We have heard many reasons as to why it is so difficult:

• Software development is complex
• People aren’t motivated or disciplined enough to get it done
• The business folks won’t engage

While Scaling Agility is difficult, we think the reason it is so difficult is that the method in predominant use – scaling Scrum with Scrum methods – is rarely challenged as a valid approach. While these methods may work in non-complex situations (essentially independent projects, single stakeholder) as organizations get more complex (dependencies between projects, multiple stakeholders and releases comprised of inter-dependent products) they will only rarely provide the vision and guidance required for scaling.

Our experience with dozens of companies we’ve helped ourselves and dozens others by our associates, tells a story of three things needed to achieve agility at scale. These are:

• A business driven approach
• An holistic view shared throughout the organization
• A systems thinking attitude

Most successful transitions to enterprise agility have used one of three approaches:

• Agile methods within the context of Lean-Thinking
• The Scaled Agile Framework
• A mandate of Agile from the top

The first two approaches incorporate all three of the necessary ingredients mentioned above. The third facilitates these, but is not enough to necessarily be sufficient. All three, however, provide the necessary mindset for agility at scale.

This webinar uses these three approaches to illustrate the necessary ingredients for agility at scale. Attendees will also understand why attempting to scale without a big-picture, holistic, business driven view is unlikely to achieve much beyond local improvements.