It is normal for companies to face big problems that the team might not be big enough to handle. It is their choice to keep their problems at a smaller scale but it is believed that the higher the risks, the higher the return. As a result, ‘Scaling Agile’ has recently become more popular amongst companies to deal with big corporate issues in a short amount of time.
When there are good business tips like this, it's not a bad idea to try to implement some to your business or to expand your knowledge on these. Let's start getting to know more about Scaling Agile!
What is Scaling Agile?
In Agile, products are built incrementally and iteratively to help companies deliver to customers quicker with smaller increments, at a higher quality. When it comes to scaling agility, it is about the company scaling itself to fit the size of their problems. Companies can set up several agile teams to work on a big problem at the same time finding ways to implement those solutions to all corporate levels as a whole, in a short time.
There are different types of frameworks businesses are using and can also be beneficial to all kinds of organizations as well including:
Scrum of Scrums (SoS): This framework is using the Scrum framework at a larger scale. Scrums are usually when discussions are made in the team to come up with solutions whereas SoS involves communication with other agile teams to where each team sends a representative to share the solutions their team came up with.
The Scale Agile Framework (SAFe): This is a framework for high structure companies that aims to promote an agile mindset and lean practices. Companies can have large agile teams to achieve large goals. There are four values to this framework.
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- Alignment: dealing it commitment to plans for best outcomes
- Transparency: in their plans, focus, strategy, progress and workflow
- Built-in Quality: maintain support for innovative products
- Program Execution: apply plans to improve performance
Disciplined Agile (DA): DA is known to be the most adaptable framework since they are responding to changes by encouraging a learning-oriented workflow to implement solutions. As well as incorporating scrums, DA culture always uses updated knowledge to transform the financial, HR and many more aspects of the business.
Benefits of Scaling Agile
Just like what the frameworks have been made for, the major benefits of scaling agile would be the improvement of efficiency and its ability to make work-related decisions to respond to the problems in a quick manner. As a corporate example, Barclays adopted DA and also changed their working environment to encourage more collaboration and communication, where they managed to see an increase in the number of work being completed and a 50% decrease in complexity in their coding data.
Challenges within Scaling Agile
Nowadays, the biggest problem the majority of companies are facing is Covid-19. Companies are starting to scale agile to keep the efficiency of businesses within this economic situation. Due to the sudden change, employees may be resistant to change since they might feel the anxiety of stepping out from their previous process. Minor Food Group did an agile transformation to ensure safety for both employees and customers. Their storefronts are closed, communication had to be done online, food deliveries only and each team had to always work at their best ability to come up with daily solutions to keep the business running which can be very draining for employees to adapt.
To fight the challenge, resulting from their improved agile teams, they made sure that the rest were on the same page by having workshops and training sessions that slowly introduced them to their agile transformation to not only create an agile mindset but also stay optimistic and ensure the best decisions are made.
It can be really difficult to face big challenges especially in an organization environment. Even though there can be many other ways to improve efficiency, Scaling Agile can be one of the options for businesses to try out and enhance their performance through the creativity and productiveness of their human resources. GetLinks believes that no matter how big the challenges are, resilient companies will try every way and eventually get through it. If you want to keep up with more interesting business solutions, don’t forget to follow us for updates!
Sources: Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4, Source 5
