Organisations are undergoing pressure to beat the competition by enhancing customer satisfaction. Adopting agile methods helps organisations deliver faster value to the market. Agile implementation at the team level needs just a committed agile mindset to deliver successful results, but scaling it at the enterprise level has many challenges. While scaling agile at the enterprise level, organisations use scaled agile frameworks to implement a structured approach to scaling agile at scale. The current article provides a guide for implementing agile at scale.
What Is Enterprise Agility?
Enterprise agility is the organisation’s ability to respond to customer requirements quickly. The leaders should implement agile practices beyond the single team and departments to scale it across the enterprise. Scaling agile across the organisations allows them to work as a single unit in achieving organisational goals. They should make an effort to bring changes in the organisational culture, structure, and process to help the organisations to scale agile practices and help organisations be responsive to change
What are the Steps for Leading Agile at Scale?
Leading agile at scale is not a single-day task. Many organisations attempt to build agility but get stuck at the team level due to challenges such as rigid hierarchies, disconnected teams, heavy governance, and slow decision-making. The agile leaders enforce agile adoption at scale in the organisation. Explore the steps for leading agile at scale here.
Step 1: Assess Organisational Readiness
The leaders who are looking to lead agile at scale should first assess the organisation’s current culture, structure, and readiness to adopt agile at scale. The leaders should first evaluate current processes in the organisation and identify pain points to analyse inefficiencies. Understanding agile maturity levels in the organisations helps the leaders set transformational goals. The leaders may have to invest in greater efforts if the businesses are at the initial stages and still gaining knowledge about agile, or if the company has already adopted the practices across small teams, the leaders should scale it across multiple departments.
Step 2: Train the Leadership
The next step of scaling agile at the enterprise is to train the leadership about agile practices. Implementing agile in the organisation should be a top down approach where the management will get more familiar with agile principles and the SAFe framework. The leaders should move beyond the command and control approach and embrace empowerment. This cultural shift in the leadership mindset empowers teams to take independent decisions to resolve issues, and these decisions tend to be the most effective solutions as they stay closer to the work. By following agile practices, the management can reduce pendency on hierarchical approvals that end up in faster decision-making and effective results. By scaling agile at enterprise levels, the leaders can develop trust teams to take accountability for the task and not just execute them. The success of the scaled agile organisations depends on the quality and speed of the business outcomes and on creating customer impact.
Step 3: Identify Value Streams
Identifying value streams plays a key role in leading the enterprise towards agility. At the enterprise level, the work is generally organised around projects and departments. Identifying value streams helps organisations focus on delivering end-to-end business value. The certified SPCs will drive agility and define clear value streams so that they can align the teams, strategy, and execution around the shared objectives. By grouping ART around the shared purpose, leaders can reduce bottlenecks, enabling organisations to improve project flow and shorten time-to-market. Each value stream in the organisation establishes accountability for the team, helping them make faster decisions focused on delivering great customer value. Value streams help leaders adopt a structured approach to scale agile at the enterprise level and ensure that organisational agility is driven by speed, business outcomes, and continuous improvement rather than by a process.
Step 4: Identifying Team Dependencies
The leaders should align multiple teams within the organisation through PI planning. It is very important for agile leadership to function effectively and prevent organisational blockers. Unidentified dependencies affect predictability and flow. When the inter-team dependencies are recognised late, there could be a significant delay in project progress. When this happens across multiple teams, even small delays can create months of delays in product release. Also, leaders can view the organisation as a single unit rather than a set of teams and manage risks effectively, preventing last-minute surprises.
Step 5: Extending and Accelerating
The leaders should launch more ARTs and value streams and accelerate the transformation. By launching more ARTS, the teams can refine and adopt agile practices and reduce disruption. The leaders can effectively scale agile to different departments and create an integrated agile organisation that aligns organisational strategy and operations. Right alignment helps organisations make better decisions, collaborate more effectively, and sustain agility at scale.
Step 6: Continuous Integration/Deployment
Leading agile at scale needs technical excellence because multiple teams are involved in delivering shared goals. While scaling agile practices across various teams, it isn’t easy to conduct manual testing. Other issues, such as infrequent integrations and lengthy release cycles, cause significant delays in the product development and increase risk. The leaders should use technology to help automate testing and identify risks early. Continuous integration/deployment pipelines allow teams to integrate code frequently and implement changes at short intervals to deliver complex releases with confidence. Without leveraging technology, organisations fail to maintain speed and stability while scaling agile.
Step 7: Measure and Improve
Measuring and improving are vital to maintaining agility at scale. By establishing clear SAFe metrics, the organisation can see the progress of work through the system and the team’s performance against their commitments. As leaders can easily identify potential bottlenecks across teams and ARTs, they can make data-driven decisions. Through regular insights, organisations can refine processes and improve delivery. A culture of continuous learning helps organisations consistently deliver better business outcomes.
Conclusion
Leading an enterprise towards scaled agility is a complex and challenging job that requires more than implementing a framework. The leaders can lead effective transformation through the organisation by focusing on delivering customer value. The organisations that scale agile thoughtfully can move smarter and stay responsive to the changing market trends.
