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Small and medium-sized companies quickly adopted Scrum and Kanban and benefited rapidly from a shorter time-to-market and more flexibility to changes in customer demands. However, until recently only a few organizations in Switzerland applied agile at scale. This trend is changing, and larger and more established organizations were trying to do the same thing. They, too, wanted to gain more flexibility and innovation power through Scrum to remain competitive. The challenge is that Scrum defines how a small team interacts and does not initially provide solutions for larger organizations with many teams [1]. Based on this demand, more agile frameworks have been developed to support such scaled agile initiatives.
Why re-inventing the wheel when there are proven frameworks readily available?
The key question to decide on a framework is which model best enhances your business model and strengthen your competitiveness in the market going forward.
To better understand where to go, reflecting where you are currently might be crucial. What is the current situation of your agile journey in terms of agile maturity on these dimensions?
Ask yourself (by defining and measuring using metrics) [2], which of those dimensions are most important to improve on in your current organization [3]:
Once you have gone through an assessment and have chosen a scaled agile framework, create and measure metrics and monitor how they develop.
"The pace of change today is so high, there are no more three or five-year plans. You need to be able to respond to change. The people that survive in this disruptive world are those that can adapt, and those that can adapt and scale at speed." Shayne Elliot. CEO, ANZ Bank
The Frameworks
All three frameworks have the ideas and principles of lean thinking in common[4]: with a focus on intrinsic value, value streams, flow orientation, the pull principle and quality. We have compared each framework by comparing various dimensions. So let's get to know the frameworks at hand.
SAFe is an interactive framework that allows you to apply Lean-Agile and Scrum practices in large enterprises. It is presented as an interactive knowledge base for implementing agile practices, it provides much guidance and covers a wide range, including enterprise architecture. It is designed for medium to large organizations with many concrete solutions at the process level and has a scalable organizational structure that can coordinate many teams and integrate various stakeholders and traditional company structures to enable business agility. SAFe consists of team level, program level, and portfolio levels, while it comprises the interaction of different roles, artifacts, and methods at each level.
To do so, SAFe introduces several roles at scale, including Release Train Engineer, System Architects, and Product Management, on top of the basic roles of the team level (Scrum Master, Product Owner, Developers). A major advantage of SAFe is that it supports complex systems with many teams and dependencies.
LeSS is a framework for scaling agile development to multiple teams with minimal additional processes than single-team Scrum. I.e., use as few processes as possible to get multiple Scrum teams to collaborate and deliver combined output well. The framework has been designed for up to eight teams and enables control of up to several thousand people (with LeSS Huge). True to the motto "Less is more," the framework stands out primarily because of its simple structure since it is already built on functioning Scrum teams. Each team has a dedicated full-time Scrum Master that helps its team members to have a holistic product focus. To govern multiple Scrum teams, an Area Product Owner is introduced as a role at scale.
The comparatively low implementation costs and good scaling options for product owners are an advantage. But scaling with Scrum teams is limited to a certain size and is primarily suitable for medium-sized companies.
Spotify describes the organizational structure of product development at the Swedish streaming service Spotify. The focus is on building an organization structure, i.e., the coordination of teams in a lean company. It is therefore less of a big toolbox than SAFe and relies more on reducing silos in an organization. Collaboration is characterized by trust, shared goals, and the belief that everyone always acts with the best intentions.
The Spotify model organizes around these roles: Squads form the basis – self-organized (Scrum) teams. Squads with products or services related to each other form a Tribe. Chapters (which have line management character) and guilds (loosely defined community of practice) bring together people with the same skills and competencies.
The practices and structures should be understood to adapt them to the needs of one's organization. This means there is significant work involved in designing the implementation of the Spotify model and that it is not just a model that can be applied with a practical set of tools and practices.
Comparing these frameworks with other models provides a classification on the dimension’s complexity and size of organization:
Conclusion and Recommendation
Agile transformations are journeys to new ways of working for organizations while striving for overall better business agility. Although there are proven frameworks out there, consider which elements of those frameworks suit your business needs best. There is no one size fits all approach. Agility has various dimensions, so it is very important to define a clear set of KPIs to measure against during the transformation journey as your organization may value some aspects more and others less. As presented earlier in this publication, select those areas of focus first: working methods, accountabilities, culture and leadership, technology, and application landscape. Maturity shall be reached first on those dimensions in which your organizations set its priorities.
Depending on the size and complexity of the organization, it is often easier to get started with a very concrete framework than selecting methods and tools on one's own discretion: well-defined procedures, artifacts, and decision points allow you to "get started" quickly after a short training and to follow up with coaching. This way, you avoid typical pitfalls at the beginning. Once the organization has learned and internalized the methods and practices that work in the framework, you can start amending the approach to the organization’s needs.
In contrast to simply implementing a framework, the mindset and cultural change take more time. Frameworks for scaling can only work if the organizational structures and the mindset of the leaders and employees adapt as well over time. Existing hierarchical and political structures must be discussed. Ultimately, rethinking the purpose and goals of the organization lead the changes. Being agile is often the development of a learning organization that can permanently adapt to changing market conditions.
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