settling on a scaling framework. Even though dependencies between teams could be your initial reason to look into scaling frameworks, focusing on removing the dependencies by working towards features teams (e.g., by sharing knowledge and spreading competencies) could potentially be sufficient for your organization.
If your problem lies somewhere else, such as Product Owners of teams working on the same product not being aligned with each other, a simpler solution could be to facilitate a frequent PO alignment session in order to do a common release planning.
No matter your motivation to scale, as many of the scaling framework courses will teach you, if you can avoid scaling, avoid it. However, what we see is that adopting a scaling framework often can work as a very good “excuse” to start continuously improving systemic issues across the organization. The larger, organizational impediments that we as single Scrum teams couldn’t remove might now get the attention of our surroundings as we invest and grow our efforts. And this, in itself, could be a very good reason for scaling agile in your company. No matter your drivers, just remember to first nail it and then scale it.
Credit: Comic Agilé
