The quote in the title is attributed to Oren Gotesman from Scrum Professionals weekly office hours (I highly recommend attending if you can – I’ve learned so much from the group). And while it’s meant to be funny, it’s also true.
Organizations seem to think that scaled agile is this magic wand to get teams to talk to each other and work together seamlessly.
In reality, many of the scaling frameworks and practices they try to adopt just make things worse.
When your teams aren’t healthy, everything that’s going wrong gets magnified when you start to scale up.
If a house in your neighborhood is on fire, do you solve it by building more houses?
In other words:
When you try to scale a hot mess, you get a flaming hot mess.
Before you even think about scaling, take a good, hard look at your teams and how they’re operating. Are they self-managing teams operating cross-functionally to frequently deliver the right value at a sustainable pace that adapts to change? If the answer is no, focus on that first.
If the answer is yes, what are you hoping to get by scaling? What does scaling even mean to you? And why aren’t you there yet?
Are you trying to adopt an overly complicated framework so you can check some boxes and pay yourself on the back?
Or are you looking at your organization as a system and identifying some opportunities to improve among teams in a lightweight, flexible way?
Don’t set your whole neighborhood on fire. Start by putting out your own fire first.
The second rule of scaling agile? Don’t.
Photo by Stephen Radford on Unsplash