Abstract: Congratulations! You've received incredible benefit from adopting agile approaches with your teams, and you're exploring and implementing tools to expand those benefits to ever-larger efforts involving more people, bigger goals, and much higher cost and impact for your company. This is the moment when every group needs to struggle with one of the most important challenges: How do we sustain and grow the social dynamics that have made agile successful? Agile processes, regardless of approach, are successful because of changes in how people work together, and failure to address this challenge early typically results in a "big dump process model", rarely resulting in meaningful, sustained change to the organization.
This talk explains six collaboration-focused perspectives and tactics that are consistently found valuable when focusing multiple agile teams on a single larger outcome. The collaboration techniques covered include one shared goal, two axes of engagement, three steering councils, the new gang of four, fist of five, and the six supporting roles. Designing your team of teams considering these six techniques will accelerate your improvement journey and improve your likelihood of successfully implementing any scaling model at the program level. These patterns are extracted from experiences helping launch and evolve programs using multiple scaling approaches (including SAFe, multi-team Scrum, and scaled kanban approaches) across a variety of companies and industries (more than 20 different agile programs of 50-150 people).
Learning Outcomes: - Recognize the human element of SAFe release trains
- Seed the social structures that drive real agility
- Amplify individual excellence across the release train
- Reduce risk of SAFe being a “big dumb framework”
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